The Outcasts of Penikese Island, playing Tuesday to Saturday at the Martha’s Vineyard Playhouse through August 26, tenderly restores to light a shadowed episode of institutional cruelty from more than a century ago. Scott Barrow, an actor with Broadway credentials who has often appeared at

“The Outcasts of Penikese Island” at the Martha’s Vineyard Playhouse through August 26, is about rejecting those who are different. In the play, the outcasts are those people in the early 20th century in Massachusetts with Hansen’s disease, then referred to as leprosy, and their

Three nights remain to enjoy laughter, music and Shakespearean shenanigans under the open sky at the Tisbury Amphitheatre, where Twelfth Night has been held over for an extra weekend. Island audiences — including families with small children — have flocked to the show since it

Last Friday I sat down with cartoonists Mick Stevens and Paul Karasik in the gallery space of the Martha’s Vineyard Playhouse, where some of Stevens’ cartoons are currently being exhibited. I had gone to the opening of his show, and wanted to see it again.

As though dipped in a fiery sunrise palette, each brushstroke forges a blaze of orange and amber, encircling a raven occupying the heart of the canvas. Aptly named “Big Daddy,” the bird sports an ebony plume and an austere gaze. In another canvas, “Bright and

While treading water in the open ocean off the coast of San Diego, playwright Mona Mansour and her nephew debated the morality of war. With a family of Lebanese Civil War survivors and her nephew nearing U.S. Army deployment, Ms. Mansour felt cognitive dissonance and