Full Productions – Past Shows
The Niceties
Live Online Reading and Streaming
Who gets to tell the story of race, history and power in America? In this riveting, provocative play, a black student and her white professor – both brilliant, both liberal – debate whether the legacy of slavery defines our past, and our present.
Live Online Reading - October 28, 2020 at 7 pm EST; Streaming - October 29-31, 2020
Crumbs from the Table of Joy
Martha’s Vineyard Playhouse and Rosalind Productions Inc. present a live online benefit play reading of CRUMBS FROM THE TABLE OF JOY by two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Lynn Nottage, to raise money for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.
Our Town
A new production of the classic story by Thornton Wilder, featuring a cast of professional and local performers. Our Town is supported in part by a grant from the Martha's Vineyard Cultural Council, a local agency that is supported by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a state agency.
View DetailsLow Down Dirty Blues
Welcome to Big Mama's Home of the Blues, where the party is just heating up! This sizzling revue finds a group of veteran blues musicians assembled for a late-night jam session, swapping stories and sharing their favorite tunes. Featuring nearly two-dozen smokin’ songs and non-stop riffs, these hot rhythms celebrate the bawdier side of the Blues and are guaranteed to keep the theater sultry and steamy from the first note to the last.
View DetailsVanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike
Winner of the 2013 Tony Award for Best Play. A wonderfully absurd comedy about three eccentric siblings. Vanya and Sonia are watching wild turkeys in the cherry orchard at their family home in Bucks County when Masha, their movie-star sister, comes to visit with her latest boy-toy. Add a psychic cleaning lady and a star-struck neighbor and anything goes. No familiarity with Chekhov is required! "Durang at his absurdist best - unhinged, hilarious, and heartwarming!" (Carol Rocamora)
View DetailsDear Elizabeth
Poets Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell shared a deep, thirty-year friendship. A love story told through their brilliant, witty, revealing correspondence.
View DetailsStag’s Leap
COME MEET PULITZER-PRIZE WINNING POET SHARON OLDS, who will be signing copies of Stag's Leap after both performances! An evening blending theatrical imagery and spirited language, based upon Stag's Leap. This show is presented with, and features members of, the Salt Lake Acting Company.
View DetailsDelusion by Proxy
A new play by Brooke Adams
A dark comedy about love and tyranny.
View DetailsThe Room Where I Was Held
World Premiere
Captivity comes in many forms. The world premiere of a gripping drama about the power of money, privilege, and family ties.
View DetailsChilmark
World Premiere
A compelling drama about a remarkable community, based on historical events.
Angela’s Mixtape
New England Premiere
Her mother is a lawyer and activist, her aunt is Angela Davis, but who is she? In this spirited autobiographical comedy, Eisa Davis pays affectionate tribute to her unorthodox upbringing in Berkeley, California.
Passionata
World Premiere
Sometimes finding true happiness requires a bit of scheming. The world premiere of a new farce with a fresh twist.
The Snow Queen
Martha's Vineyard Playhouse - Family Stage Production
A Magical Wintry Fairytale Adventure
Hans Christian Andersen's
THE SNOW QUEEN
As Told by MJ Bruder Munafo and Elizabeth Wojtusik
Friday 12/8 at 7 pm
Saturday 12/9 at 2 pm and 7 pm
Sunday 12/10 at 2 pm
Friday 12/15 at 7 pm
Saturday 12/16 at 2 pm and 7 pm
Sunday 12/17 at 2 pm
Advance ticket purchase recommended
Driving Miss Daisy
Pulitzer Prize-winning play
Set in mid-century Atlanta, Georgia, DRIVING MISS DAISY follows the 25-year relationship between a cantankerous Jewish gentlewoman and her dignified African-American driver. MV Playhouse honors the 30th anniversary of Uhry's beloved classic with a new production on the Patricia Neal Stage. More About the Play
Who You See Here
World Premiere
WHO YOU SEE HERE, a farcical comedy by Emmy Award winner Matt Hoverman about an uptight therapist and her recovering alcoholic husband who find their lives upturned and their love tested when charismatic but disturbed movie star Tom Speck staggers into their small town’s AA meeting. Add a beautiful psychiatric patient with a stalking problem and you’ve got a smart, funny play about anonymity, celebrity, and making the perfect salad.
Director Jeanie Hackett (LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT at the Geffen starring Alfred Molina and Jane Kaczmarek) helms a terrific ensemble cast of comedy pros - Angela Goethals (HOME ALONE, JERRY MAGUIRE), Mather Zickel (I LOVE YOU, MAN, RACHEL GETTING MARRIED), Russel Soder (I MARRIED A MOBSTER) and Kat Fairaway (GETTING MEISNERED) - in the world premiere of this comedy.
This play contains adult themes and is not recommended for under age 13. Includes profanity, adult content and partial nudity.
Dusty and the Big Bad World
Based on a 2005 scandal in the world of children’s television known as “Bustergate”, DUSTY AND THE BIG BAD WORLD is a darkly funny, no-holds-barred yet even-handed look at PBS, government censorship, gay marriage, and what it takes to ultimately step up and fight for what you believe in.
Audience Comments
The Second Girl
Set in the kitchen during Eugene O'Neill's classic LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT, Ronan Noone's new play gives us an intimate and often humorous look at the struggles of two Irish immigrant servant girls and the American chauffeur.
Read the MV Times review
Read the Vineyard Gazette review
Read the Cape Cod Times article
Red
Winner of six Tony awards in 2010, including Best Play
In this riveting drama, John Logan creates a searing portrait of master abstract expressionist Mark Rothko.
Crumbs from the Table of Joy
In this beautiful memory play by Pulitzer winning playwright Lynn Nottage (RUINED), Ernestine Crump takes you on a journey with the Crump family.
