“Maybe the play depicts the battle between a cactus and a ficus.”
—Quinn Bauriedel, director of Welcome to Yuba City

Home of the Prune Festival and the bee-beard contest, Yuba City is an invisible gem tucked away in the desert. 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 prairie dog "dog." 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, and build a cactus mailbox.

A massive set recreates a mythical truck stop—parking lot included—where a wild cascade of characters explores the limits of human lunacy. Gaze in wonder as cowboys perform a clown ballet on asphalt! Watch a group of small town criminals make a citizen's arrest! See—if you can!—an invisible jackalope who dines all day on pie! Long hidden stories of the American West are revealed by clowning, dancing, live music played on tubas and spoons, cowboy philosophers, and a stunningly mean group of foulmouthed waitresses. Welcome to Yuba City promises a hilarious—and outrageous—evening of tall tales and tinfoil handicrafts that reminds us of the truly odd experience of living on this planet.

Pig Iron Theatre Company tests and breaks the boundaries of dance, drama, clown, puppetry, and music. For Yuba, the company is joined by composer Michael Friedman and Giovanni Fusetti, a master teacher of physical performance forms.

“One of the few groups successfully taking theatre in new directions.”
—The New York Times

Direction: Quinn Bauriedel Text: Deborah Stein Composed by: Michael Friedman Set Design: Mimi Lien Lighting Design: James Clotfelter Costume Design: Maiko Matsushima Choreography: Christina Zani Artistic Advisor: Giovanni Fusetti Performers: Hinako Arao, Charlotte Ford, Sarah Sanford, Geoff Sobelle, James Sugg, Alex Torra, Dito Van Reigersberg

Executive Producers: Al & Nancy Hirsig

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Quinn Bauriedel (director) hails from California, though he's been performing, designing, directing, and managing Pig Iron in Philadelphia for nearly 14 years. While Pig Iron was in its infancy, Quinn was studying at École Jacques Lecoq in Paris. In 2000, Bauriedel took a sabbatical in Bali, Indonesia, on a Henry Luce Foundation Fellowship, and returned to Pig Iron in 2001. Welcome to Yuba City is the first show Bauriedel has directed for the company since The Tragedy of Joan of Arc in 1998, and marks the culmination of his Fox Foundation Fellowship. Bauriedel has a 19-month-old son, Oskar, and another son on the way.

Mimi Lien (set designer) was born in New Haven and now lives in Brooklyn. She studied architecture at Yale University and the Glasgow School of Art, then spent a year in Italy creating paintings, installations, and objects. In 1998, she moved to New York City and began working as a set designer. She was a semifinalist in the Ring Award for opera design in Graz, Austria, and in 2007 she was Live Design magazine’s Young Designer to Watch. She has received a Barrymore Award and an American Theatre Wing Hewes Design Award nomination..

Maiko Matsushima's (costume designer) most recent design includes THIS (Playwrights Horizons, NY); The Children of Vonderly (Classic Stage Company, NY); Adding Machine, Suitcase, or those that resemble flies from a distance (La Jolla Playhouse, CA); Brooklyn Bridge (Children’s Theatre Company, MN); Bomb-itty of Errors (The Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, MO); All Is Not (Adirondack Theatre Festival, NY); So Close, Year of the Baby, Cat’s Paw (Soho Rep., NY); El Paso Blue (Theatre Row, NY); and We Sink As We Run (Dixon Place, NY). She has also worked as an associate costume designer on Broadway's Spring Awakening, Radio Golf, Lestat, Assassins, Good Body, Pacific Overtures, and Wicked in Japan.

Hinako Arao (co-creator/performer) was born in Hiroshima, Japan in 1981. She moved constantly while growing up, and at age 17 she left for Argentina. In 2001, she moved to Philadelphia for the environmental studies program at Temple University, but ended up with a BA in theater. In 2006, she started working with Pig Iron Theatre Company and has co-created three original works, Love Unpunished, 365 Days/365 Plays, and Come to My Awesome Fiesta, It's Going to be Awesome, Okay?, in addition to remounting Pay Up. She now lives in London and attends the London International School of Performing Arts.

