Arts & Entertainment
Anyone who spent any time on the Vineyard before 1984, the year Lillian Hellman died (she was born in 1905), has a story to tell about the writer’s mean-spiritedness, from the number of nurses’ aides she fired in a single week, to her scowl at the Helio’s waitress who complimented Ms. Hellman on her mayonnaise, to the slightly ghastly sight of her shuffling down Main street, Vineyard Haven, leaning on the arm of a white-uniformed caregiver, a cigarette dangling from the famous writer’s grimacing lips.
During college in 1940, while working as a summer cowhand on the family’s Northern California cattle ranch, Dave Brubeck asked his father’s permission to take a job playing jazz at a San Francisco night club. Confounded by the idea, his father shook his head and replied, “I can’t understand why you would want to spend time in a dark and noisy and smoky place, when you could be out here with me in the fresh air with beautiful country all around you.”
If all the feminists in all the play-going world could vote to remove one production from the lists, it would probably be unanimous to expunge Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. Oh, some regrets would ensue: We would rue the loss of such lines as, “I’ve come to wive it wealthily in Padua. If wealthily then happily in Padua.” And it’s a hilarious plot point that the reigning town fat cat, Baptista, insists on marrying off his over-the-top nasty daughter, Katharina, before her sweet kid sister, Bianca, can have her pick of swooning swains.
By HOLLY NADLER
Wampanoag Language
The Death and Rebirth of the Wampanoag Language is the topic for Professor David J. Silverman, of George Washington University, when he speaks on Wednesday, July 29, at 7 p.m. at the Vineyard Haven Public Library.
Second City alumna Tara DeFrancisco — who also has performed with ComedySportz, iO, and Annoyance Theatres in Chicago, not to mention being named the funniest person in Chicago — is offering a workshop open to anyone 16 or older interested in the opportunity to learn Chicago-style improv here on the Vineyard.
A guest of Troubled Shores, the Island’s improv company, Ms. DeFrancisco also will work with IMP Camp kids enrolled in session four and the company’s professional troupes.
