Circuit Arts, the Island nonprofit that grew out of the Martha’s Vineyard Film Festival, has been stepping up its involvement in live performing arts with a new division called Circuit Stage.
“We’ve been doing more and more theatrical productions and offerings, and just called it what it was. It’s all really happened organically,” said Circuit Stage director Brooke Hardman Ditchfield, a professional actor and longtime director of the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School theatre program.
After a well-received production of An Iliad, by Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare, at Grange Hall in West Tisbury earlier this year, Circuit Stage now is collaborating with North Shore Music Theatre to bring Ian Shaw’s play The Shark is Broken to the Martha’s Vineyard Performing Arts Center beginning July 5.
Other upcoming shows include the Live from the Grange music series, kicking off July 18 with Hitch & the Giddyup and continuing with other regional and local bands.
“We always try to pair [headliners] with an opening act that’s a young, up-and-coming artist from the Vineyard,” she said.
In August, Circuit Stage will host a reading of a new work by playwright and Chekhov translator Carol Rocamora, as well as more live music.
Coming up this fall, Circuit Stage will present a new storytelling musical from the Heartwood Trio and continue to collaborate with Island artists developing new work.
“We’ve really been incubating a lot of things out of a desire to incubate projects we believe in and artists we believe in,” Ms. Hardman Ditchfield said.
Circuit Stage’s first full-length play, An Iliad, came to the Grange two years ago in an excerpt performed by Island actor Lagan Love during the off-season variety show Locals.
“It was mesmerizing, [and] we had talked to them about the possibility of doing the full production,” Ms. Hardman Ditchfield said.
This year was the right time, she said.
“It felt like the right size of show to tackle, [and] Lagan has been doing just incredible work over the last two years on this piece,” Ms. Hardman Ditchfield said of An Iliad, which retells Homer’s epic in the context of world conflicts from the Trojan War to Gaza.
“The subject matter is timeless and ancient, but also so prescient now,” she said.
Mr. Love’s riveting performance this spring was directed by Katherine Reid, a Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School graduate who now teaches with Ms. Hardman Ditchfield in the performing arts department and frequently appears as an actress and singer on the Island.
Abby Bender, Danielle Mulcahy and other Island performers also have brought works in progress to the Grange.
Known best for the Martha’s Vineyard Film Festival, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this year, Circuit Arts also has its own documentary studio, Circuit Films, and since 2020 has operated a drive-in movie series at the YMCA with tickets sold on a pay-what-you-can basis.
On the live-performance side, Circuit Arts runs the Martha’s Vineyard Children’s Theatre Camp — formerly part of Island Theatre Workshop — and now Circuit Stage as well.
The nonprofit’s 2021 move to Grange Hall, where it holds a long-term lease from owner Vineyard Preservation Trust, provided Circuit Arts with a year-round theatre for stage shows as well as screenings.
“Because theatre is my background and we have a theatre now, we wanted to start doing more of that and really making sure we were taking our stewardship of that space seriously,” said Ms. Hardman Ditchfield, who is married to Circuit Arts executive director and fellow actor Brian Ditchfield.
The Vineyard has a strong cohort of theatre artists as well as a promising next generation coming through the high school program, Ms. Hardman Ditchfield said.
She and Mr. Ditchfield established the Locals shows in honor of their former drama coach, playwright and teacher Jonathan Lipsky, who encouraged young actors with a similar series.
Poetry, comedy, monologues and music are also welcomed at the Grange, Ms. Hardman Ditchfield said.
“We really wanted to make sure the community had a place to come and feel like they can scratch that creative itch and feel supported,” she said.
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