I think it’s fair to say that “My Fair Lady” is one of the great examples of the American musical’s golden era (that period from the mid-1950s through the ’60s). This 1956 work has just about everything — humor, romance, and some trenchant social satire, including a feminist motif that must have seemed daring for the ’50s. And it was composed by no less than the classic writing team of Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe.

The question for a 21st-century audience, however, is just how dated this 60-year-old material will seem. Is it possible that “My Fair Lady” (running now through Aug. 28 at Sag Harbor’s Bay Street Theater) still has resonance for a modern audience?  

The answer is mostly yes. This revival gets off to a rough start, though it is no fault of the performers: This is a highly enjoyable and wonderfully acted production. Instead, the fault lies in Mr. Lerner’s antiquated book. As the story opens, you might remember, a young woman named Eliza Doolittle is selling flowers on the streets of 1912 London when she spots a man copying her speech into a notebook. The man turns out to be Henry Higgins, a professor of phonetics who makes fun of her coarse use of language, thus launching the first of the show’s many memorable musical numbers, “Why Can’t the English Learn to Speak?”

It is a charming and clever song, and if Higgins’s rough treatment of Eliza ended here, it would all be in good fun. But when the professor tries to give Eliza speaking lessons to teach her how to be a “lady,” the insults increase in harshness — “Cabbage!” “Guttersnipe!” “Imbecile!” — until he is actually threatening her with physical violence; he’d like to smash her in the head with a broom, for example. Even as you remind yourself that you are watching a musical from 60 years ago, it’s hard not to be distracted by the ugliness of Higgins’s attacks. Sure, you recognize that the point is to portray the professor as a misogynist, but his cruelty is written at such a high pitch that it is jarring to a modern audience, or at least it was to me. At one point, Eliza flinches as he comes near her, stating that she expected him to hit her.

Most of this nastiness ends at about the 20-minute mark, at which point the production hits its stride and you can concentrate on the ensemble’s terrific performances. You know this narrative, of course, even if you’ve only seen “Pretty Woman.” It’s the mythical Pygmalion story of metamorphosis, and Kelli Barrett, who plays Eliza, is nothing short of smashing; her transformation from cockney flower girl to elegant English rose really couldn’t be much better.  Ms. Barrett is not only a terrific actress who handles humor and drama in equal measure, she is also a fabulous singer who nails every musical number, especially, “I Could Have Danced All Night.”

Paul Alexander Nolan has a tougher job as the pretentious, imperious Higgins, and it is a credit to him that he does not shy away from the professor’s meanspiritedness. In fact, as an actor he rather seems to relish it. By the end, Mr. Nolan dances and sings his way through his role with such a deft touch that you almost feel sorry for him when he sets about the musical’s closing number, “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face.” Did I say almost? 

And one would be remiss not to mention John O’Creagh’s performance as Eliza’s father, Alfred. Mr. O’Creagh inhabits this drunken dustbin worker with an infectious cheer, and though his singing doesn’t measure up to the two leads, there’s no one in the cast who looks like he’s having more fun. Mr. O’Creagh nearly steals the show with his rousing rendition of “Get Me to the Church On Time.”

It’s not easy to get this broad-canvased musical to work on a small stage, but the director, Michael Arden, the choreographer, Chase Brock, and the set designer, Dane Laffey, find ways to utilize Mr. Laffey’s two-level, modern-looking set in ways that never seem claustrophobic.

In the end, of course, Higgins gets his comeuppance and Eliza finds her voice as a woman. But this is really a musical about the transparency of social class. Eliza’s transformation proves that “breeding” and “class” are utter myths and bear no relation to birthright or DNA. It’s about environment and simple cosmetics. Anybody can do it.

What most of us cannot do, though, is perform onstage with the joy and precision currently on display at the Bay Street Theater.

Studio or plein-air, Tile Club member or Abstract Expressionist, painters have praised the South Fork’s light across many disciplines and movements. All of them agree it casts a certain spell, and few places can match the body of remarkable artistic evidence we have to back it up. 

The quality of light might be different here because its influence goes beyond visual arts. John Hall Wheelock, the late editor and poet who spent much of his time in East Hampton, proves it abundantly with his poem “Bonac”:

This is enchanted country, lies under a spell

Bird-haunted, ocean-haunted — land of youth, 

Land of first love, land of death also, perhaps, 

And desired return. Sea-tang and honeysuckle

Perfume the air, where the old house looks out

Across mild lowlands, meadows of scrub and pine, 

A shell echoing the sea’s monotone, 

That haunts these shores.

Wheelock could have been writing about the work of William Merritt Chase. The old house looking out across mild lowlands might easily be the Stanford White-designed house where Chase lived when he painted and taught in Southampton’s Shinnecock Hills from 1891 to 1902. 

