4615 Theatre Company launches its first full season

The 4615 Theatre Company has joined the ranks of full-time producing DC-area theaters this year with a four-production schedule balanced between classic and contemporary stories.

The Silver Spring-based company is presenting Shakespeare’s seldom-produced King John in rep with The Lion in Winter, James Goldman’s contemporary account of King John’s father, the great King Henry II, and his fractious family. These two shows continue to play through August 5.

This fall, 4615 will stretch back 2400 years to produce Sophocles Electra, the story of a young woman’s revenge against her mother for killing her father. Her brother Orestes returns from hiding with a cover story: that he is not Orestes but a friend, returning with the ashes of Orestes, killed in a chariot race. Electra, already in mourning for her father, is moved to even more profound grief, but when she discovers the truth, she quickly falls in with her brother’s plan to overthrow her mother and her stepfather. Stevie Zimmerman will direct this drama, which will run from October 20 to November 4 of this year.

4615’s entry into the Women’s Voices Theater Festival will be Saviana Stanescu’s Waxing West, in which Daniela, a young Romanian woman in the time shortly after the overthrow of the brutal dictator Nicolae Ceausecu, decides to go to America to marry the graceless Charlie, who is the son of a benefactor. Once in America, however, she discovers that Charlie is quite kinky and his sister, Gloria, is even kinkier. Moreover, she is haunted by the ghosts of Ceausecu and his equally brutal wife, both of whom were killed when the Communist government was overthrown. The Ceausecus appear as vampires, sing, dance, comment on Daniela’s American adventure, and threaten her with torture. Wilborn Hampton of the New York Times calls Waxing West “intriguing and entertaining”. 4615 Artistic Director Jordan Friend will helm this production, which will run from January 19 to February 10, 2018.

4615 Theatre Company performs in the Highwood Theatre, 914 Silver Spring Avenue, Silver Spring, MD.