Audience Comments
High Time
This new play details a 12-hour acid trip with Leary, poet Allen Ginsberg, Englishman Alan Watts, Mary Meyer, JFK's last mistress, Rosemary Woodruff, a beautiful young dancer and Lisa Bieberman, Leary's devoted assistant.
View DetailsVisitors
A life-long love story set in rural England.
Sweetened Water
A Vineyard house is the setting for this play about Cynthia, a recent widow dealing with her sorrow and an uncertain future; and Richard, a priest who has just lost his mother. At the suggestion of their mutual friend, Sara, Richard moves into Cynthia's house for a quiet retreat. Themes of grief, faith, intimacy and secrets abound.
View Details77%
EAST COAST PREMIERE
Eric's wife is out of town closing a big business deal, he just blew his last job, the kids are acting up and his mother-in-law just moved in. What are the odds? A play about modern marriage.
A Walk in the Woods
Lee Blessing's Pulitzer-nominated drama is based on real life Cold War negotiations in 1982. This compelling play centers on a Soviet and an American negotiator who have left the table for an informal walk in the woods on the outskirts of Geneva; ultimately forming a bond of mutual respect and understanding.
View DetailsNot Constantinople
An elderly couple settles into the Witness Protection Program in a gated community in Boca Raton. The husband unwittingly befriends a hit man with a contract on him. But when the husband develops Alzheimer's, the hit man develops a conscience: why kill a guy who won't even know his own name soon?
Time to send another hit man - a woman with an MBA.
Yes, this is a dark comedy.
King Mackerel & The Blues Are Running: Songs & Stories of the Carolina Coast
King Mackerel & The Blues Are Running: Songs & Stories of the Carolina Coast has been performed by the Coastal Cohorts (Don Dixon, Bland Simpson, and Jim Wann) all across North Carolina and the South, as well as at the Kennedy Center in Washington and in New York City, where its Off-Off-Broadway run was hailed by the New York Post, saying “Carolina fish tale is quite a catch -- a pure, salt-watered delight!”
View DetailsSatchel Paige and the Kansas City Swing
It's 1947. Jackie Robinson has just integrated American baseball. In his shadow, Satchel Paige and his All Stars gear up to play Bob Feller's All Stars from the majors in a thrilling off-season match-up. Jazz fills the night, baseball the day. And America is about to experience something it's never faced before.
Search: Paul Clayton
A true tale of Love, Folk Music and Betrayal
This new musical play celebrates the true story in words and song of one of Bob Dylan's first musical mentors. Paul Clayton of New Bedford was the most recorded young folk singer in America when Bobby Zimmerman arrived in 1961 Greenwich Village to begin his career as Bob Dylan. It was Paul who helped open the doors of the folk world to him. From 1961 to 1965 Paul taught Bob the tricks of the trade, while falling helplessly in love with him.
Search: Paul Clayton is for mature audiences only. It is sexually explicit, contains adult language and drug use.
The Whaleship Essex
Based on a true story
The Essex and its crew met with tragedy on November 20, 1820 when it was sunk by an enraged sperm whale in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Based on first-hand accounts, “The Whaleship Essex” is an epic, ensemble tale of survival. Infused with authentic sea shanties, “The Whaleship Essex” revels in the common language shared by both the theatrical and the nautical worlds.
The Screenwriter’s Daughter
Hollywood's greatest screenwriter can create every storyline but his own daughter's.
It’s A Wonderful Life: The Radio Play
A heartwarming family holiday classic presented on stage as a live radio play.
Based on the movie by Frank Capra
Hot Tickets
Very Short Plays by (mostly) Female Writers
5 Mojo Secrets
Is there a secret to making marriage work after kids, careers and being together for what seems like forever? Maybe it takes a miracle – or maybe just a good old fashioned mojo.
Coming up for Air: An Auto JAZZography
Stan Strickland, one of Boston’s most versatile and well-known jazz musicians and a Vineyard favorite, will be bringing his one-man theatrical show Coming Up for Air – an AutoJAZZography to The Vineyard Playhouse, August 15-17, 2011. Playing sax, flute, keyboards and an assortment of percussion, Strickland riffs about his life and art -- taking the audience on a dramatic musical odyssey of soulful discovery.
View DetailsRoot
AFRICAN AMERICAN FESTIVAL OF THEATER & MUSIC
View DetailsTennessee Williams: Original Acts
The Vineyard Playhouse celebrates the one hundredth birthday of a beloved American playwright, with a premiere professional production of four of his one- act plays, TENNESSEE WILLIAMS: ORIGINAL ACTS, directed by Joann Green Breuer.
View Detailscoming2terms
Two life-long friends, from different cities and orientations, meet monthly to start a new life. Before anything biological can happen, they discover that there are deep personal and emotional challenges within a world that they begin to realize will always be filled with challenging variations of love and dependable chaos.
View DetailsTape
A riveting, caustically funny play about high school friends who meet up 10 years later and wrestle with questions of memory, motive and truth.
SantaLand Diaries
A disillusioned worker assumes the identity of Crumpet the Elf for a prominent metropolitan department store. He shares his colorful views on his holiday occupation in insightful and entertaining ways.
Adapted by Joe Mantello
Faith Healer
Blarney and mystery, twists of memory, and maybe magic, conjured by a trio of heroic hucksters.
FLY
A new play about the heroic Tuskegee Airmen of WWII
The Rise & Fall of Annie Hall
This super contemporary comedy is about a struggling playwright's life gone haywire as he schemes to get the rights to turn his favorite Woody Allen comedy into a Broadway Musical.
View DetailsRunaway Beauty Queen or The Lost Pleiad
An Original Goddess rock musical!
It’s A Wonderful Life
The Radio Play
Memory House
Walking the Volcano*
A short play progression by Jon Lipsky