Remember that old Dylan song, “Somethin’ is happenin’, but you don’t know what it is, do you Mr. Jones?” In the opening first scene of the two-person play, coming2terms, at the Vineyard Playhouse, we’re all Mr. Joneses as we try to figure out what a particular attractive couple is up to. They’re coming across with everything long-term couples tend to do. Bickering? Check! Avoiding larger issues? Check! Sharing their day? Check!

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.

By PETER BRANNEN

For Jaws production designer Joe Alves, frights were in short supply on set during the early summer of 1974.

“My concern was the audiences might laugh at the shark,” he said in a telephone conversation from his Hollywood home on Tuesday.

Few people embody the statement “still waters run deep” more than Island singer-songwriter Willy Mason, equal parts thoughtful and lighthearted as he considers his musical roots and his career.

He is half done with his next album, which should be released around January. In August and September, he will be playing festivals in the United Kingdom.

Drumbeats will echo out across the Camp Ground in Oak Bluffs on Saturday evening, and anyone drawn by them towards the open-air Tabernacle will see flashes of color in constant motion and hear the voices of the Watoto Children’s Choir, a singing group from Uganda.

Uganda is currently home to more than a million orphans who have lost their parents to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. About 20 of them will be performing on the Vineyard at the end of the choir’s six-month tour of the United States.

Jeanie Mathis has never been to Martha’s Vineyard or any part of the East Coast. She lives in Reevesville, Illinois, population 50. Yet she knows about the Island because she reads every issue of the Gazette . . . twice. “I read it at the shop [a hair salon in her home] and then I reread it at night,” she said.

LOCAL HEROES

Editors, Vineyard Gazette:

We the People

Our country celebrates its two hundred and thirty-fifth birthday on Monday and the national holiday will be marked by colorful parades, fireworks displays and picnics from sea to shining sea, including here on the Vineyard where Islanders of every stripe will pause to commemorate the founding of this great nation.

And on the eve of this Independence Day, the endless debate continues among Americans about who we are as a people, what we stand for as a nation and what are the principles and values that guide American society.

The Edgartown historic district commission has ordered a cease and desist on construction of a large fence being built on a North Water street home.

The order was issued to Edgartown contractor John Nugent on Wednesday to halt activity on a new granite and wood fence and granite curbing at 93 North Water street, as well as a brick retaining wall along Cottage street which runs perpendicular to the property.

West Tisbury town administrator Jen Rand picked up her phone last week and heard the words no one has heard in at least three decades.