The playwright steals — lines, plots, anything that works. The playwright uses historical events, fashioning his own take on the characters within those happenings. He finds whole scenes come to him in his dreams. He writes fluidly in iambic pentameter. He doesn’t mind getting bawdy. The playwright is?

William Shakespeare, sure. But there is another correct answer: Robert Brustein.

A flinty sun was dropping brilliantly, taking the temperature with it as the countdown to show time began Friday evening in the outdoor horse ring at the agricultural fair ground —­ but it was the gleaming white Lippizan stallions that shone.

The storm fencing had been circling Ocean Park for days. No Parking signs had seemed to breed in the seaside streets of Oak Bluffs. By Sunday, cops and volunteers in yellow T-shirts also appeared to have multiplied, and then came the music-lovers (at least for the day), by the thousands, bearing folding chairs and friends from out of town, kids and coolers jammed with sandwiches, gourmet salads and chilled bottles of Sauvingnon blanc.

The toes of Daniel Libeskind's black elkskin cowboy boots curl up like those curved walls he so loves - spiralling curves that cross a void of history in the Jewish Museum he designed in Berlin, bathtub-like curves beckoning 75 feet down into bedrock in his master plan for the Ground Zero memorial, a curve inspired by a shard of earth to house exhibits in the Imperial War Museum in Manchester, England, where even the floor curves six feet down.

Patricia N. Nanon, the feisty choreographer who founded The Yard as an informal dance theatre project in 1972, next month will grant full ownership of her multimillion dollar property in the wooded hills of Chilmark to the singular Island arts colony.