Three original plays, penned by Islanders Taffy McCarthy, John Ortman and Peter Palches, will move from the page to the stage for two weekends in a row at the Katharine Cornell Theatre in Vineyard Haven in an Island Theatre Workshop presentation called Pick of the Crop.
Longtime Island Theatre Workshop artistic director Lee Fierro directs Peter Palches’ Sam Meets Maria, or Still Here, which features Island actors Niki Patton and George Ricci.
The Island’s oldest players, the self-described vagabonds of Island Theatre Workshop, have found a home. After 41 years on an endless Vineyard shuffle, the troupe aims to set up shop in the cozy building on Music street in West Tisbury that housed the town’s library for 100 years.
In the small town where he lived, there is no memorial to Matthew Shepard. The fence post where he, an openly gay man of 21, hung dying for some 18 hours, tied up after being pistol-whipped, has been torn down. The bar from which he was lured to his murder is gone.
Once and for all can the question be answered: Can we go home again? Playwrights from Chekhov to Wilder have renewed the debate and, of course, the answer will always have to be Maybe, depending on the place and who was — and may still be — in it.
There are few plays in history that attempt as much spectacle on stage as Antony and Cleopatra, a romantic tragedy of war, lust, politics, lust, betrayal and lust. “This script is frequently quite over-the-top, and the lead characters so histrionic about their feelings for each other that it borders on farce,” explains Nicole Galland, who is cocreator with Chelsea McCarthy of Shakespeare for the Masses, an off-season project produced by the Vineyard Playhouse to make Shakespeare’s plays accessible, fun and affordable (as a matter of fact, it’s free).
Nightmares and Dreams: Immigrant Voices is a short play written and performed by a group of 5 to 12 Vineyardwomen from six different Latin American countries: Brazil, Chile, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Ecuador, and Uruguay. The play was created in an adult education conversational English class using theater exercises, music, and literature as creative and effective learning tools.
A trio of ten-year-olds crowded the ticket booth of the Vineyard Playhouse last week, earnestly peddling imaginary tickets to playhouse employee Geneva Monks. This was their dress rehearsal, preparation for last Saturday’s production of Cave Critters Unite, the play created by Bridget Mello’s class at the Edgartown School for their part in the playhouse’s Fourth Grade Theatre Project.
