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What an unfathomable loss this Pride season.
Drag performer Dito van Reigersberg, better known as Martha Graham Cracker, has passed away at the age of 53. The actor suffered complications from a 2023 bone marrow transplant, which was part of his ongoing fight against cancer.
“I am absolutely devastated to tell you that my sweetest and most generous and most talented friend Dito van Reigersberg aka Martha Graham Cracker has given her last bow (or is it curtsey?),” Victor Fiorillo, senior reporter for Philly Mag, wrote on Facebook Monday night. “Dito just died, surrounded by family and friends and music and an amazing medical team at Penn.”
Van Reigersberg was a strong advocate in Philadelphia’s LGBTQ+ community, hosting drag performances and Pride concerts — adding his signature mix of sincerity and sass. He billed Martha Graham Cracker as “the world’s tallest and hairiest drag queen,” often with her shaggy legs and arms on full display.
“Martha Graham Cracker allows me to do something and be bolder or braver or bigger,” van Reigersberg told WHYY’s Friday Arts in 2013, “to reveal things about myself that are more hidden and more exciting in that way, that they feel a little bit secret.”
Van Reigersberg was also a co-founder of Philadelphia’s Pig Iron Theatre Company in 1995 and starred in multiple productions throughout the years, earning various accolades and awards.
“I think we all feel just like we hit the lottery with being on this planet at the same time and being close to him,” said Gabriel Quinn Bauriedel, co-artistic director at Pig Iron. “He’s close to so many people, and so many people feel just kind of adrift right now, but he will be remembered as just a wild animal, peaceful soul, a poet, a deep thinker, a goofball.”
Becoming Martha
The drag performer leaves an undeniable mark on the Philadelphia performing arts community. Born in the Washington, D.C. area, he liked to try on his mother’s makeup as a kid.
“We were worried that Dito might never have any friends, that he was an introvert,” van Reigersberg’s mother Stephanie told WHYY in 2013. “I mean, this is all very unexpected. It all started when he was maybe a freshman or sophomore in high school. Before that he was very shy.”
However, van Reigersberg’s love for dress up and theater would ultimately bring him many life-long connections. The actor attended Swarthmore college — where he met fellow students and Pig Iron co-founders Dan Rothenberg and Bauriedel.
“The plan was never to start a 30 year theater company,” Rothenberg said. “The plan was to work together.”
The friends put on a version of Cyrano de Bergerac in college, which they eventually toured and took to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Their work received strong feedback and from there, Pig Iron kept growing.
After college, van Reigersberg spent time in New York studying at the Neighborhood Playhouse and the Martha Graham School of Dance — which became a strong influence for his drag career. His alter ego, Martha Graham Cracker, developed slowly in these years. Glimpses of the character could be seen in gender-bending theater roles — playing a lunch lady or an Irish nurse.
“Being Martha Graham Cracker kind of allowed him to be more wicked, more flirtatious,” Rothenberg said. “Dito was a real mix of shy and extroverted, so I think as Martha Graham Cracker he flirted 50 times more than I saw him really flirt as himself.”
Beginning in 2005, Martha became a fixture of van Reigersberg’s performances. Her cabaret act ran for 15 years at L’Étage in Queen Village. In a review of Martha Graham Cracker’s 8th anniversary show in 2013, WHYY News’ Howard Shapiro called van Reigersberg a “Philadelphia institution” and “the drag diva who croons and swoons, toys gleefully with an audience and is glorious in all her imperfection.”
The actor had a knack for “balancing two distinct but related professional lives,” Shapiro said, “one in platform high heels, purposely ill-fitting vinyl and an assortment of wigs, and another as a busy actor and teacher.”
“On stage, Martha was all rock and roll, all joy, all comedy, very much David Bowie, very much a clown, very much an explosive personality,” said Dustin Kidd, a friend and professor of sociology at Temple. “Offstage, Dito was a tender-hearted friend, but also deeply passionate about fighting for the arts and fighting for the rights of artistic communities, queer communities, marginalized communities everywhere.”
Rothenberg said that van Reigersberg had a natural ability to make an audience trust him.
“He had two different colored eyes, and he had big eyes,” Rothenberg said. “And he and I would joke about that there’s two kinds of actors, big eyes actors and small eyes actors. I would say, ‘You, my friend, are a big eyes actor,’ which I really meant to be like everybody loves sneaking up to you, everybody experiences the full beam of your energy and your presence.”
“When I recover, I can do more shows.”
The last five years of van Reigersberg’s life were marked by illness. According to a statement from Pig Iron, van Reigersberg had battled not one but two kinds of rare cancer since 2021, leukemia and blood cancer.
Despite this, he was able to find joy. In 2021, van Reigersberg married his longtime partner, dancer and choreographer Matthew Neenan.
“He went through some chemo, and then he got married to Matthew,” Bauriedel said, “And it was the most spectacular wedding after this really, really challenging summer.”
Fiorillo wrote a piece for Billy Penn announcing van Reigersberg’s leukemia diagnosis in 2022. Van Reigersberg reflected on his cancer journey with Philly Mag last year.
“It’s pretty scary to go from being a performer, having a great time and feeling good, and then suddenly my only job is working on getting rid of this leukemia,” he said. “I don’t even know how to talk about that, exactly. It puts a lot of things in perspective. Like, ‘okay, those are just shows. When I recover, I can do more shows.’”
While that illness forced the actor to take a hiatus, Martha Graham Cracker returned to the stage in spring 2024.
“The path of progress is never straight,” van Reigersberg told an audience while hosting Philadelphia Orchestra’s Pride Concert last year. “It’s gay. It’s lesbian. It’s bisexual … It’s trans.”
Pig Iron announced that this past January, complications from the bone marrow transplant began to emerge.
“Since then, Dito has been in and out of the hospital, with fevers and low oxygen,” the theatre wrote. “His oncology team wasn’t able to pinpoint what exactly caused all of this, but last week they landed on a diagnosis of graft-versus-host disease, a grave complication from some transplants.”
Rothenberg said that while those final years were incredibly challenging, van Reigersberg maintained his sense of optimism and empathy for others.
“He really carried himself through these illnesses with so much courage and grace, so much care for his husband,” Rothenberg said. “Even on the day before he died, when he came out of sedation for a moment, he looked at his mom and he said, ‘How are you? He underlined the you.’”
Bauriedel has been thinking about early performances in the past few days, like their first professional debut of Cyrano at Edinburgh Fringe.
“Dito played Cyrano, and at the end of the play, Cyrano is losing his life,” Bauriedel recalled. “He’s losing his voice, and a cello is playing, and I think that image just… I don’t know, I can’t get it out of my mind, even though that was in 1994, but he was as brilliant in that as he has been in everything, and theater doesn’t last, but it lingers and it sticks and it stays, and I’m thinking about that play so much today.”
Pig Iron notes that “In lieu of flowers, you can send memories, poems, artwork, photos, videos, and messages to Dito’s family at an email address we’ve set up: lovefordito@pigiron.org. His family will be able to view all of these when they feel ready.”
