Park Square Theatre will try to get back on track with a 2020-21 season that includes a mystery, in more ways than one.

The St. Paul venue often stages a summer thriller and it's often by Jeffrey Hatcher, who wrote its "Sherlock Holmes and the Ice Palace Murders" and upcoming "Holmes and Watson." (For a few performances of the former play, he went on as Holmes while actor Steve Hendrickson recovered from surgery.) Hatcher will be back for the July 2021 opening of a new mystery. He'll also direct but his title and subject remain under wraps.

Another Twin Cities theater vet, Rick Shiomi, is writing and directing "Fire in the New World" for summer 2021. It'll be the third in his series of noirish dramas featuring private eye Sam Shikaze, who solves crimes in Vancouver's Japantown in the years after WWII. (Theater Mu staged another Shikaze play, "Yellow Fever," in 2013.) The world premiere is a co-presentation with the Vancouver native's Full Circle Theater.

Park Square's season opens in October with another collaboration, with Prime Productions, "The Revolutionists," a comedy set during France's Reign of Terror. It's by the country's most-produced playwright, Lauren Gunderson, whose "Silent Sky" is on stage at the Bell Museum. History also drives "Triangle," a musical romance inspired by the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire that killed 146 people.

Shanan Custer and Carolyn Pool, who've collaborated on the theater's "2 Sugars, Room for Cream" and "Sometimes There's Wine," move on to the hard stuff with "Bad Things, Good Whiskey," another two-woman, slice-of-life comedy.

The season is rounded out by "Airness," in which five would-be rockers compete for the National Air Guitar Championship. Park Square will also present Katha Dance Theatre's world premiere, "Shaamya — of Equality," choreographed by Rita Mustaphi and inspired by a Bengali poem. It's available as an add-on to the season.

As it attempts to recover from a disastrous year in which it canceled most of its shows and parted ways with former artistic director Flordelino Lagundino, the theater also has named a trio of artistic associates who will help guide it: Shiomi, director Ellen Fenster and Kim Vasquez, a director and producer of Broadway's "Be More Chill," who is a native of North St. Paul.

Chris Hewitt • 612-673-4367