It was more exciting than the circus coming to town. At long last (although in the normal course of Martha’s Vineyard rebuilding, records for speed were set), the Bunch of Grapes Bookstore on Main street in Vineyard Haven, destroyed last July 4 in a fire that started next door at Café Moxie, stood this past Saturday, June 13, at 9 in the morning with a purple ribbon stretched across windows and doors awaiting the celebratory snip of the scissors.

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.

People’s tones shift to reverential when the Vineyard Playhouse is introduced into the conversation, as was demonstrated at last week’s fundraiser at Friederike and Jeremy Biggs’s Manhattan penthouse (they also reside in Lambert’s Cove).

How many women live in New Jersey, perform at Mikhail Baryshnikov’s gala in New York city one week, then in the next travel to the Vineyard to lead school kids in movement and the art of the spoken word?

It’s Claire Porter — here under the auspices of The Yard and its artistic director, Wendy Taucher — who is ratcheting up excitement this week in all the Island schools.

By HOLLY NADLER

In the good old Globe days, William Shakespeare’s audience welcomed the many hours it took to plow through one of his plays. What else did they have to do? There were no movies, no television, even books were in short supply: the richest citizens had two or three volumes per household, and at least one of them was the Bible.