MANTEO – A North Carolina institution is taking pride in a Tony Award for major contributions to American theater.

Major acting awards were being presented during Sunday’s televised Tony Awards show, but the prize honoring “The Lost Colony” came during a cocktail party Saturday in New York. The country’s longest-running symphonic outdoor drama has been in production every summer since 1937 on the Outer Banks.

The Tony Honors for Excellence in Theatre notes that artists including Andy Griffth, Lynn Redgrave and Terrence Mann performed in the play based on the story of the early English colonists who vanished from their Outer Banks settlement.

The show got its start with one of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs funding theatre and other live performances during the Great Depression of the 1930s.