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.

Fine Finish for Featherstone Festival

Featherstone’s Festival of Poetry’s very successful summer season is wrapping up with a reading by Naomi Shihab Nye, an award-winning Palestinian-American poet whose works have garnered multiple awards over the years. Fellow poet William Stafford said of Ms. Nye, “Her poems combine transcendent liveliness and sparkle along with warmth and human insight. She is a champion of the literature of encouragement and heart. Reading her work enhances life.”

Chris Fischer’s well-worn Ford pickup is a familiar sight on the winding roads up-Island. Its rusted bed is piled with vegetable peelings; turnip greens, muddied onion skins, brilliant green bean shells are scattered among gardening tools and a hodgepodge of things farm-related. It is an early Saturday morning and Mr. Fischer, a private chef and Island native, is driving between the farm stands, refrigerators and gardens of Chilmark in search of ingredients for lunch.