The Ides of March are coming a month late to the Vineyard.

Friends, Romans, countrymen, and Vineyarders are invited to Shakespeare for the Masses’ staging of Julius Caesar at the Pit Stop this weekend.

Three teens, two girls and a boy, clad in jeans and nondescript navy blue sweatshirts stand on a stage and wait for a cue from the audience. “France!” shouts a woman from a few rows back. The performers leap into action, willing to personify whatever they think means All Things French. “Oui!” shouts the boy. One of the girls contributes, “Escargots, but of course!” and the other girl spreads wide her arms, “But, of course, we go to the park-e’!”

Little money, a backstage dressing room the size of an office desk — it’s all part of the charm of working in community theatre. But when the audiences, about half of whom you know personally, laugh or gasp or sit in mesmerized silence it’s all worth it.

Like a set change between acts, the Vineyard Playhouse has been in a feverish state of transformation this winter. Now, with construction ahead of schedule on the new $2 million expansion and renovation of the Vineyard Haven venue, the playhouse board of directors has voted to continue construction through the summer, while kicking its fund-raising effort into overdrive. As a result, there will be no performances this summer in the historic 1833 meeting house, but Vineyard Playhouse executive director MJ Bruder Munafo said it’s for the best.

Each year the Bravencore Theatre Troupe, made up of students from the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School, creates an original work for the Massachusetts Educational Theater Guild’s (METG) annual high school festival. Kate Murray, the theater arts teacher at the high school, views this as a badge of honor as not all of the other high schools create their own shows.

As playwright, theatre and film director George C. Wolfe tells it, the event which first motivated him toward the arts was the same one that led him to his latest ambitious project, presenting the history of the American civil rights movement.

That moment, which set him on his course toward the arts, the plaudits for his stage and screen work, the Tony awards, and now the new job as chief creative officer for the nascent National Center for Civil and Human Rights, came in 1964 when he was a boy of 10, in the small town of Franklin, Ky.