On Sunday, Sept. 28, there will be tryouts for two original one-act musicals about Vineyard history:

Nancy Luce, The Musical was originally produced in the summer of 2007 as part of Children’s Theatre Workshop summer program, with a book by Dana Anderson and music by Linda Berg.

An Island of Women, Life on the Vineyard, 1850-1852, written by E. St. John Villard, takes place at a time when much of the male population was at sea whaling. Philip Dietterich has written the music and lyrics.

Phyllis Vecchia will be holding a fall creative drama workshop for four-and-a-half to ten-year-olds at the Oak Bluffs School in the home economics room. Classes will be held on Thursday afternoons from 3:30 to 4:45 p.m.

The series of classes will begin on Thursday, Oct. 2, and run weekly until Dec. 4.

Since last week’s assassination of Imad Mughniyeh, a leading figure in Islamist fundamentalist organization Hezbollah, Liz Dembrowsky, director of New York theatre company White Trash Intellectuals, does her day job with a police officer in the room, for security.

A speechwriter for United Jewish Communities, a non-governmental organization that raises funds for Israel’s poor, she also spent her 30th birthday last week writing a press release on a suicide bombing that occurred in Dimona, Israel. For Ms. Dembrowsky, it’s all good training.

The good thing about January is that it isn’t December. December, of course, is when we spend too much money on presents, stress out that we’re compelled to send cards and letters, attend parties and fundraisers, and string up tired decorations. Or we’re feeling guilty that we’re not doing any of those things. But on occasions during each Christmas season, we’re bound to partake of an event that makes it all worth while. A performance of Amahl and the Night Visitors is one of those occasions.

A suicidal husband, a vaudeville act down on its luck, a pair of commedia dell’arte clowns, two morbidly sensitive shepherds, and a train passenger trapped in the loo with an idiot conductor on the far side of the door. What do these characters have in common? Well, brought together in one-act plays under the aegis of Island Theatre Workshop, they represent a fruitcake slice of the human predicament. They are also, as samples of the absurdist tradition, a whole bunch of fun.

No artistic medium asks us, the audience, to bring our imagination to the table as much as a staged theatre reading. So when a work such as Kim and Delia is presented by Vineyard playwright and filmmaker Brian Ditchfield — on Saturday night, May 31, under the aegis of the popular Island Interludes program of New Works by Island Writers — and when the play itself is a homage to imagination and its infinite possibilities, well, the audience shares in the creation.

Einstein alluded to it, and the quantum physicist and 1-800 medium alike declare it openly: linear time is way less real than we think it is. In Tony Award-winning composer Jason Robert Brown’s song-cycle musical, The Last Five Years, chronological time goes by the board as, in a clever device that turns the love story on its head, time moves forward from the man’s perspective, backwards from the woman’s.

The lights go out and the theatre is dark for a preternaturally long time. The sound of gushing water engulfs us, and we’re savvy enough about the events of August 30, 2005, in New Orleans to know that this is the 18-foot wall of water funneling down the streets of all the neighborhoods fanning out from the levees of Lake Ponchatrain.

Rachel Stein’s dad, Arthur (Adam Heller), after 9/11, had a freak out beyond everyone else’s freak out, but he had a certifiable right to it: One of the infamous planes flew into his office at the Twin Towers. While Arthur somehow muddled into a stairwell and was shepherded out by a fellow with a flashlight, the 65 employees who worked under him were not so lucky. Since then — and the action of the play takes place in 2003 — Arthur has not changed out of his pajamas and he’s starting to, well, stink.

Every summer the Vineyard Playhouse presents a Shakespeare play in the al fresco amphitheatre at the Tashmoo Overlook in Vineyard Haven, and those in the know about one of the very “funnest” things to do in the high season, are on hand to appreciate it.