Sitting down for a lunch break at a windowside table at Waterside Market in Vineyard Haven, Ricardo Khan leaned in comfortably and said with a laugh, “You’ll have to do the talking, I’ve got to eat!” His eyes brim with good humor; this is a man at ease with himself and the world around him. Small personal tales spill easily into the conversation, unsurprising for a playwright and director who has dedicated his life to the art of gathering individual stories and weaving them into narratives that speak to an audience from the stage.
The 31st annual Arts and Society Bloomsday Celebration — of music and drama based on the text of James Joyce — will be performed Tuesday, June 16, at the Katharine Cornell Theatre in Vineyard Haven. Curtain time is 8 p.m.
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.
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.
Double Dose of Comedy
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.