In the spring of 2011, only months after Vineyard resident and playwright Jon Lipsky, who was my father, died, the seed was planted for posthumously publishing eight of his finest plays. The project sparked to life after a memorial event held in Boston when Bill Barclay, a student and collaborator of Jon’s, asserted that it was wrong that none of his plays had ever been published, and that we should change that. I was likewise of the mindset that the plays ought to be published, so we swiftly became a team on what became a multi-year effort to publish my father’s plays. This August, that seed will come to fruition with the release of The Plays of Jon Lipsky, a two-volume collection. A release event will be held at the Vineyard Playhouse on August 2 from 5 to 7 p.m. to celebrate the publishing of the collection.

For me, theatre has always been about relationships. On stage, the relationships of the characters are the currency of theater artists. Offstage, though, I have been impressed by the quality of the individuals who work in theatre. Growing up as the son of a theatre professional, and also having spent ample time on stage and around the community of the Martha’s Vineyard Playhouse, I met many caring, deep, funny, engaging, warm-hearted individuals. We all know the stereotype of the narcissist actor, but, growing up, I experienced mostly the opposite. One of the key values I learned from growing up around the theatre was the value of relationships between individuals in a community, and how central that is to a healthy group of artists.

When I began working on publishing my father’s plays, an initial question that I confronted was how much time to spend working on a project that essentially belongs to my father. The project quickly began taking more time and energy than I ever imagined it would. On many occasions, both Bill Barclay and I let go of the idea that the project might soon be completed, only to replace it with the determination to keep working on it no matter what new hurdle came our way.

What has kept me motivated through the years of work on the project is rooted in the values I learned from growing up around the theatre on the Vineyard, and also in Boston where my father worked. From these communities, I developed a sense that deep, personal relationships and a community spirit are totally central to what a worthwhile theater project entails. Thus, to me, there could not be a more worthwhile nor significant project for me to engage in than to publish my father’s plays. By engaging with the plays, I engage with his thoughts and feelings that he wrote into them, and at the same time engage with the community of individuals who cared about him, personally and professionally.

The project got a large vote of support when Bill and I ran a successful kickstarter campaign that received a total of more than $10,000 from the donations of over 100 people — family, friends, collaborators and his former students. With that seed money, we began working with theatre publishers, Smith & Kraus Inc., to bring these works into the world. We hired Vineyarder and theatre artist Mac Young to design the interior and exterior of both volumes. We reached out to collaborators of Jon’s to write introductions to the different plays, to write supplemental essays, and to help us create production histories for the plays. The project has progressed thanks to personal relationships with a community of warm-hearted, caring, passionate individuals.

A release event will be held at the Vineyard Playhouse from 5 to 7 p.m. on August 2. There will be refreshments and a reading from one of the plays. All are welcome.