“Bonac” is a literary evocation of some of Chase’s best work from Shinnecock, a selection of which is on view in a retrospective at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., through Sept. 11. This superbly realized and overdue recognition of Chase, the first since 1983, was four years in the making. It includes just over 70 oils and pastels with a richly curated selection of ephemera. 

The exhibition includes a room called “The View From Shinnecock Hills: Chase’s Mature Years,” which is an essential reference for anyone interested in South Fork art or nature. Even the most jaded habitués should prepare for fresh reverie and notes of sea-tang and honeysuckle in the air near Dupont Circle.

Under Chase’s spell the light is more than illumination. It’s a form of exultation that dares you to look away. For Chase, who died in 1916, light didn’t merely reflect or refract or fall from the sky. It projected upward from ocean, bay, harbor, pond, or kettlehole. He took the elements and applied them to canvas with an effect that one critic aptly called “atmospheric.” 

In the Shinnecock room Chase’s work asks: How much is a place remarkable in and of itself, or how much does it become that way through its portrayal? A case for the latter is incontestably won with “The Big Bayberry Bush” (1895), recently restored by and on loan from the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill. Among the most recognizable works in the show, it represents nearly as perfect an ideal as we have of an East End landscape then or now.

The Parrish has one of the largest Chase collections in the world, including 40 oils and works on paper and archives. The three works it contributed to this retrospective support Chase as a truly “modern” master, equally at home at the Parrish’s new Herzog and de Meuron building as he was at its previous space on Job’s Lane in Southampton. 

The retrospective is notable for revealing how beautifully Chase renders the East End, among other subjects, in pastel. He was remarkably gifted in the medium and helped revive it, co-founding the Society of American Painters in Pastel. A superb example, among 12 pastels in the show, is the large-scale “Untitled (Shinnecock Landscape)” from a private collection, which anchors the room. His pastel technique is enhanced by a neat trick of roughing up the paper first with a cuttlefish. 

Oil or pastel, there’s something resolutely September about Chase’s best work. You sense him waiting until late season for the clearest light before painting his wife and children in Shinnecock Hills, for example. His light and color are most atmospheric then, evocative of place. It’s as though if you stood in front of his pictures long enough, daylight would gradually become evening. Under his spell you might see his family leaving the canvas to go home, a daughter later dozing off on a screen porch to the reedy undulation of crickets. 

Goethe said, “Color is the pain of light.” On the South Fork it seems Chase found a subtler interpretation, closer to Wheelock’s melancholy bird-haunted place, or Victor Hugo’s observation that, “Melancholy is the happiness of being sad.” 

As Chase taught at Shinnecock, Shinnecock seems to have taught him about light and its relationship to the land. A Chase horizon doesn’t simply define land and sky; it makes the difference gradually disappear, as though nature had briefly lost its train of thought. It’s the screen printer’s equivalent of continuous tone, and Chase uses it to beguiling effect in “Idle Hours” (1894) and “Seaside Flowers” (1897). 

Chase founded the Shinnecock Hills Summer School of Art in 1891 after establishing his reputation at the Art Students League in New York. He later taught widely for over 35 years. An exhibition bonus is a section devoted to the work of Chase students who happen to be in the Phillips Collection — whose prescient founder, Duncan Phillips, added the first Chase work to his collection in 1932. It’s a winning compliment to the master and underscores the superb work he inspired. 

The retrospective also brings to mind too many East End painters recently lost, witnesses to landscape and light in their own right, Priscilla Bowden Potter, Ralph Carpentier, Robert Dash, Sheridan Lord, Jane Freilicher, and Jane Wilson among them.

While his East End work was pointedly of a place, Chase didn’t want art restricted by geography. Dorothy Kosinski, the Phillips director, quotes him saying, “Art has become international‚ the best of art today belongs to all countries combined and localization has been entirely done away with.” 

It is fitting, then, that if you miss the show in Washington it will go next to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (Oct. 9 to Jan. 16) before traveling to Venice’s International Gallery of Modern Art in February 2017. Largely unknown outside the U.S., Chase will finally have his first retrospective abroad.

Viewed as a whole — there are superb landscapes from Europe, towering portraits, interiors of his legendary Tenth Street studio in New York — the retrospective shows that Chase’s creativity was limited only by the time available to him. He was a man of the world, a proud generalist who seemed capable of busting out of realism. Much was made of his not being invited to the 1913 Armory Show in New York. It was one of the very first to introduce what we now know as Modern Art to America. Chase was said to be deeply slighted at his omission, but might there have been a teacher’s irony and some respect in his reported criticism of the new works?

In one of the show’s (and the artist’s) final pictures, “Self-portrait in 4th Avenue Studio” (1915-16), his stern realist’s gaze and the abstract brushwork on a just-begun canvas almost says, “You want Modern? I’ll give you Modern.” It seems as much a challenge to the viewer as to the artist, whom this retrospective establishes as a master regardless of genre.

