The IMP Free For All — when award-winning improv students open their doors to the community for free improv performances and workshops for all ages — begins on Friday, May 8, with two performances.
First the middle school troupe, IMP-act, takes the stage to perform short pieces from games and skits based on audience suggestions.
Then the IMPers, the teen professional improv troupe, take the stage to present their new piece — Animal Farm — created at the Chicago Improv Festival.
The Vineyard Playwrights’ Studio will hold its inaugural meeting at the West Tisbury Library on Wednesday, May 6, at 4:30 p.m.
The group is open to playwrights interested in an interactive workshop for evaluating plays of all lengths, themes and degrees of completion. Actors will provide readings, and a short, constructive discussion of the play’s strengths and shortcomings will follow.
Meetings will be at the library the first Wednesday of each month. The public is welcome to attend and participate.
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.
Casting Calls
An Island of Women, an original musical, has begun rehearsals ahead of a premiere in June. Two singing roles are open, for women between 16 and 30. The roles are Hannah Norton Vincent, a young wife whose husband is at sea whaling, and Grace Mayhew, who is working in a Fall River mill while she waits for her fiancé to return from sea. Both are important roles with singing.
For details, call 508-627-2529 or e-mail [email protected].
In his 1841 essay Circles, the transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson celebrated the moment when a visionary rises up amongst us. “By a flash of his eye,” wrote Emerson, the artist “burns up the veil which shrouded all things, and the meaning of the very furniture, of cup and saucer, of chair and clock and tester, is manifest.”
Poetry is coming back to Che’s Lounge in Vineyard Haven. The popular music venue has hosted several poetry events including Vineyard Slam, Hot Words, and the Warrior Writers (Iraq Veterans against the War). Linda Black and Michael West, organizers of the new Island Voices series, invite Island poets of all ages, styles, and levels of accomplishment to come and share their work in celebration of National Poetry Month.