Ghost Land: A New Play About the War in Ukraine

September 8 – October 15, 2023

Preview: Friday, September 8 at 8 p.m.
Opening Night: Saturday, September 9 at 8 p.m.
Q&A with the Playwright: Following the 4 p.m. show on Sunday, September 10
Q&A with the Cast + Crew: Following the 4 p.m. show on Sunday, October 1

City Garage is excited to announce that Ukrainian playwright Andriy Bondarenko will be flying from Ukraine to join us for the opening weekend of the world premiere of his new play “Ghost Land,” and will be here in LA September 5th through September 11th.

“Ghost Land” is a new work commissioned by and written for City Garage about the war in Ukraine by Andriy Bondarenko. Since Russia’s brutal full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February of 2022, the world has watched in admiration at the toughness, resilience, and fierce determination of the Ukrainian people as they fight for their very existence in the face of this senseless and barbaric attack. Bondarenko’s play is an opportunity for an American audience to get a glimpse of what this experience feels like for the people of Ukraine and to ask ourselves how we might react should we find ourselves in the nightmarish situation they are currently enduring.

The Stories:

The play is made up of three, interconnected stories: a soldier dealing with combat trauma; a family trapped in the war zone whose home is invaded by a pair of Russian soldiers; and the third, a girl who survives a Russian torture cellar. The brutal reality of the war is mixed with fictional and even mystical ideas about suffering, violence, idealism, and the hunger for peace. True to the Ukrainian literary tradition of writers from Gogol to today, the play, despite its grim material, works in a dream-like, hallucinatory way that is poetic, powerful, blackly comic, and hauntingly beautiful.