Black Irish Comedy Hits Vineyard Haven

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.

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Children’s Theatre Begins Monday at Sailing Camp

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,

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Island Voices Poetry Series Comes to Che’s Lounge

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.

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Now Showing: Summer of ’42 Brings Nostalgia to Island Stage
Holly Nadler

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.

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The Grocer’s Son Visits Katharine Cornell Theatre

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.

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Frozen Captures Morality of a Moment
Megan Dooley

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.

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The Lonesome West: A Brothers’ Quarrel
Sofi Thanhauser

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.

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Kim and Delia Bring Their Dark Enchantments to Katama Farm
Sofi Thanhauser

Something is growing at the Farm Institute, alongside the tomatoes.

It’s a fairy tale with a surrealist bent, a celebration of the power of imagination with a somber undertone.

Written by Brian Ditchfield, and originally conceived as a video to be shot in alleyways of Chicago, Kim and Delia is the first production of Art Farm, Mr. Ditchfield’s and Brooke Hardman’s joint venture in something they call “sustainable art.”

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Bella: Artist, Philosopher, Musician, Puppeteer
Sofi Thanhauser

In his 1841 essay Circles, the transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson celebrated the moment when a visionary rises up amongst us. “By a flash of his eye,” wrote Emerson, the artist “burns up the veil which shrouded all things, and the meaning of the very furniture, of cup and saucer, of chair and clock and tester, is manifest.”

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Walking the Volcano at the Playhouse
Holly Nadler

It’s the sixties in the highest arc of the go go era. A boy and a girl meet in the lavatory of a 727. They’re there to flirt and to bargain. He, a self-described Fulbright scholar “gone bad,” needs her to sneak anesthetized birds sealed in hair rollers past customs. Also narcotized poisonous snakes, small ones, sewn into the lining of a lady’s undergarment.

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