Not to start on too bossy a note, but do go out and catch all five plays and musical productions of the African American Theatre Festival being performed, mostly, at the Vineyard Playhouse and running this week through early September.

The festival began this past Wednesday with Root, a one-woman play written and performed by Vanessa German and directed by Heather Arnet. The play travels from 1980s Los Angeles to the Civil Rights marches of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to drug-saturated Juarez, Mexico to a battered and drenched New Orleans.

By NICOLE GALLAND

For people who are scared (or uninterested) in the work of William Shakespeare, the Vineyard is a good place to get over it. The Vineyard Playhouse’s summer Shakespeare in the Amphitheatre is as playful and robust as anything on Nickelodeon, and in the off-season, Shakespeare for the Masses makes the Bard seem as accessible as an HBO series.

The Vineyard Playhouse raised $350,000 at its annual fundraiser on Sunday night, a huge boost for the capital campaign now under way to renovate the historic playhouse building on Church street in Vineyard Haven. The renovation project includes remodeling the stage, which will be named after the late actress Patricia Neal, it was announced at the event early Sunday evening.

Acting is an endurance sport. Don’t believe it? Go to the Grange Hall any Thursday, Friday or Saturday night for the rest of the summer and see one man’s theatrical version of the Ironman Triathlon.

First, let it be said that on the evening this critic attended the Vineyard Playhouse’s outdoor performance of The Comedy of Errors, Friday, July 22, when the weather was so warm it felt as if the entire Island was holding a Bikrum hot yoga class (for those unfamiliar with the workout, the purpose is to reproduce a boiling afternoon in Calcutta), the heat itself became a starring character.