The battle of good vs. evil rages in Silver Spring as people in spandex toss each other around. Performers compete for a prize conjured up by a dragon. Spectators roar their approval with chants like: “Cheeseburger! Cheeseburger! Cheeseburger!”

It’s all orchestrated by diehards who have training in classic Shakespearean theater — and professional wrestling.

Sound fun?

Flying V Theatre has been producing theatrical shows around Montgomery County since 2011 to blend niche cultural interests with traditional theater. The nonprofit organization added professional wrestling to its portfolio in 2019 as part of its “Fights” branch. Joey Ibanez and Tim German have been co-artistic leads since 2020 to bring their love of comic books, video games and geekier pop culture to the company’s storytelling.

The culmination of their 2025 season goes down Dec. 20 at Silver Spring Black Box Theatre at 8 p.m. “Fighter Fantasy,” a riff off the popular Final Fantasy video game series, will bring a two-year story arc to a close, where the hero of good, Abby Jane, faces the villain, Tjay Sykes, who is trying to control the “fighterverse” for the championship belt.

This is the kind of story that Ibanez and German have always wanted to tell through professional wrestling.

“Whereas other places kind of lean into the sport or the arena aspect, we try to tell live-action comic books,” Ibanez said with a laugh.

“We always say we’re bringing the best of Saturday morning action to Saturday night.”

Classical training

Ibanez, 41, graduated from the Bristol Old Vic Theatre Company in England, where he studied Shakespeare, and has performed at Washington, D.C.-area stages such as Shakespeare Theatre Company and the Kennedy Center.

German, 45, graduated from the University of Maryland, College Park, and acted in productions at Bethesda’s Imagination Stage and Glen Echo’s Adventure Theatre MTC.

The pair have also spent a lot of their adult life traveling along the East Coast to grapple in front of fans who admire the theatricality inherent in wrestlers who work tirelessly to hone their craft. By presenting it in a black box theater alongside more traditional plays, Ibanez and German are directly drawing the line of connection from theater to wrestling.

“Professional wrestlers in the space of theatrical performers are not particularly respected,” German said. “That’s not shade or anything, but there are a lot of people who don’t realize what we do because they don’t watch what we do.”

“It takes training but they’re highly crafted performers, almost the same as if you go to see circus, burlesque or drag. Those performers trained and got good at their act to be where they are.”

Professional wrestling’s popularity across the region is at its peak, the duo said. They attribute it in part to John Cena’s farewell match to World Wrestling Entertainment, which was held at Capital One Arena in D.C. “That match, in and of itself, got us like 20 more tickets sold,” Ibanez said with a laugh.

But the pair know how hard it is to make wrestling events happen around the region. They say there’s some bureaucratic red tape with jurisdictional fighting commissions that oversee events. But they know that a decent number of people are interested in performing from their time teaching upstarts at Renaissance Rumble Wrestling, a training school in Rockville.

Even with the long, odd hours they spend putting on Flying V shows, training students and other odd jobs, Ibanez and German wouldn’t have it any other way.

“It’s artistically fulfilling. It’s tiring,” German said. “Joey and I both know that one of the best parts of this is getting to make wrestling in your community and have people come and see it and be affected by the things we make.”

They want to use Flying V as a gateway for wrestling newbies and fanatics alike to keep up the momentum of interest in more performances.

“One thing that everyone says about our shows,” Ibanez said, “is that this is the place people bring people who don’t know about wrestling to come fall in love with wrestling.”