MINNEAPOLIS — Shakespeare’s comic romance “Much Ado About Nothing,” Tennessee Williams’ Pulitzer Prize-winning drama “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” and the Neil Simon comedy “The Sunshine Boys” will highlight the Guthrie Theater’s new season, the Guthrie said Monday.

The Guthrie announced 14 plays for its 2011-2012 season. The season kicks off with “Much Ado About Nothing” in September on the Minneapolis theater’s thrust stage.

Dearbhla Molloy, a Tony Award-nominated actress for “Dancing at Lughnasa,” will make her Guthrie debut as Beatrice in “Much Ado.” It marks a reunion with Guthrie Director Joe Dowling. Both Molloy and Dowling started their careers together at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin.

Dowling, who will direct “Much Ado,” said he wanted to cast a more mature couple as the quarrelling Beatrice and Benedick who eventually fall in love.

“There’s a humor in these people who don’t expect ever that romance is going to come into their lives that late,” Dowling said. “And the humor is when, in fact, they find themselves falling in love.” The role of Benedick is still being cast, Dowling said.

“Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” Williams’ drama about a southern family fighting over the fortune of dying cotton tycoon Big Daddy, has not been produced on the Guthrie stage since 1975.

“That’s a long time,” Dowling said, “so I thought we should have a go at it.”

Simon’s “The Sunshine Boys” will conclude the new season. Guthrie veterans Raye Birk and Peter Michael Goetz will play Lewis and Clark, a vaudeville comedy team that is persuaded to reunite after a long estrangement.

The new Guthrie season also includes the American premieres of “End of the Rainbow,” featuring Tracie Bennett in a musical drama about the last days of singer Judy Garland, and the musical “Roman Holiday,” a stage adaptation of the 1953 movie starring Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn and featuring Cole Porter songs.

Other productions include Noel Coward’s comedy of manners “Hay Fever,” the British farce “Charley’s Aunt” and “The Burial at Thebes” by Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney and based on Sophocles’ tragedy “Antigone.”

Holiday favorite “A Christmas Carol” will return for its 37th year at the Guthrie.