Are you a theater professional? A novice Thespian? Never acted in your life?

Ghostlight Theater Company is interested in talking to you.

Ghostlight — named for the single lamp left burning onstage after cast and crew have all gone home — is a new community theater company that is looking for people to help stage its first production in July.

"Our hope is that everybody, from the production staff to the crew and actors, will all be coming from the community, whether it's college students from Millersville or F&M or people living right here in the neighborhood," Dan Jurman, one of the founders of Ghostlight, said. "For the first show, we're opening the doors completely for anybody out there."

That first show will be six-time Tony Award-winner "City of Angels," written by Larry Gelbart ("M*A*S*H") with music by Cy Coleman ("Sweet Charity"). The show, which will run July 10 until Aug. 2, will be making its Lancaster County debut.

"It's a witty show," Jurman said. "The music is fantastic. It's a crime nobody's ever done it locally."

"We wanted to open with a bang," Joe Gagliano, another of Ghostlight's founders, said.

Ghostlight will be interviewing production staff in January and holding cast auditions by appointment only March 1-2 at the Puerto Rican Cultural Center at South Prince and Farnum streets. Call-back auditions will be March 8.

"We want to be a concept-driven theater," Jurman said. "We don't care if you have 20 years of experience or this is your first time. We want it to be an educational process. We want to mentor new people. And we really want to see a lot of new people coming into the process who maybe never had a voice in the arts before."

The shows will be held at the Puerto Rican Cultural Center. Ghostlight has a three-year lease on the center's newly refurbished theater.

The company is the joint effort of 11 local theater professionals who saw a gap in Lancaster's artistic community.

"A lot of us really missed having community theater here in the city, and we thought it was time to bring it back," Jurman said.

The group searched the city for a home, finally landing at the Puerto Rican Cultural Center. Gagliano said the center's director, Modesto Rodriguez, and others "were so welcoming," and eager to make use of their recently renovated building.

"This location is indicative of what we're about," Gagliano said. "This building is part of the rejuvenation of Lancaster city, and what they're doing here melds so well with what we're trying to do, and what we're trying to bring back to the city in an area that really needs this kind of exposure and this kind of work."

Ghostlight is a for-profit theater, Jurman said, being run like a nonprofit.

He said forming a nonprofit group was considered, but there were already many nonprofit theaters vying for too few grant dollars.

The way Ghostlight will run, Jurman said, is that 10 percent of the profits — if a show does well enough to realize any profit — will go back to the investors, 20 percent into operations and the remaining 70 percent paid to staff and cast.

"Based on the sales of the show, everyone has a chance to make some money," Gagliano said.

"And that's from the production staff, who normally get paid in community theater, right down to the actors and everyone involved. It's a unique structure in that way."

Jurman, former executive director of Ephrata Performing Arts Center, said Ghostlight is "putting all the money back in because we aren't doing this to make money. We're doing it because we thought there was a need."

Ticket prices will be $15 for adults and $10 for seniors and students.

More details about Ghostlight are available at the group's Web site, www.GhostlightTheaterCompany.com.

E-mail: lalexander@lnpnews.com