Eric Kuhn was born in Southampton and reared in Amagansett. He is a former reporter and news editor for The Star. 

Artists Chosen By Artists

The Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill has announced the 14 artists chosen by seven jurors to participate in “Artists Choose Artists,” the museum’s biennial exhibition focused on artists of the East End, which will open Oct. 30.

Dinah Maxwell Smith and RJT Haynes were selected by Tina Barney; Garrett Chingery and Saskia Friedrich by Lynda Benglis; Jackie Black and Marianne Weill by Tony Oursler; Suzanne Anker and Ben Butler by Donald Lipski; Anne Bae and Monica Banks by Jorge Pardo; Bill Komoski and Toni Ross by Cindy Sherman, and Karin Waisman and Almond Zigmund by Leo Villareal.

The museum will hold a screening of “Eva Hesse,” a new documentary about the influential sculptor who helped establish Postminimalism before her death in 1970 at the age of 34, tomorrow at 6 p.m. Helen Hesse Charach, the artist’s sister, with whom she escaped from Nazi Germany at the age of 4, will introduce the film. Tickets are $10, free for members and students.

“Shapes” at Halsey Mckay

The Halsey Mckay Gallery in East Hampton will open two exhibitions on Saturday with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m.

Ellie Rines, who runs a gallery at 56 Henry Street on the Lower East Side, where Halsey Mckay also has a viewing room, has put together “Shapes,” with work by Graham Collins, Rand Hardy, Mary Heilmann, Sadie Laska, Matt Rich, Keith Sonnier, and Blair Thurman.

A solo show of paintings by Patrick Brennan will also be on view. Mr. Brennan layers paint alongside studio and miscellaneous detritus, including discarded fabrics, cardboard, and Popsicle sticks. His forms lack any representational content and emerge through his mark-marking process.

The shows will continue through Aug. 29.

Four Painters at Harper’s Books

Harper’s Books in East Hampton is unveiling a group show that will be on view through Sept. 25, with an opening reception on Saturday evening from 6 to 8.

Participating painters are Katherine Bradford, Sarah Braman, Al Freeman, and Adrianne Rubenstein, each of whom has a distinctive style. Ms. Bradford often situates half-finished figures in strange, fantastic landscapes, while Ms. Braman makes abstract geometric sculptures and paintings on pieced-together plywood panels.

Mr. Freeman staples scraps of cardboard painted with numbers, letters, and images onto canvas panels. Bold colors and extreme painterly expressionism turn Ms. Rubenstein’s figurative elements into near abstraction.

Eugene Brodsky at Studio 11

A solo show of collages and accordion books by Eugene Brodsky will be on view from tomorrow through Sept. 15 at Studio 11 in the Red Horse Plaza in East Hampton. A reception will be held Saturday from 5 to 7 p.m.

Mr. Brodsky often combines compositions of disparate elements with a taste for unusual materials and complex processes. His collages, executed in ink on silk and burnished paper, layer mostly abstract and roughly rectilinear elements with an occasional geometric shape or scrap of figuration. The edges are rough, as if torn, and the ink is applied in lines, blotches, and drips.

Four Photographers in Montauk

An exhibition of work by four photographers opens today at the Depot Gallery in Montauk and continues through Aug. 22. A reception will take place on Saturday from 5 to 7 p.m.

Gerry Giliberti synthesizes graphics, photography, sculpture, and digital imagery to create abstract, surrealistic images. Michele Dragonetti’s recent work has focused primarily on boat hulls, initially found at the marinas of Montauk.

Rosemary Hawkins’s contribution to the exhibition includes works in color infrared and medium-format pinhole photography. While much of Marilyn Stevenson’s work is abstract, she is also showing photographs of the ever-changing nature of water and sky at Mecox Bay.

Paintings and Video at Marcelle

“Savage Nature,” a show of work by John Zieman and Melinda Hackett, will open at the Peter Marcelle Project in Southampton on Saturday with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m. It will remain on view through Aug. 21.

Mr. Zieman has been directing and editing film and video for many years. In addition to documentaries, feature films, and cultural programming, he has continuously created his own personal video art and worked on high-profile projects with other video artists.

Ms. Hackett’s paintings and drawings refer, in her words, “to organic space and unfixed time.” While her forms suggest the natural world, they are poetic inventions the aim of which is to take the viewer to an unfamiliar place.

Group Show at White Room

“Sweet Imbalance,” featuring work by Laura Benjamin, Lauren Loscialo, and Robert Perez, is on view through Aug. 28 at the White Room Gallery in Bridgehampton. A reception with live music will be held Saturday from 4 to 9 p.m.

Ms. Benjamin creates collaged images of celebrities and pop-culture objects using candy wrappers. Ms. Loscialo’s recent photographs on canvas capture the play of architecture and organic structure in the world. The mixed-media works on canvas in Mr. Perez’s “Split Pop” series consist of flowers and other natural objects split between realistic and expressionistic rendering.

