The Island Players 78th Season

Manatee County's oldest community theater, founded in 1949, still performs in a playhouse at Gulf Drive and Pine Avenue in Anna Maria, a former family home that was barged down the Manatee River around 1912. The Island Players' 78th season is mostly comedy. There are two Jones Hope Wooten crowd-pleasers, Always a Bridesmaid (the opener) and 'Til Beth Do Us Part, plus Andrew Bergman's Social Security and Norman Robbins' thriller Prescription for Murder. The exception is Lauren Gunderson's Silent Sky, directed by Kelly Wynn Woodland. It follows Henrietta Leavitt, who was barred from Harvard Observatory's telescopes and whose work on variable stars gave astronomers a way to measure cosmic distance.