4615 Theatre Company will launch its third season with two plays in rep by distinguished British playwrights, and will finish with two world premieres by local writers.
A woman has a passionate affair with her husband’s close friend — what could be less remarkable than that? But in Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, the fact of the adultery makes all three people inhabit every moment of the play — the third person’s absence as heavy and powerful as the other two’s presence. By beginning with the end of the affair and working backward to its libidinous beginning, Pinter makes Betrayal “a forensic examination of romantic breakdown,” according to Variety’s Matt Trueman, who calls it a “masterful play.” From August 16 to September 8, 2019; Stevie Zimmerman directs.
More or less simultaneously, 4615 will be staging a different sort of betrayal — Lucy Prebble’s Enron. This is an immaculate examination of the high-flying schemes of Jeffrey Skilling, who wanted to make his company not just a supplier of energy but a trader in it. “What [the play] vividly offer[s] is not a lecture on corporate madness but an ultra-theatrical demonstration of it at work,” says the Guardian’s Michael Billington in his five-star review. Enron will run from August 9 to September 1 of this year. 4615 Artistic Director Jordan Friend will direct.
For the holiday season, 4615 will present the world premiere of The Infinite Tales, a work adapted and directed by Gregory Keng Strasser. From Irish myth, four children are cursed and transformed into swans, and forced to wander for nine hundred years. While Strasser is an experienced director (he directed Rorschach’s 410[GONE] this season) this appears to be, from his resume, his first foray into authorship. From December 6-29, 2019.
4615’s sole offering for the 2020 portion of the season will be a new play by Renee Calarco, Museum 2040. This is a story about an America recovering from what happened to it sixteen years ago, in the election of 2024. 4615 produced a world debut work by Calarco’s brother, Joe Calarco, called Separate Rooms, earlier this year. Museum 2040 will run from March 13 to April 5 of next year.
Tickets for the Summer Rep, performed at Dance Loft on 14, are on sale now.
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