Ghost Road Company Returns With World Premiere THE DRY YEARS

The Ghost Road Company will present the World premiere of The Dry Years, our first full production since 2019. Conceived by Ghost Road ensemble members John Guerra and Christine Breihan, the show is set to open on Saturday, February 4, 2023, 8PM at the Broadwater Main Stage in Hollywood, CA.

The Dry Years is directed by Breihan and written by Guerra in development with Ghost Road. The run will continue Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights through March 4, 2023.

"During the dry years, the people forgot about the rich years, and when the wet years returned, they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way." - John Steinbeck, East of Eden

The Dry Years begins-as stories so often do-with an arrival. It begins the day a pair of lawyers showed up and started buying "useless land" for more than it was worth. By the time folks realized why, it was too late. The lawyers had stolen their water at the point of a pen and built an aqueduct to bleed them dry. Ten years later, this rural California community stands on the edge of collapse. That is until a stranger drives out of the desert, offering a solution to all their problems: Rain.

Inspired by the strange but true story of Charles Mallory Hatfield-Southern California's most famous (and infamous) practitioner of the pseudoscience of rainmaking-this is a story about stories. The ones that are true, the ones that aren't, and the ones that are somewhere in between.

The cast features (in alphabetical order) Richard Azurdia, Ronnie Clark, Liz Eldridge, Kelvin Morales, Melissa Paladino, Katharine Noon, Camila Rozo, and Brian Weir. The production team includes Set Designer Katrina Coulourides, Lighting Designer Brandon Baruch, Sound Designer Cricket Myers, Costume Designer Vicki Conrad, Movement Director Adam Dlugolecki, Prop Master John Burton, Assistant Director Jordan Villegas, Stage Manager Cate Chapman, and Mark Seldis, producer for The Ghost Road Company.

"The Dry Years is a story about people who refuse to give up despite drought, economic depression, and environmental disaster, so it is apropos that it has been developed by a group of artists who also refused to give up, despite the onset of a global pandemic," says Breihan and Guerra. "We began working on this play in March 2020. We had exactly one in-person workshop before in-person theatre came to a screeching halt. Over the next three years, we met with our amazing team of collaborators over Zoom, in open-air parking lots, and closed-down store fronts to create something that may be the product of the dry years but is certainly lusher than we ever could have imagined."

John Guerra (Playwright) is a Latinx writer who left his home in Carpenteria, CA to make his fortune in the theatre. He never found his fortune, but he did become a 2019 Sundance Theatre fellow and a member of The Ghost Road Company. When he's not creating with Ghost Road, he's writing about class, California, and minotaurs. His work has appeared on stages across LA including: A Noise Within, The Blank Theatre, Coin & Ghost Theatre Company, The Fountain Theatre, Rogue Artists Ensemble, Will Geer's Theatricum Botanicum, the Vagrancy Theatre Company, and Pomona College. His work has also been developed and produced by the T. Schreiber Studio in New York City. He holds his BA in Theatre from UC Irvine and an MFA in Writing for Performance from CalArts. John is a proud member of the Dramatist's Guild. Read more of John's work on New Play Exchange: NewPlayExchange.org/users/17244/john-guerra

Christine Breihan (Director, she/her) is a Los Angeles-based theatre artist, movement specialist, and educator. She has worked with award-winning companies across the city including Center Theater Group, A Noise Within, Padua Playwrights, The Fountain, Theatricum Botanicum, Theatre Roscius, Theater of NOTE, Sacred Fools, Project Nongenue, Bocón Arts, Creative Playground, The Unusual Suspects, The Blank, and The Ghost Road Company. Internationally, she studied at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic arts, and has performed with Ghost Road at the Grotowski Laboratorium in Wroclaw, Poland. Movement/intimacy choreography includes: Trojan Women (Project Nongenue), Death of Medea, This Grief Will be of Use (Theatre Roscius), Noises Off (University of Maryland), Everybody, The Revolutionists, and These Shining Lives (Loyola Marymount University). TV Credits include TNT's The Last Ship and Nickelodeon's Bucket and Skinner's Epic Adventures. Upcoming directing/choreography projects include a workshop presentation of Theatre Roscius' The Death of Medea at the Getty Villa. She holds her BFA in Acting from Boston University, and her MFA from Loyola Marymount University, where she currently lectures in Movement and Acting. She is currently earning her CMA (Certified Movement Analyst) from the Laban/Barteneiff Institute of Movement Studies and is a proud member of Actor's Equity and SAG-AFTRA.

The Ghost Road Company is one of Los Angeles' premiere theatre ensembles dedicated to the creation of new work for the stage. The company is unique in its approach, having developed its own methods of collaborative development over many years. Ghost Road has presented its work nationally and internationally from The Getty Villa, Inside the Ford, and Atwater Village Theatre, to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, KO Festival in Amherst, and the Grotowski Laboratorium in Wroclaw, Poland. Past works include Super Duper (Zoom version), Jocasta: A Motherf**king Tragedy, Asterion, The Bargain and the Butterfly, and Home Siege Home (The Oresteia Trilogy). For more info, visit www.ghostroad.org.

Opening is set for Saturday, February 4, 2023, at 8pm. The regular running schedule is Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights through March 4. General Admission is $35 ($25 for Seniors and $20 for students), and are available online at www.ghostroad.org

The Broadwater Main Stage is located at 1076 Lillian Way, Los Angeles, CA 90038.

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