Mad Cow Theatre Announces Season 22

Mad Cow Theatre's Season 22 will continue the theatre's tradition of producing plays that both captivate and challenge the Central Florida audience.

The 10-show season, which will begin Sept. 21 and run year-round through September 2019, will include at least half a dozen plays never before produced in the area.

Among the shows will be two musicals - the Tony-Award-winning Irish musical romance Once and the comic mystery The Mystery of Edwin Drood - along with two classics and six contemporary plays, ranging from comedy to drama to romance that combines the two.

Half of the season's shows feature a woman playwright.

Season 22 will open with a 1920s comedy classic, The Royal Family, by George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber. This funny valentine to the theatre takes its audiences into the lavish lifestyle of a famous celebrity family, whose outrageous behavior is matched only by their love for their work. The Royal Family will play Sept. 21-Oct. 14 in the Harriett.

In Mad Cow's smaller Zehngebot-Stonerock Theatre, Season 22 will open with Gina Gionfriddo's Rapture, Blister, Burn, a comedy with a little bite, a healthy serving of afternoon martinis, and four women diving into a freewheeling old-fashioned consciousness-raising conversation. Rapture, Blister, Burn will be presented Oct. 26-Nov. 18. Mad Cow will ring out 2018 in the Harriett with Rupert Holmes' hilarious musical whodunit The Mystery of Edwin Drood, winner of the 1986 Tony Award for best musical and four other Tonys. Based on the unfinished novel by Charles Dickens, Drood (Nov. 30-Dec. 23) will end in a novel way every night: The audience votes to decide who committed the crime.

Mad Cow will start the new year in the Harriett with Robert Askins' Hand to God, the ruthless comedy about sex, sinners, and sock puppets, which will play Jan. 18-Feb. 10, 2019. In the Zehngebot-Stonerock, Branden Jacob-Jenkins' Gloria (Feb. 15-March 10, 2019) is a sharp-toothed new comic drama about the magazine industry, in which one employee's sinister actions throw the entire workplace into chaos. With spring will come Top Girls, Caryl Churchill's 1980s trailblazer, a funny and provocative look at women and success by the celebrated British playwright. Top Girls will be presented in the Harriett March 29-April 21, 2019.

The plays keep on coming through the summer of 2019, which will open with the hit musical Once, the winner of eight Tony Awards, including best musical. Once, the enchanting tale of a Dublin street musician and his almost love, has a book by renowned Irish playwright Enda Walsh, with music and lyrics by Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová. It will be presented June 7-30, 2019.

June also will see another Irish story, the romantic comedy/drama Outside Mullingar, by American playwright John Patrick Shanley (Doubt), a poetic fable that shows audiences it's never too late to take a chance on love. Outside Mullingar will play in the Zehngebot-Stonerock June 21-July 14, 2019.

Following that show, George Bernard Shaw's classic Heartbreak House (Aug. 9-Sept. 1, 2019) will take the Harriett stage - a rousing comic masterpiece of wit and romance, clashing philosophies and battering hearts. Finally, Tanya Saracho's compelling Fade will close the season in the Zehngebot-Stonerock. This fresh and funny show about class, race and a Latina television writer - and how the stories she hears make their ways into her TV scripts - will be onstage Aug. 23-Sept. 15, 2019.

"Theatre unites us all as we celebrate the human condition through art.," said Mitzi Maxwell, Mad Cow's executive director. "The bonds of artists, audience and our community create something truly magical and entertaining.

"Mad Cow's Season 22 brings us dynamic stories of people who are looking to connect to their families, their friends, their culture and themselves through the world of the play."

Mad Cow Theatre is downtown Orlando's professional theatre company, presenting compelling works of theatre for a wide range of audiences, with a passion for both classic and contemporary plays and musicals representing the best of American and world literature. Founded in 1997, Mad Cow has produced more than 175 works of theatre to an ever-widening audience - promoting, enhancing and celebrating the human condition through art.