While Disney saturates the media with ads for its Tim Burton extravaganza Alice in Wonderland, young Island thespians are sending Alice tumbling through a television screen instead of a looking glass, in a play about the absurdity of media-saturated consumer culture, called Alice in Americaland.

The Island’s oldest players, the self-described vagabonds of Island Theatre Workshop, have found a home. After 41 years on an endless Vineyard shuffle, the troupe aims to set up shop in the cozy building on Music street in West Tisbury that housed the town’s library for 100 years.

In their pale pink tights and soundless slippers, teeny ballerinas scurry across the vast stage just a little too quickly in this rehearsal; when the lights come up tomorrow and Sunday, the troupe will be hidden underneath the huge, stilt-supported skirt of Mother Ginger in the annual Island production of The Nutcracker.

“Mother Ginger can’t move that fast,” gently chides artistic director Beth Vages, who is staging this holiday ballet for her 23rd time, her 12th on Martha’s Vineyard.

In the small town where he lived, there is no memorial to Matthew Shepard. The fence post where he, an openly gay man of 21, hung dying for some 18 hours, tied up after being pistol-whipped, has been torn down. The bar from which he was lured to his murder is gone.

The man in black, from his boots to bejewelled beret, was impeccably groomed on Tuesday as he stroked he neatly trimmed white beard and lamented how he’d been type-cast. He is usually the guy who gets beaten up — “the biker, the trucker, the redneck,” in his words. This experience in taking fake fisticuffs was what Broadway combat choreographer David Brimmer was passing on to an enthusiastic group of Vineyard students.

“Chickens! Are you ready?”

Upstairs at the Vineyard Playhouse on Tuesday, artistic director M.J. Bruder Munafo was calling two actors for their cue.