The stage is set: Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School drama students will perform tomorrow in the semifinals of the statewide drama guild competition with an original play written by drama teacher Kate Murray and students Kirkland Beck and Kenny Stone. Islanders are invited to attend the contest performance of the play, called Letters, in Fall River, to see a production that already has earned the cast and crew awards.
Island Theatre Workshop presents PigPen Theatre’s latest show, The Old Man and the Old Moon, for a limited engagement at the Katharine Cornell Theatre on Sunday and Monday, July 5 and 6 at 8 p.m. The Old Man and the Old Moon is a tale of an old man who must abandon his duties of refilling the moon every month, to cross the seas in search of his missing wife. The show runs just under one hour and is appropriate for all ages, both children and adults. Tickets are $10, available at the door.
The Vineyard Playwrights’ Studio will hold its inaugural meeting at the West Tisbury Library on Wednesday, May 6, at 4:30 p.m.
The group is open to playwrights interested in an interactive workshop for evaluating plays of all lengths, themes and degrees of completion. Actors will provide readings, and a short, constructive discussion of the play’s strengths and shortcomings will follow.
Meetings will be at the library the first Wednesday of each month. The public is welcome to attend and participate.
If all the feminists in all the play-going world could vote to remove one production from the lists, it would probably be unanimous to expunge Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. Oh, some regrets would ensue: We would rue the loss of such lines as, “I’ve come to wive it wealthily in Padua. If wealthily then happily in Padua.” And it’s a hilarious plot point that the reigning town fat cat, Baptista, insists on marrying off his over-the-top nasty daughter, Katharina, before her sweet kid sister, Bianca, can have her pick of swooning swains.
Dressed in a black suit, with a salt and pepper mane fanned around a stern countenance, Tony Award-winning performing artist André De Shields closely resembled the great American statesman Frederick Douglass when he performed on stage in Manhattan last winter.
Island Theatre Workshop’s One Act Play Festival this month serves up a full evening of theatre, with five one-act plays in a one-night program that travels through time and around the globe.
It beigns in L.A. with Frederick Stropel’s play Package Deal, directed by Kevin Ryan. This dark comedy invites the audience to sit in on lunch and the contract negotiations of Starla Simmons. An out-of-work actor, an out-of-touch casting agent, and an out-of-reach waiter make this luncheon delicious.
As he sits for an interview in the kitchen of his mother’s Oak Bluffs cottage, Paul Padua seamlessly breaks into and out of character — not just one, but many of the roles he’s played over the years as a member of the Vineyard Playhouse performance group the Fabulists.
In the good old Globe days, William Shakespeare’s audience welcomed the many hours it took to plow through one of his plays. What else did they have to do? There were no movies, no television, even books were in short supply: the richest citizens had two or three volumes per household, and at least one of them was the Bible.
Second City alumna Tara DeFrancisco — who also has performed with ComedySportz, iO, and Annoyance Theatres in Chicago, not to mention being named the funniest person in Chicago — is offering a workshop open to anyone 16 or older interested in the opportunity to learn Chicago-style improv here on the Vineyard.
A guest of Troubled Shores, the Island’s improv company, Ms. DeFrancisco also will work with IMP Camp kids enrolled in session four and the company’s professional troupes.
