This week the play 5 Mojo Secrets began its run at the Vineyard Playhouse. The play tells the story of a successful African American couple as they try to sort out what happened to their once happy marriage. It is a subject every married couple, even the happiest, can relate to. After all, how do two separate individuals retain their own identity and aspirations while also becoming that one unit known as husband and wife? It is a challenge that many decide is just too great.
Mark the calendars, the Edgartown school play takes place next Friday and Saturday, Nov. 4 and 5 at 7 p.m.
This year’s production is called Bluebeard and is billed as a spooky musical tale. Bluebeard is based on a cautionary tale involving sisters Mary Stephanie and Mary Elizabeth and their search for the man of their dreams. Of course, when trying to follow a dream, it is not uncommon for nightmares to infiltrate the landscape. The show visits both the humorous and haunting sides of this journey.
Each summer the folks at the Vineyard Playhouse host a series they call Monday Night Specials. This summer’s series began last Monday and runs through the summer to August 29. The idea is simple. Host one-night-only readings of plays. If you’ve never been to a reading, the experience is well worth it.
James Lapine (pictured) has won the Tony Award three times for the best book of a musical, for Into the Woods, Passion and Falsettos. His list of other Broadway and Hollywood credits is long and illustrious.
Mandy Hackett is the associate artistic director of the Public Theatre in New York city, one of the most vibrant and important performance spaces in New York city and therefore, by extension, the world.
Spalding Gray was a brilliant monologist. He walked onstage, sat down at an empty desk, except for a glass of water, and proceeded to mesmerize the audience. He did not need props, a backdrop, nor bells and whistles of any kind. His subject was his own life, weaving autobiography with an emotional terrain of depth and complexity.
The Amish Project is a play that faces big questions head on, including how do you forgive the murder of five innocent little girls?
The play is based on the tragic events of Oct. 2, 2006 when a gunman entered a one-room Amish schoolhouse in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania and shot 10 young girls, killing five of them.
Later the Amish people of that community publicly forgave the gunman in a service of reconciliation. Eventually, the West Nickel Mines schoolhouse was torn down and the New Hope School was built at another location.
The late great star of the stage, Katharine Cornell, who lies buried behind the theatre she bequeathed to the town of Tisbury, would approve of the choice of The Turn of the Screw for the Island Theatre Workshop’s Halloween presentation.
Nightmares were never so much fun. During the past two weeks the campers at Imp have been learning the ways of improv — the fast action, quick reflexes of theatrical art Yoda would be proud of. But who’s to say, once the mind is unleashed to improvise at will, how the subconscious will be affected.
On Friday, July 29, you are about to find out as the campers present The Dreams and Nightmares Show at the Edgartown School.
This weekend the Vineyard Arts Project is presenting a performance by Morphoses, a dance company that has been in residence at VAP since Sept. 11. During this time the troupe has been working on a show entitled Bacchae by resident artistic director Lucca Vegetti.
Creative drama teacher Phyllis Vecchia has an innovative way to get history across to sixth graders: Rather than talking about suffragettes Amelia Bloomer and Susan B. Anthony, and the abolitionist Henry Stanton, she has them BE Amelia Bloomer and Susan B. Anthony and Henry Stanton. In a rousing half-hour in Amy Reece’s sixth grade class at the Martha’s Vineyard Public Charter School on Thursday of last week, Ms. Vecchia guided the entire class through improvised paces of the women’s rights movement from 1840 to 1860.