A group show of work by 11 artists will also be on view.

Haitian Art Sale in Sag

Christ Episcopal Church in Sag Harbor, in partnership with the Vassar Haiti Project, will hold its fifth Haitian art and handcraft sale to benefit the remote village of Chermaitre tomorrow from 5 to 8 p.m., Saturday from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., and Sunday from 9 to 2.

The sale will include 200 original paintings as well as a wide assortment of unique and affordable gifts, including silk scarves, jewelry, and iron sculpture. Handcrafts are priced from $5 and up, and paintings from $50. All sales are 50 percent tax deductible.

“Photo-Technic II”

The Alex Ferrone Gallery in Cutchogue will present “Photo-Technic II,” an exhibition of work created from alternative photographic techniques, from Saturday through Sept. 25, with a reception set for Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m.

Dan Welden will show works created using Solarplate Etching, a process he developed. Gerry Giliberti will exhibit gelatin silver chloride contact prints, while Lois Youmans will show transfer prints on plaster.

Montauk Benefit Exhibition

Camp Soulgrow Studio and Artshape Mammoth in Montauk will present “Wayfarers,” a group exhibition of work by eight artists, on Saturday and Sunday from noon to 8 p.m., with a reception to be held Saturday from 6 to 8, followed by an after party at the Montauket. A portion of sales will support Camp Soulgrow, a creative workshop camp for kids, and Artshape Mammoth, an organization that supports the development of artists.

Comedy, R&B, hospitality, presidential politics, New Orleans party music, and Sith Lords will all touch down at Guild Hall in East Hampton this week, starting tomorrow at 9 p.m. when Jay Pharoah will perform his first comedy show on an East End stage.

A stand-up comic, actor, impressionist, rapper, and voice actor, Mr. Pharoah joined the cast of “Saturday Night Live” in 2010 and since then has perfected impressions of Barack Obama, Jay Z, Denzel Washington, Kanye West, and many other notables. His comedy special “Can I Be Me?” is available for streaming on Showtime, and he has appeared in several motion pictures, including Chris Rock’s “Top Five.” Tickets cost $45 to $100, or $43 to $95 for museum members.

Sunday’s guest for “Stirring the Pot: Conversations With Culinary Celebrities” will be Danny Meyer, the restaurateur who founded Shake Shack and whose Union Square Hospitality Group includes the Union Square Cafe, Gramercy Tavern, Blue Smoke, the Modern, and North End Grill, to name a few. Florence Fabricant, a food writer for The New York Times and the author of a dozen cookbooks, will interview Mr. Meyer about his remarkable career in hospitality and his active involvement in the fight against hunger. Tickets cost $15, $13 for members; $50 includes a reception with the speaker before the talk.

“Echoes of Etta,” a tribute to Etta James, a singer versatile enough to be in both the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Blues Hall of Fame, will take place on Sunday at 8 p.m. William Blake, a soul singer with a three-octave range, will channel Ms. James with a trio of backup singers and an all-star band under the direction of Michael Thomas Murray. Among the classics and covers from Ms. James’s repertory are “At Last,” “Tell Mama,” “You Can Leave Your Hat On,” and “Something’s Got a Hold on Me.” Tickets are priced from $40 to $75, $38 to $70 for members.

The Hamptons Institute will present “Presidential Politics,” a panel discussion of experts capable of shedding light on the quadrennial extravaganza, on Monday evening at 7.

Ken Auletta, an author, journalist, and media critic for The New Yorker, will moderate. The panelists are Howard Dean, a former governor of Vermont who spent summers in East Hampton as a youth and was a Democratic presidential candidate in 2004; John Podhoretz, a writer, editor of Commentary magazine, and former presidential speechwriter, and Katrina vanden Heuvel, a writer and publisher of The Nation. Audience members can watch rhetorical sparks fly for $25, $23 for members, and $500 adds a 6 to 7 p.m. reception beforehand and a dinner afterward with the speakers at a private home.

Live Stormtroopers and Sith Lords from the 501st Legion of the Empire City Garrison will be on hand for a screening of “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” on Wednesday at 8 p.m. Admission is $12, $10 if you’re a member.

If “Star Wars” fails to ease your anxiety about presidential politics, surely the music of the HooDoo Loungers and Mamalee Rose and Friends will cure what ails you, if only for one night, next Thursday night at 8. The Loungers are a nine-piece band that travels with the rhythms, sounds, history, and spirit of New Orleans, including jazz, brass band, classic R&B, and funk. Mamalee Rose and Friends is a six-piece band with two singers, Lee Lawler and her daughter, A. Rose Lawler. Their music ranges from gospel to R&B, from rock to blues.

Lilly-Anne Merat, a homegrown talent who now divides her time between Asheville, N.C., and New York City, will bring her own take on soul at the party. Tickets cost $27 to $40, $25 to $38 for members.

