A Scranton native’s Tony-winning play will lead off the Scranton Shakespeare Festival’s winter season.

“The Humans,” by Stephen Karam, will be staged Nov. 28-30. The timing, the weekend after Thanksgiving, was chosen because the play is about a Scranton family visiting their daughter in New York City for the holiday.

“It’s a time when families are visiting and people are looking for something to do and just it felt ripe for the vibes of the show,” said festival artistic director Michael Bradshaw Flynn. “And it felt like we’d be able to tap into the joys and also the pains and frustrations that come with family holidays.”

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NEW YORK, NY – JUNE 12: Playwright Stephen Karam accepts the Tony award for Best Play for “The Humans” onstage during the 70th Annual Tony Awards at The Beacon Theatre on June 12, 2016 in New York City. (Photo by Theo Wargo/Getty Images for Tony Awards Productions)

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Cate McDonald as Sleeping Beauty and Kelly Jean Graham as the Evil Carabosse. (Scranton Shakespeare Festival)

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NEW YORK, NY – JUNE 12: Playwright Stephen Karam accepts the Tony award for Best Play for “The Humans” onstage during the 70th Annual Tony Awards at The Beacon Theatre on June 12, 2016 in New York City. (Photo by Theo Wargo/Getty Images for Tony Awards Productions)

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The other shows will be an original holiday fairy tale farce in the British tradition; a youth ensemble alumni production of “Sweeney Todd: the Demon Barber of Fleet Street” and an Irish play, “Juno and the Paycock.”

Karam won the 2016 Tony Award for best play and “The Humans” ran on Broadway for 393 performances. It was also nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for drama, made into a movie starring Amy Schumer, Richard Jenkins and June Squibb, and has been staged elsewhere.

The plot: the Blakes, an Irish-American Scranton couple, travel to New York City’s Chinatown to spend Thanksgiving with their daughter and her boyfriend in their shabby apartment. Another daughter and a grandmother are also there when mysterious things happen and family tensions rise. It is a one-act, 90-minute show.

Flynn hopes to get in touch with Karam before the staging. The Scranton High School graduate and Green Ridge native is the son of Albert and Marie Karam.

Karam could not be reached for comment.

The venue is Kreitler Hall at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Scranton, which can accommodate a complex set.

The rest of the season returns to the festival’s permanent home in the Marketplace at Steamtown, Lackawanna Avenue, Scranton.

The British holiday tradition of pantomime is on stage Dec. 12-14 and Dec. 19-21. Despite the name, a “panto” is far from silent. The audience is encouraged to cheer and boo over-the-top characters and laugh at local references. Like many pantos, it is built around a fairy tale, in this case “Sleeping Beauty.” Previous pantos have been a success, Flynn said.

College-age alumni of the festival’s youth program will stage the Stephen Sondheim musical “Sweeney Todd: the Demon Barber of Fleet Street” Jan. 2-4 and Jan. 9-11.

The festival picked an Irish playwriter for the final winter production, a nod to the large local Irish-American community. “Juno and the Paycock,”by the late Seán O’Casey, will run from March 5-8.

It is set in a Dublin tenement during the Irish Civil War.

“As most great Irish plays are, it’s very, very funny until it’s not,” Flynn said.

The play is a sequel to O’Casey’s “The Shadow of a Gunman.” It isn’t necessary to have seen the first to appreciate the upcoming production, Flynn said.

Tickets are available at $20 per performance at scrantonshakes.com. The season will be funded mainly by ticket sales.

A grant from the Eureka Foundation, which supports causes in and around Lackawanna County, aids mostly the youth programs. The festival also hopes for a Lackawanna County grant.

There are more parts for local performers during the winter season. In the summer, professional and college actors from outside the region can use college housing.

“This is really when our local stars carry the weight of it,” Flynn said. Some actors receive small stipends.