Charlotte Ford (co-creator/performer), co-creator of last year's Flesh and Blood and Fish and Fowl, is a Philadelphia-based theater artist who devises her own work and has performed with Pig Iron Theatre Company, Lucidity Suitcase Intercontinental, 1812 Productions, Theatre Exile, Big House Plays and Spectacles, New Paradise Laboratories, the Arden Theatre, Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival, Brat Productions, and the McCarter Theatre. She has been nominated for two Barrymore Awards( Red Light Winter, Mr. Marmalade). She is a recipient of the 2008 and 2009 Leeway Art and Change Grant and the 2008 Independence Foundation Fellowship. She received the 2009 PTI grant to premiere her new absurdist clown play, Chicken, at the 2010 Philadelphia Live Arts Festival. She holds a BA from Bryn Mawr College and an MFA from the London International School of Performing Arts.

Dito van Reigersberg (co-creator/performer) is a founder and co-artistic director of Pig Iron Theatre Company. He has co-created and performed in the majority of the company's 24 pieces to date. His favorites include Mission to Mercury, Cafeteria, Hell Meets Henry Halfway, and 365 Days/Plays. He has also performed with Headlong Dance Theater, Nichole Canuso Dance Company, Azuka Theatre, and Mauckingbird Theatre Company (The Misanthrope, Hedda Gabler). Nobody knows this, but . . . he has an alter-ego named Martha Graham-Cracker. Don't ask, don't tell.

Sarah Sanford (co-creator/performer) grew up in various small Connecticut towns before attending Swarthmore College near Philadelphia. She studied at École Jacques Lecoq prior to joining Pig Iron on Shut Eye in 2001. Since then she has appeared in PITC creations including The Lucia Joyce Cabaret, Hell Meets Henry Halfway, Love Unpunished, and 365 Plays/365 Days. Alongside her Pig Iron work she has acted at BRAT Productions, the Lantern, the Wilma, Mauckingbird, and in Jo Strømgren’s The European Lesson. Sarah has also performed with Toronto company Volcano (The Four Horsemen) in Vancouver and Victoria, B.C. She recently brought her original piece Appetite, a collaboration with Toronto dance and theatre artists, to Philadelphia. Sarah was a finalist for the 2008 F. Otto Haas award and recipient of the 2007 Crow’s Theatre award for direction of Appetite.

Geoff Sobelle (co-creator/performer) has been a company member of Pig Iron since 2001. He is the co-artistic director of rainpan 43, a renegade absurdist outfit. Geoff was awarded an Independence Foundation Fellowship and grants from the Philadelphia Theatre Initiative to create all wear bowlers, (Innovative Theatre Award, Drama Desk nomination), the rube-goldberg kinetic junk play, machines machines machines machines machines machines machines, and Flesh and Blood and Fish and Fowl. He was named “Best Theatre Artist 2004” in Philadelphia Magazine, received a 2006 Pew Fellowship in the Arts, and is a 2009 Creative Capital grantee. He is a graduate of Stanford University, and trained at École Jacques Lecoq in Paris, France.

James Sugg (co-creator/performer) is an actor, sound designer, composer and 10 year member of Pig Iron Theatre Company with whom he has created 10 original works. He has also worked with Seattle Rep, Actors Theater of Louisville, Folger Theater, The Wilma, The Arden Theater, Headlong Dance Theater, Rainpan 43 and Lucidity Suitcase Intercontinental amongst many others. His work has been recognized with four Barrymores for Outstanding Sound Design and the F. Otto Haas Award for Emerging Theater Artist. He is the composer of the musicals A Murder, A Mystery And A Marriage, James Joyce is Dead and So Is Paris(Pig Iron), The Sea(a one man electric chamber opera) and Cherry Bomb (1812 Productions).

Alex Torra (co-creator/performer) Hailing originally from sunny Miami, Florida, Alex now lives in Philadelphia and works as the Associate Artistic Director of Pig Iron Theatre Company, and as a freelance director and performer. For Pig Iron, he has served as a performer in Anodyne, 365 Plays/365 Days, and PAY UP, Assistant Director on Sweet By-and-By and Chekhov Lizardbrain, and as Director of Come to Awesome Fiesta, its Going to be Awesome, Okay? A recipient of a 2007 Princess Grace Award in Directing and Drama League Directing Fellowship, Alex’s directing and assistant directing work has taken him across the country, including the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the Guthrie in Minneapolis and to Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company. This summer, Alex directed Comedy of Errors for Shakespeare in Clark Park.