Home of the Prune Festival and the famous bee-beard contest, Yuba City is an invisible gem tucked away in the desert. If you stare long enough it might vanish like a mirage. Rest here on your travels along that long unswerving snake we call the interstate, park your rig, unfold your legs, drain the main vein, and try our world-famous jackalope stew.
Cowboys and aliens, curmudgeons and troubadours, bassoonists and balloonists, you're all welcome. So go ahead: play the piano with your feet, stitch an armadillo-skin purse, carve a butter sculpture and build a cactus mailbox.
This fall, Pig Iron Theatre Company will premiere their latest work, Welcome to Yuba City, at the Festival Theatre at the Hub at 5th and Fairmount Streets, marking Pig Iron’s tenth World Premiere at the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival. Yuba City begins in previews on Wednesday, September 2; and the show runs through September 19.
Welcome to Yuba City is an absurd performance work presenting fragments of mythic America in an outpost on The Edge of civilization. Pig Iron's crackerjack ensemble of clowns, buffoons and crazy-old-uncles will delight audiences with hilariously crafted vignettes that present a dream-America hand-crafted out of tall tales and tinfoil. This is a desert dance, a variety show rodeo, a musical oasis and a parade of misfits, eccentrics and loners.
Led by director and Pig Iron co-founder Quinn Bauriedel, Yuba City will feature an all-star cast of longtime Pig Iron collaborators, including Company Members Sarah Sanford (Hell Meets Henry Halfway), Geoff Sobelle (Drama Desk nomination for all wear bowlers), James Sugg (2009 OBIE Award winner for Chekhov Lizardbrain), and Pig Iron co-founder Dito van Reigersberg; Artistic Associates Hinako Arao (Love Unpunished) and Alex Torra (365 Days/365 Plays); and newcomer Charlotte Ford (Barrymore nominee for Red Light Winter).
Mimi Lien (Love Unpunished, Barrymore winner for Wilma’s Outrage) will design the set; James Clotfelter (Chekhov Lizardbrain, Isabella) will design the lighting. The play’s development has been inspired in part by The Ensemble’s work with Giovanni Fusetti, a world-renowned clown teacher whose early work with Pig Iron guided Yuba City’s approach to character-building and movement.
"I am so fortunate to work with an ensemble of comic wizards who create full and precise theatrical worlds that are motored by one part humanity and one part lunacy,” said Bauriedel. “This play is meant to evoke the part of the human spirit, the part that doesn't play by the rules and that exists toward the margins and extremes of reality."
The creation and World Premiere of Welcome to Yuba City has been sponsored in part by the Philadelphia Theatre Initiative, a program of the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage administered by the University of the Arts; the William Penn Foundation, which generously supports Pig Iron’s “Island” open-development periods; and the Charlotte Cushman Foundation, who are supporting actor salaries for Yuba City.
Pig Iron Theatre Company has been creating original performance works in Philadelphia since 1995, making plays about live music, dead people, neuroscience and thwarted love affairs through a unique method of collaborative creation and with a signature physical approach to character. Past collaborations have included work with the legendary director Joe Chaikin, playwright Adriano Shaplin, choreographer David Brick, and composer Cynthia Hopkins. Pig Iron's work has been seen at theaters and festivals in London, Edinburgh, San Francisco, Italy, Poland, Ukraine, Brazil, Germany, Ireland, Romania and Peru. The company's original works have met with critical acclaim and awards, including a 2005 OBIE, and most recently, Pig Iron's Chekhov Lizardbrain was hailed by The New York Times as one of the top 10 theatre events of 2008.
The event will take place at The Festival Theatre at the Hub, 626 N. 5th Street (at Fairmount Ave.), Philadelphia, PA.
For more information, visit www.livearts-fringe.org or phone 215.413.1318.
Tickets cost $20 for previews; $25 for weeknights; $30 for Sat./Sun.
Dates are as follows:
Wednesday, Sept. 2, 8pm (preview)
Friday, Sept. 4, 9pm (preview)
Saturday, Sept. 4, 9pm (opening)
Sunday, Sept. 6, 3pm
Wednesday, Sept. 9, 8pm
Thursday, Sept. 10, 8pm
Friday, Sept. 11, 8pm
Saturday, Sept. 12, 9pm
Sunday, Sept. 13, 3pm
Wednesday, Sept. 16, 8pm
Thursday, Sept. 17, 8pm
Friday, Sept. 18, 9pm
Saturday, Sept. 19, 9pm
