It was during the summer of 1969, the summer of Woodstock, when I first fell in love with the Vineyard – fishing for blues, clamming, growing our own vegetables. I was making documentaries and films for Sesame Street with Eli Noyes, my boyfriend in college, whose family [his father is the architect Eliot Noyes] has a home in Menemsha. We had done a documentary film about the Putney School, and we spent the summer, fall, and part of the winter editing it in Alex Preston’s parents’ pump house in Menemsha.

In 1973, I was invited by Shirley MacLaine to join the first delegation of American women invited to the People’s Republic of China, just after Nixon’s visit. Together Shirley and I made a documentary called The Other Half of the Sky: A China Memoir, about the trip. It was nominated for an Academy Award. My first feature film was Girlfriends [1978] starring Melanie Mayron, Eli Wallach, Chris Guest, and Bob Balaban. One of the first movies about a contemporary young woman, it gained a lot of attention and awards, and I was able to sell it to Warner Brothers. After that, I made It’s My Turn [1980] with Jill Clayburgh and Michael Douglas for Columbia Pictures. Back in New York in the 1980s, I started directing theater again, including Donald Margulies’ Found a Peanut at the Public Theater, as well as many other new American plays all over the country.

When I married Walter Teller in 1985, we spent our honeymoon on the Vineyard. I moved to Los Angeles with Walter, and we had two boys, Sam and Eli. In order to spend more time with them, I started doing TV, Cagney & Lacey, thirtysomething, My So-Called Life, and Once and Again, as well as cable movies like Face of a Stranger by Marsha Norman – Gena Rowlands won an Emmy for her performance in it.

My husband Walter’s family has been coming to the Island since the 1940s. My father-in-law, Walter Magnes Teller, wrote nonfiction, including books about the Island – An Island Summer and Consider Poor I, which is about Nancy Luce, the West Tisbury chicken lady. My mother-in-law, Jane Teller, was a talented sculptor. Every summer they drove up from Bucks County, Pennsylvania, with their four boys, first staying in a camp in Lobsterville, then in the “Paint Box” in Menemsha [described in An Island Summer]. Finally, they bought land overlooking Quitsa Pond in Chilmark.

I am very lucky to have married the Vineyard. Walter and I first met in Cambridge, just after I had graduated from Harvard. Then we connected at Sundance in 1984. I was advising directors, and Walter, an entertainment lawyer in Los Angeles, was doing the same with producers. Since 1985, Walter and I have been coming to the Vineyard every summer. We built a new house on the footprint of [his parents’] old one. I love the beach here. I go to Quitsa Pond. My husband sails, and we have kayaks. A highlight for me and my son Eli was taking drawing classes at the Field Gallery with the Maleys. I read, and I like to do nothing. We have so many friends here – both new and old – as well as family. We reconnect to our East Coast roots.

Our sons have grown up with the Vineyard as an important part of their lives. They both went to the Chilmark Community Center and worked summers for Primo and Mary at the Chilmark Store. Sam, our older son, has spent two summers writing for the Vineyard Gazette, and Eli taught at Camp Jabberwocky and has worked at several galleries on the Island.

Now I am doing more theater again, working mostly with new playwrights. And I have several new plays in development at theaters all over the country. I’ve also had positions as a guest faculty member at California Institute of the Arts, University of Southern California, Yale, Columbia, and Juilliard. Next spring I’ll teach playwrights and screenwriters at New York University. I met M.J. Bruder Munafo, artistic director of the Vineyard Playhouse, through James Lepine, who sent me Daniel Goldfarb’s Modern Orthodox [which Lepine directed in New York]. Producer and then-board-member Monina von Opel and M.J. suggested I direct a reading of the Goldfarb play for the Playhouse’s Monday Night Special series in 2003, and I have done a play or two at the Playhouse almost every summer since. What M.J. has been doing there is superhuman, producing – and often directing – several plays at the Playhouse. I don’t know that people appreciate what she does. She’s like a three-ring circus between the Playhouse; the Fabulists; the outdoor theater; the camp she runs where kids have the chance to explore theater, try it on, and be playful; and the Monday Night Special, which is a great lab for playwrights. I just think she’s a brilliant producer.

I really love the collaborative process, working with other directors and actors. I function as a catalyst, creating a safe environment for writers and actors to develop a play, and helping them move their work to a higher level. For me it’s great. I put all the actors up at our camp, as many as I can. We get a few days to focus on a piece of work – often a new draft – and then present the work in progress to an enthusiastic, diverse, and discriminating Vineyard audience. The Q and A afterward is really important, because it gives us a chance to get feedback. There are so many talented actors living on and visiting the Island, and you feel nurtured by the environment. It’s a great place to work, away from the pressures of the city. I look forward to doing a full
production at the Playhouse.

There’s something about an island that creates intimacy, as well as magical time or “time out of time” – the light, the flowers, the fish, the friends, pies, and tides. It becomes a part of you, and hopefully, you a part of it.

I don’t know what I would do without the Vineyard in my life, and I hope to spend more and more of my time here.