Guild Hall’s summer benefit will begin tomorrow at 5 p.m. with a private preview of the exhibition “Aspects of Minimalism,” followed at 7 by cocktails at the Mulford Farm on James Lane. Dinner, dancing, and a live auction, also at the farm, will begin at 8. Tickets, which start at $100 for cocktails only for young patrons and rise from there, can be purchased at guildhall.org.

The print version of this article referred incorrectly to the Hamptons Institute as a collaboration between the Roosevelt Institute and Guild Hall. The Hamptons Institute has no connection to the Roosevelt Institute.

For anyone stuck outside of Montauk with the August blues again, next week’s Music for Montauk schedule of concerts should be a soothing balm. The series, which runs from Tuesday to Aug. 22, will have world-class musicians performing creative musical programs in unconventional locations.

The series kicks off on Tuesday with a Cuban-style dance band, Funky Guajiro, at Solé East at 8 p.m. The quartet features vocals, bass, percussion, and tres guitars. Tickets cost $20 at the door. 

On Wednesday, Inspired by Shakespeare, with harp, strings, and vocals, will play at 5:30 p.m. at Fort Pond House at 128 Second House Road. Admission is free. 

Next Thursday brings the Four Elements Summer Benefit Party at a private residence, where the music, food prepared by a private chef, and wine served by a sommelier will evoke the four elements. Tickets cost $150 and are limited to 50. 

On Aug. 20, a rodeo concert will be given under a tent on the grounds of Montauk County Park at Third House. A chamber orchestra will perform a program featuring “Appalachian Spring” and “Rodeo” by Aaron Copland beginning at 6:30 p.m. Admission is free for the family-friendly concert. On Aug. 22 at the same site and time, Frederick Zlotkin will play cello as a guest performer in a Schubert String Quintet concert. 

Guests have been invited to supply their own drinks and picnics for these outdoor events. Tickets can be purchased at musicformontauk.org. J.B.

Miss Rosie, an Americana-folk group from Oberlin, Ohio, will bring both old-time tunes and original songs to the lawn of the Southampton Arts Center for a free concert Saturday at 7 p.m. 

The band, which consists of Sam Bailey, banjo/vocals, Meghan Mette, fiddle, Noah Singer, guitar, Will Bahr, drums, and James Vitz-Wong, upright bass, combines a variety of influences to create a unique musical palette within the folk tradition.

The center’s weekly Jazz on the Steps series will present two seasoned jazz musicians, Mark Marino on guitar and Peter Weiss on bass, on Sunday at noon, on the front steps of the building. Mr. Marino, who lives in Massapequa and teaches guitar studies at Long Island University’s C.W. Post campus, has been playing jazz professionally for almost 40 years. Mr. Weiss, who lives in East Hampton, established himself on the New York jazz scene. With his wife, Jane Hastay, he hosts the Art of Song’s Parlor Jazz Series at the Bridgehampton Historical Museum.

In conjunction with its exhibition “Winning the White House: From Press Prints to Selfies,” the center will screen “Electoral Dysfunction,” a documentary about voting in America, next Thursday at 7 p.m. in the concert hall. A discussion with the filmmakers will follow. Tickets, which can be purchased on the center’s website, are $12.

Jamie Patricof was disappointed he could not be in East Hampton for the opening of the film “Captain Fantastic” last Friday. Not because he hadn’t seen it; with Lynette Howell Taylor, he co-produced the film and had in fact seen it countless times.  However, having spent summers and weekends here for much of his life, he fondly remembers the theater before it was a multiplex.

“It was where I had my most memorable experiences of going to the movies,” he said during a recent telephone call from Los Angeles. “I saw ‘Star Wars’ there. We’d sometimes sneak in through the back door, but that’s another story.”

Since its release on July 8, “Captain Fantastic” has received almost unanimously favorable reviews. Joe Morgenstern, The Wall Street Journal’s film critic, called it “a tremendously accomplished and enjoyable film about a singular household.” 

The New York Times critic Manohla Dargis said of the film’s director, Matt Ross, his “insistence on taking your intelligence for granted is itself a great turn-on. His characters don’t need smartphones to do their thinking for them; he assumes the same holds true of his audience.”

When the film opens, Ben Cash and his six children are living in a large tepee-like structure deep in the woods of the Pacific Northwest, where he runs what seems at first a survivalist boot camp. When Ben learns his wife has committed suicide after several months of institutionalization for bipolar disorder, he loads the children into an old bus-cum-R.V. for a trip to New Mexico for the funeral, despite his father-in-law’s warning that he will be arrested if he tries to attend.

