Keegan Theatre's New Season

The 11th season will open abroad with "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" in the troupe's 10th annual Ireland tour (Sept. 3-Oct. 4). The same show will then kick off the Washington season at Church Street Theat er. While the other Keeganites are in Ireland, the company's bare-bones experimental arm, New Island Project, will present the U.S. premiere of "Love, Peace, and Robbery" in New York at the First Irish Festival (Sept. 23-28).

"One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" (Nov. 28-Dec. 20), adapted by Dale Wasserman from Ken Kesey's 1960s novel, will be directed by Susan Marie Rhea, with Mark A. Rhea as the rebellious psychiatric patient.

"Love, Peace, and Robbery" (Nov. 28-Dec. 21), by contemporary Irish writer Liam Heylin, will have its Washington premiere at Arlington's Theatre on the Run. The dark comedy is about two ne'er-do-wells trying to stay out of jail and off booze and drugs. Kerry Waters Lucas will direct Eric Lucas, Matthew Keenan and Bruce Rauscher.

A second New Island production, Samuel Beckett's solo tour de force "Krapp's Last Tape" (Feb. 19-March 14), will be staged by Eric Lucas and will star Brian Hemmingsen at Theatre on the Run.

"Elizabeth Rex" (March 19-April 18), by Canadian playwright Timothy Findley, imagines that Elizabeth I summoned Shakespeare and his players to distract her the night before her lover Essex was to be executed. Susan Marie Rhea will direct at Church Street.

David Mamet's real estate scammers' roundelay, "Glengarry Glen Ross" (June 4-28), which Keegan toured in Ireland last year, will be staged by Jeremy Skidmore at Theatre on the Run.

The musical "A Man of No Importance" (July 16-Aug. 15, 2009), with a book by Terrence McNally, music by Stephen Flaherty and lyrics by Lynn Ahrens (the trio who wrote the musical "Ragtime"), is about a Dublin bus conductor who puts on an amateur production of Oscar Wilde's "Salome" and finds his true character. Mark Rhea will direct at Church Street.

-- Jane Horwitz