Elden Street Players near quarter-century of provocative productions

About 25 years ago, then-Herndon Mayor Richard Thoesen gathered together a group of business people and asked them to brainstorm ideas to improve services in the community.

"I told him I would like to start a theater company, even though I didn't have any performers and I didn't have a theater," recalled Les Zidel, the man credited with founding the Elden Street Players. "I was the owner of a business in Herndon Industrial Park, and the people who owned the park were really community-minded, and they had an empty warehouse space. I asked if I could use the space to put on a play, and that's how the Industrial Strength Theatre came into being."

In 1988, the Elden Street Players were born with a production of "Freedom of the City." The controversial play detailed the early 1970s riots in Ireland that led to Bloody Sunday, an incident in which unarmed civil rights protesters were shot and killed by British soldiers.

"We sold four shows of 100 seats, which were just folding chairs," Zidel said. "And we had no stage, but it captured the imagination of a great number of people, including the Herndon Rotary Club, who would become instrumental in helping. I invited the mayor to come see the show, and he decided to renovate the theater and take charge."

A year later, the Elden Street Players staged its inaugural presentation at a revamped Industrial Strength Theatre with its production of Lorraine Hansberry's "The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window."

Zidel credits many people with helping the Elden Street Players begin. Their goals in the early years were simple.

"We wanted to try more experimental work," Zidel said. "We didn't want to be just another community theater that was doing 'Hello Dolly.' We wanted to do serious drama."

Early plays included "The Man in a Glass Booth," "Requiem for a Heavyweight" and "Spoon River."

Zidel recounts an encounter he had while at a theater conference, meeting with others from the region and discussing the theater's plan.

"This guy comes up to me and shakes my hand and says, 'I'm glad to meet you now, because you won't be here next year,' " Zidel said. "But it has grown into one of the most successful and critically acclaimed community theaters in the area, because it was never afraid of doing tough and difficult plays early on in building an audience."

Today, 16 men and women sit on the Elden Street Players' board, and its mission is to continue providing serious theater.

"Our audience expects us to do things that a lot of other community theaters don't do, and in fact they chastise us when they think we do things too tame or too Neil Simon-ish," said Jeff Boatright, who has served as president of the theater, on and off, for six of the past 10 years. The main stage of the Industrial Strength Theatre is a black box 42 feet wide by 24 feet deep that faces arena-style seating. None of the nearly 120 seats is farther than 20 feet from the performance space.