What follows is a suspenseful battle between Ben’s commitment to raising his children according to his values — home schooling, survivalist training, living off the land, and radical political ideas — and his wealthy father-in-law’s (Frank Langella) conviction that the family’s lifestyle is responsible for his daughter’s death. Lest that conflict sound sche­matic, however, the characters are so fully realized on the page and represented with such nuance by the actors that the audience’s sympathies are constantly shifting between them before ultimately settling on their fundamental, if flawed, humanity.

“Captain Fantastic” is the second film written and directed by Mr. Ross, who is also an accomplished actor, perhaps most familiar as Gavin Belson from the HBO series “Silicon Valley.” He won the best director award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival in the Un Certain Regard category for “Captain Fantastic.” 

During a recent conversation with Mr. Ross, the director ex plained that the primary impulse behind the writing of the film was parenthood. “It’s very much for me about being a father. My daughter is 13, my son is 9, and I was writing it a couple of years ago at a point in my life when I realized how quickly it was going.”

“When you’re a parent, you think a great deal about what you’re passing on to your kids, and I was really becoming kind of obsessed with what it was my wife and I were teaching them. In a way, the film presents an extreme choice of conscious parenting by positing a father who decides to devote his every waking moment to raising his children.”

When Ms. Taylor first read the script, she knew it was exceptional. “You read so many screenplays, and it’s rare to find one so unusual, needing so little development. Jamie and I both knew immediately it was a project we wanted to be involved with.”

Mr. Patricof added that for him, as a father of two, “it brought up all those issues of how you raise your kids.” He recalled that as a child he loved outdoor activities, one of his favorites being camping with his father in Cedar Point Park. “I sort of got away from that, but now I’m more interested in getting back outdoors, and I think it has something to do with the film.”

Mr. Ross said he didn’t have a specific actor in mind for the role of Ben, because “you don’t know who you’re going to have access to and who’s going to be available even if you do have access to them. But when it came time to cast, Viggo was my first choice, and we were very fortunate that he wanted to do the movie.”

“When Frank Langella agreed to do the role, he spoke a great deal about how it was important to him not to be a one-dimensional villain. I said to him, ‘Your character is antagonistic toward Viggo’s character, but you are not the antagonist.’ I think if you have a protagonist who behaves like an antagonist and an antagonist who behaves like a protagonist, that’s much more like real life. Not only is it more real, it’s better storytelling.”

Mr. Patricof’s parents have long had a house on Huntting Lane in East Hampton Village. His brother, Jonathan, is a trustee of Guild Hall, and Jamie Patricof is on the board of the Kendall Madison Foundation. “I spent so much time there growing up, and I still have close friends there,” he said. “It will always be a special place for me.”

Laurie Anderson, the musician and visual and performance artist, will make a whirlwind tour of East Hampton next week. On Wednesday at 6 p.m., she will speak at the Art Barge on Napeague in the final installment of its 2016 “Artists Speak” series. Andrea Grover, curator of special projects at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill and incoming executive director of Guild Hall in East Hampton, will moderate the discussion. 

The following evening at 8, “Heart of a Dog,” Ms. Anderson’s deeply personal and moving film released last year, will be screened at Guild Hall. And on Aug. 13 at 5:30 p.m., she will perform a concert for dogs and their people at LongHouse Reserve in East Hampton, the proceeds of which will be shared with the Animal Rescue Fund of the Hamptons. 

“Heart of a Dog,” which was shown in January at the Parrish, explores love, loss, and death from a Buddhist perspective, focusing on Lolabelle, Ms. Anderson’s rat terrier, who died in 2011. The 75-minute film, a collage of media spanning the artist’s childhood through recent years, includes both aging celluloid depicting her early life in the Midwest and more recent iPhone, drone, and GoPro video, as well as her own animation.

With the 2013 death of her husband, the musician Lou Reed, as an unspoken yet present backdrop, Ms. Anderson weaves disparate events into a meditation on impermanence. She connects the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in New York City and the subsequent rise of surveillance and data-mining by the National Security Agency, to her exploration.

“The thing about being an artist and a Buddhist is they’re pretty much the same,” Ms. Anderson, who has a house in Springs, said. “There is just one thing: Pay attention, be aware. There are no rules, no one is in charge. It’s fantastic.” 

“Heart of a Dog,” she said, “is, essentially, what are stories? I tried to look at it from a bunch of angles: Who’s narrating what story, and how you tell stories, and your own story. And what it means when the N.S.A. tells your story for you, how it gets stored forever, supposedly. I tried to pull threads together. I tried to make a film that wasn’t stuck on a theme, but ranges over ideas.”

Late in life, Lolabelle went blind, and Ms. Anderson arranged for music and painting lessons for her terrier. Upon Lolabelle’s death, in the middle of the film, Ms. Anderson explores the bardo, the transitional state of existence between death and rebirth in Tibetan Buddhism. 

