Forsaking an Orb to Pursue the Light of His Life ‘The Old Man and the Old Moon,’ a Musical Tale of a Quest

The shaggiest dog you’ll ever see makes a late entrance in PigPen Theater Company’s enchanted The Old Man and the Old Moon, at the New Victory Theater. It’s a highly companionable creature who resembles (and, in fact, may be) an animated white bath mat. But it isn’t there just to charm us. This bounding, bouncing quadruped serves an important plot function, one that pulls tighter some of the many loose threads that have been hanging from a very wide woof. (You should pardon the term.) This shaggy dog, you see, is both the mascot and embodiment of a great big old shaggy dog story. Like puns, shaggy dog stories — which assemble piles of improbabilities into outlandish towers — are generally regarded as the literary province of childish minds. But the PigPen troupe, a consortium of shaggy young men who met as freshmen at Carnegie Mellon University seven years ago, asks us to appreciate the finer arts of wild storytelling, while speaking to the childish mind in all of us.