06/02/2026
Our hearts are broken.
On Monday, we learned that our community lost Dito van Reigersberg, co-founder of Pig Iron Theatre Company, beloved performer, brilliant risk-taker, and friend.
Dito performed in nearly every one of the 29 Philadelphia Fringe Festivals, starting with Pig Iron’s “Cafeteria” in the first festival in 1997. For several years, the arc of the Fringe Festival was a familiar one: opening night, a week or two of 20-30 shows each day, a steady build which would peak “precisely” at the moment that Martha Graham Cracker - Dito’s Amazonian drag alter ego - strode onstage at the Late Night Cabaret.
The effect of watching Martha perform those shows was a duo of feelings that don’t logically go together: total awe, and radical belonging. “I can’t believe what I’m seeing. These are my people.”
Dito’s ability to hold both things at once - on the one hand: virtuosity, experimentalism, danger; on the other: welcoming, pleasure, humor, joy - made him an exemplar of the kind of outrageous, anarchic, beautifully-human approach to performance that has come to define how we do it in Philly.
It is unspeakably sad that Dito is gone. It is a fu***ng miracle that we all got to share this planet with him.