Many viewers will recognize local settings, including Louse Point in Springs and Atlantic Avenue Beach in Amagansett. “It really is an East Hampton film,” Ms. Anderson said. “I tried to make it part of the film, especially the center part, the bardo section. Louse Point was and is one of my favorite places in the world. Atlantic Beach — that’s why we came out there. We love the trees and water, it’s so incredibly beautiful. It’s so magic that a place so beautiful could be so close to such a big city.” 

A friend introduced her to Buddhism in the 1970s. “He said he had been having trouble concentrating, and went to a Vipassana meditation, a 10-day silent course, and came out with his mind like a beam. All the chatter had stopped and he could focus. I thought, ‘I want a mind like a beam.’ I went, and the first thing they said was, ‘You’re in pain.’ ‘No, I’m not, I want a mind like a beam.’ Gradually, I realized that I actually had a very elaborate system, like most people, for holding pain. Every time something happens and you don’t scream, you put that somewhere . . . I was excited to find out how the body does that, and how the mind goes with it.”

Of the Art Barge event on Wednesday, Ms. Anderson said she enjoys the interaction. “I love public conversations, they’re really nice. It’s not just a lecture or a show, but people get to ask, ‘Why do you think that?’ ” 

She has performed concerts for dogs in Times Square and in Sydney, Australia. At LongHouse Reserve, she will perform with the cellist Rubin Kodheli. “Rubin is just a wonderful musician,” Ms. Anderson said. “The concert is really going to be fun. I have to say, it is really fun playing for dogs.” 

Tickets for Ms. Anderson’s appearance at the Art Barge cost $20 and can be purchased at theartbarge.org/programs-workshops-alt/events-winter. Tickets for “Heart of a Dog,” next Thursday at Guild Hall, cost $14, $12 for members, and are available at the box office, at guildhall.org, or by calling 631-324-4050 or 866-811-4111. For Ms. Anderson’s concert for dogs on Aug. 13, tickets cost $100, $150, and $250, for one person and one dog.

Last fall, Billy Strong and Dell Cullum would reveal few details of the unique project they were planning, raising almost as many questions as answers. Despite scant details, Mr. Strong, an environmental activist known as the Green Explorer, and Mr. Cullum, a photographer, wildlife-removal specialist, and tireless crusader against litter, seemed an ideal partnership. The East Hampton residents were equally passionate about the environment, and their plan was ambitious. 

Almost a year later, their labor has borne fruit. “Isabela: A Green Explorer Expedition” documents their winter trip to and around the largest island of the Galapagos, 563 miles west of Ecuador in the Pacific Ocean. There, Mr. Cullum filmed as Mr. Strong, who has traveled the world imparting the message that “Your environment is you, and how you treat that environment is how you treat yourself,” found and made art from the multiple trash and debris fields they found on the island’s eastern shore. 

In the process, the men communed with creatures large and small, from cormorants to orcas, from seals to sharks. They also encountered a few humans, one of whom proved more dangerous than the apex predators of the sea. 

“Isabela: A Green Explorer Expedition,” Mr. Cullum’s first full-length documentary, will be shown on Aug. 21 at 4 p.m. at the Mulford Farm Gallery in East Hampton, accompanying a show of Mr. Strong’s island-trash sculptures.

Mr. Strong had been to Isabela the previous year, meeting and explaining his idea to a local man named Sebastian. “He’s like the Dell Cullum of the Galapagos,” Mr. Strong said of the anti-litter activist. Sebastian led him to the last wooden fishing boat in the Galapagos, which was run down. “I said, ‘Let me put money toward this so we can restore the boat and get it ready for this journey.’ When I came back with Dell, the boat was ready.” 

Just after the New Year, the 14-day expedition to circumnavigate the island began. Immediately, Mr. Strong and Mr. Cullum, accompanied by the boat’s captain and two-man crew, were immersed in unforgiving but indescribable beauty. They dropped anchor and went to shore at several points.

“I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the landscape,” Mr. Strong said. “Finding these debris fields was a little depressing, but it’s what I love to do, I get kind of excited when I find a lot of stuff — that’s my material. Even though they were extremely rough conditions, I was in my zone.” 

Within hours of finding a field of trash, much of it brightly colored plastic discarded from ships, he had conceived and assembled large sculptures, most human or animal in form. They were mounted and left behind as a messenger of sorts, “so people can know there are debris fields and through their curiosity see what’s going on,” he said. 

The heat was stultifying, and dehydration an ever-present threat. The seas were often rough, and the old fishing boat broke down several times. “I’ve known Billy for a long time, and always respected him as a person and an artist,” Mr. Cullum said. “But because of this trip, I respect his art so much more, and really started to see that unique individual doing what I call ‘extreme art,’ in extreme locations, under extreme conditions, building art from debris. To go to these locations and do it under these conditions, that’s different. It was really, really difficult, mentally and physically, but for Billy it was a mission. You could see it.” 

