BELFAST – The Belfast Maskers’ 2001 season will open in March in its newly refurbished waterfront theater. The new season will include, for the first time, a large-scale outdoor summer musical.

The season will kick off March 15 with a stage adaptation of Ken Kesey’s beat generation novel about patients in a mental asylum, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” The play will run through April 1. Tobin Malone, the theater group’s newly hired artistic director, will direct the production.

Beth Henley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, “Crimes of the Heart,” will play from April 26 to May 13. Larraine Brown, from Great Britain, will direct the play.

For three weekends in July, “The Boys from Swanville,” an original musical production conceived and directed by Tobin, will be presented outside of the theater on a specially constructed soundstage, with bleacher seating for 300. The production will feature a live band, pickup trucks and four-wheelers, fireworks and dancing. It will open July 6, with curtain times at 8:30 p.m. and 11 p.m., including July 7, July 13-14 and July 20-21.

The production of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” will return from July 26 to Aug. 12. Next, “Baby With the Bathwater,” a play by American writer Christopher Durang, will be presented on the theater’s main stage from Aug. 16 to Sept. 2. A director for this production will be announced.

Robert Hitt, a former Maskers artistic director, actor and stage director, will direct a fall production of the Anton Chekhov classic “Uncle Vanya.” The play will run from Oct. 4 to 21.

An adaptation by R.N. Sandberg of L.M. Montgomery’s novel “Anne of Green Gables,” will play from Nov. 29 to Dec. 16, and will be directed by Maskers veteran Meg Nickerson.

Special first-night season tickets, which guarantee admission and preferred seating for six 2001 gala champagne season premieres, are available. Also available are regular season passes, Matinee Club subscriptions, Saver Pass programs and special group bookings. Call the Maskers box office at 338-9668 for information.