Rollins College goes for the gold with Annie Russell’s 2021-22 season
The venerable Annie Russell Theatre is going for the cream of the crop with its 2021-22 season: All of its shows will be winners of the Pulitzer Prize for drama.
The Rollins College theater is the longest-running theater in Florida, and the upcoming season will be its — wait for it — 89th.
The planning for the new season, which starts this fall, came with anticipation for the landmark achievement that will follow.
“The season after next represents the historic Annie Russell Theatre’s 90th birthday,” said Rollins professor Thomas Ouellette, the theater’s producing director. “In the run-up to that magnificent milestone, we wish to celebrate the rich and diverse range of American plays written since the Annie first opened her doors, back in 1932.”
The season will open Sept. 24 with Neil Simon’s “Lost in Yonkers.” The play looks at an unconventional living situation in which two brothers have to live with their stern grandmother, an eccentric aunt and an uncle, who’s a low-level gangster. Rollins professor Missy Barnes, a 2019 Orlando Sentinel Critics’ Pick nominee for her acting in the Ensemble Company’s “The Niceties,” will star as Grandma.
Simon won the 1991 Pulitzer for his work, which will run at Rollins through Oct. 2. Lynn Nottage’s “Sweat,” a 2017 Pulitzer winner, tells of the human toll of unemployment. Set in a working-class bar in an industrial town in Pennsylvania, the play watches neighbor turn on neighbor as layoffs threaten their way of life. The show will run Nov. 12-20. Roberta Emerson, the recently announced artistic consultant for the CFCArts theater program, will direct. Emerson, is also a Sentinel Critics’ Pick nominee and recently directed “A Raisin in the Sun” at the Garden Theatre in Winter Garden.
“Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” will run Feb. 11-19, 2022, with Eric Zivot as Big Daddy. Zivot has acted and directed at Mad Cow Theatre and Orlando Shakes, where he recently played Albert Einstein in “My Lord, What a Night.”
Tennessee Williams’ famed play of race, class and sexuality, “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof ” won the Pulitzer in 1955. Marianne DiQuattro will direct the production. The look at a Southern family in crisis was immortalized on film in 1958, with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in starring rolls.
Finally, the musical “Next to Normal” will close out the season from April 15-23. Tom Kitt and Bryan Yorkey’s searing examination of the effects of mental illness on a family won its Pulitzer in 2010. Barnes will direct.
A season subscription to all four shows costs $70, with discounts available for senior citizens, students and Rollins alumni. For more information, go to rollins.edu/annie or call 407-646-2145.