On Sunday, July 19, a giant Mother Earth puppet together with accompany the Green Man — a 12-foot-tall spirit of vegetation — lead a wild menagerie of puppets down Main street in Vineyard Haven.
The parade marks the middle of the third annual Martha’s Vineyard Puppet Festival. Troupes from Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Maine join forces with four groups from the Vineyard to offer shows and tell stories from Africa, Asia, the forest and the sea.
Built on Stilts, the Island’s community dance and performance festival, is accepting registrations for participating artists now through July 1. The festival will run from August 12 to 17. The Built on Stilts children’s programs, Stiltshop and Advancedshop, are also now enrolling on a first-come, first-served basis. Visit builtonstilts.org for details and application forms.
The Vineyard Playhouse continues its popular summer series of new work, the Monday Night Special, with a reading and singing of a new play by Frank Higgins entitled Black Pearl Sings onMonday, August 24at 7 p.m. at the Vineyard Playhouse.
The Lonesome West, a play by award-winning playwright Martin McDonagh, is being performed at the Katharine Cornell Theatre this Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. Kristian Seney is directing, and the cast includes Chris Brophy, Rob Myers, Katharine Pilcher and Xavier Powers.
Island Theatre Workshop’s long-running summer program, Children’s Theatre, begins on Monday, June 29 and runs through Friday, August 21 at the Sailing Camp park on Barnes Road in Oak Bluffs,
Poetry is coming back to Che’s Lounge in Vineyard Haven. The popular music venue has hosted several poetry events including Vineyard Slam, Hot Words, and the Warrior Writers (Iraq Veterans against the War). Linda Black and Michael West, organizers of the new Island Voices series, invite Island poets of all ages, styles, and levels of accomplishment to come and share their work in celebration of National Poetry Month.
The island could be any island. Anyone with connections to an island — such as those of us who live on or visit Martha’s Vineyard — will think it’s their island. The year is 1942, and although there’s a major war going on and hairstyles and clothes are vintage to our modern sensibilities, the scene of three teen males (provenance Brooklyn, Yonkers and New Jersey) slapping hands at the pier for the start of another season is interchangeable from the scene of all teen males regrouping at the start of all the summers in time.
This Saturday, May 30, The Grocer’s Son screens at the Katharine Cornell Theatre at 8 p.m. This 2008 film from France, starring Nicolas Cazale as Antoine, retells the fable of the prodigal son with modern updates. The Martha’s Vineyard Film Society’s Richard Paradise summarizes, “Antoine reluctantly returns to his rural hometown after 10 years in the big city when his father (Daniel Duval) has a heart attack.
The influence of nature versus nurture, the difference between forgiveness and forgetting, the existence of good and evil: these paradoxes were invoked by a cast of three actors against a spare backdrop in Monday night’s Island opening of Bryony Lavery’s Tony award-nominated drama Frozen. The story involves a grieving mother, a psychiatrist, and the murdered child who connects them.
The audience at the Katharine Cornell starts tittering the moment Coleman Conner (Chris Brophy) swaggers onstage. Hips thrust forward, jaw slack, malevolent halfwit eyes groping around the room for something to steal or mangle, he manages to make his trip from the doorway to the liquor cabinet into one continuous promise: we are in for a treat.
