High school drama students played in the Yard last weekend — performing in a new (for them) up-Island setting to match the students’ new much-upped fund-raising goal: enough money to take a strong ensemble to perform at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival next year.

This fundraiser was particularly significant for the drama department because of their long-term endeavor to raise $6,000 per student to participate in the Fringe, at the invitation of a national student theatre organization.

What do food, fashion and fine wine have in common? Surprisingly, the Yard, the Island’s choreography and performing arts center in Chilmark. Connecting the dots requires going to the other end of the Island. First, across from the Black Dog Tavern in Vineyard Haven, where fashion designer Stina Sayre keeps shop. Then to Oak Bluffs, at the Sweet Life Café, where husband-and-wife owners Pierre and Susan Guerin will be hosting a dinner and fashion show benefit on Wednesday, June 10.

Double Dose of Comedy

Aquarium Passes

Landscape History Talk

On Wednesday, June 10, at 7:30 p.m. the Polly Hill Arboretum welcomes David Foster, forest ecologist and director of the Harvard Forest, who will speak about the landscape history of Martha’s Vineyard and nearby coastal Islands.

Every landscape is shaped by the historical interaction between humans and the natural environment; understanding this history provides strong guidance for both land management and conservation planning.

Benefit Art Show

Island of Women

An Island of Women, an original musical, looks at life on the Vineyard between 1850 and 1852 when much of the male population was off whaling. It was created by Island historian and director E. St. John Villard. It’s music was composed by retired Methodist minister of music Phil Dietterich, who is well know to Vineyard audiences for his original compositions for many local groups, as well as his work for the Scottish Society.

Guests swarmed to Mediterranean restaurant early Saturday afternoon to honor Empowered Woman of the Year Cindy Doyle and to observe the passing of the torch from former Women Empowered executive director Kaye Flathers to successor Sheila Bracy.

“We were thrilled with the turnout,” said Ms. Bracy. She attributes the success of the brunch to the volunteers who dedicated their time to organizing the event.

If there’s to be a central tragedy in one’s life, odds-on it’s bound up in the heartbreak of an unhappy family. In Athol Fugard’s seminal play, Master Harold and the Boys, which premiered in 1982 at the Yale Repertory Theatre before going on to an extended run at the Lyceum on Broadway, the playwright depicts a family’s dysfunction for the specific and fascinating angst all of its own, and also as a microcosm for the dark heart of the Family of Man as it rolled out in the decades of apartheid in South Africa.

Is the Vineyard poised to become the launch point for the next American Great Awakening?

Ask Squire Rushnell and Louise DuArt, the celebrity entertainers and authors who are the masterminds behind Inspiration Weekend 2009, which runs this weekend (June 5 to June 7), at the Tabernacle in Oak Bluffs, and they’ll tell you it just might be.

“We’re gonna light that fire again,” says Ms. DuArt, a well-known comedic impressionist who appears on national television as everyone from Judge Judy to George Burns.