Mr. Strong and Mr. Cullum would often jump off the boat and immerse themselves in the sea, the latter capturing its stunning beauty on film. They were not alone. The first orca sighting was quickly followed by two much larger orcas. “We had already seen sharks, and I was paranoid,” Mr. Cullum said. “They were telling me, ‘These are Galapagos sharks, there’s so much food in the water, there’s nothing to worry about.’ I was, like, ‘Famous last words.’ After those orcas showed up, I lost my fear of sharks. However, I was scared to death of orcas, which we saw the whole trip — we must have seen a dozen. There were times when everyone would jump in the water. Then I would do it. I would never have done it anywhere else, but I thought, if this is my time, what better place than Galapagos?” 

The men carried as much trash as they could from the island to the boat; its hold was quickly filled. “There’s so much trash in the oceans that every island is getting affected,” Mr. Strong says in the film. “The most pristine place in the world, and there’s trash all over it.” As he works, he makes reference to the town he and Mr. Cullum call home. “It’s the same way where we live,” he says. “We live in paradise too, and people trash it. They come out there and do whatever they want, trash it. No respect.” 

Mr. Strong has traveled far and wide, from Costa Rica to India, finding pollution everywhere and spreading the message of environmental consciousness and care to all he encounters, particularly children. “Everywhere I’ve been in the world, it’s the same thing,” he said. “Through education, I’m trying to show people we can change it, a little at a time.” 

Mr. Cullum also intends to spread the message worldwide, showing “Isabela: A Green Explorer Expedition” via LTV, in schools and libraries, and on YouTube. 

Minimal Art does not have the strong connection to the East End that landscape painting, Abstract Expressionism, or Pop do. And, with the exception of Dan Flavin, Minimalism does not characterize the production of artists who have lived and worked here since the mid-1970s. It might, therefore, come as a surprise that “Aspects of Minimalism: Selections From East End Collections” will open at Guild Hall in East Hampton on Saturday with a reception from 4 to 6 p.m. and continue through Oct. 10.

Minimal Art, which flourished in the 1960s, sought to eliminate personal expression from the work of art, which was to exist as a thing in itself, without reference to anything other than its materials and its presence. Industrial materials and mechanical fabrication often replaced the handmade, and symmetry, simplicity, and systems often determined the look of the work. Like Pop, which emerged more or less concurrently, it discarded the personal, heroic, and expressive qualities of Abstract Expressionism, which had so dominated the art world of the 1950s.

The Guild Hall exhibition is not strictly limited to canonical Minimalists but instead includes artists who have used materials or ideas that result in interesting relationships with those artists. The pre-eminent artists in the show who are closely associated with the movement are Larry Bell, Mr. Flavin, Robert Irwin, Donald Judd, and Agnes Martin. Artists whose work reflects or anticipates the influence of the minimalist aesthetic are Josef Albers, Blinky Palermo, Joseph Beuys, On Kawara, Gerhard Richter, Bridget Riley, Edward Ruscha, Andy Warhol, and Rachel Whiteread.

Christina Mossaides Strassfield, Guild Hall’s museum director and chief curator, conceived of the exhibition two and a half years ago. “I had visited one collector’s house,” she recalled, “and there were some amazing Minimalist pieces there. I thought, wow, we had done a Dan Flavin show a number of years ago, but we really hadn’t paid a lot of attention to Minimal Art, in part because our mission is to show artists who live or work on the East End, and not many of the Minimalists had. But here were three collectors who had wonderful Minimalist Art and art that reflects aspects of the Minimalist aesthetic.”

One example of a relationship between artists cited by Ms. Strassfield is that between Bridget Riley and Agnes Martin. Though Ms. Riley is associated with Op Art, which emphasized optical illusions, “the grid patterns and lines in her work look so wonderful when you compare them to Agnes Martin’s work.”

The English artist Rachel Whiteread casts the space inside and outside objects and buildings to yield negative impressions in materials such as rubber, resin, and concrete. Thus her “Untitled (Double Vision II),” a 2015 casting of a window, with its symmetry and rectangularity, resembles a Minimalist piece, but without the underlying aesthetic principles of that movement. 

“It’s just very exciting to see the relationships,” said Ms. Strassfield, “whether it’s the materials or the design or the aesthetic. This will be a very minimalist installation. The works need the space around them, and I think it will transform the way the building and the galleries work. I love mixing it up. Last year we had Pop, with Roy Lichtenstein, and we just had Peter Beard. The next show will be very different.”

Several public programs are planned in conjunction with the exhibition. On Saturday from 3 to 4 p.m., Leonard Riggio, the founder and executive chairman of Barnes & Noble, will discuss “Philanthropy, Collecting, and Minimalism.” James Meyer, the curator of the Dia Art Foundation Gallery, will talk about the work of Dan Flavin on Sunday afternoon at 3. Ms. Strassfield will lead a gallery tour on Sept. 17 at 2 p.m.