Nick Tarr saves stuff, and he always has. “I need things,” he said. “I don’t paint things.” The boxes he made for 20 years and with which he is perhaps most closely identified are jam-packed with objects and images he has accumulated. So, too, are his more recent scanographs and a series of spatially ambiguous photographs that testify to his compulsive and wide-ranging collecting.

A visit to his East Hampton basement studio brought to mind the French word bricolage, which refers to a construction made using available materials. The anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss used the term to characterize patterns of mythological thought, which, unlike scientific thinking, attempt to reuse available materials to solve new problems.

One example is a jerry-built stage set in Mr. Tarr’s basement. Posters, photographs, record album covers, and other objects dangle in a circle from the ceiling, surrounding a blue glass sphere that sits on a table. His photographs capture both the distorted reflections of the objects on the surface of the sphere and the images visible through and behind it. The result is a visual collage that converts a random collection of objects into something dematerialized and difficult to decipher.

His scanographs utilize familiar technology to achieve surprising results. The photographs are taken with a scanner — “a very short depth-of-field, fixed-focus camera” — which is used to create an image of a collage of objects placed on it at the same time. Whether two or three-dimensional, the elements become flattened through the process. The works combine objects that have a clear and often personal meaning to Mr. Tarr with others he has collected without knowing why. “Anything is fair game. The universe is my palette.”

“I’ve been very involved with collage since I was a kid,” he said. “When color copiers first appeared, you had to go to a copy center, since the machine was so big. I’d convince the copy expert to let me work on my own. I’d open my bag of tricks and gewgaws and gimcracks and winking, blinking things and put them on the bed. Because the bar would pass three times, one for each color, you could move things around between each pass and get some interesting results.”

Similar objects populate his boxes, which are essentially dioramas into which you peer through a lens that creates the illusion of a deep three-dimensional space inside a cube less than a foot on each side. The literal three-dimensionality of objects in a small space is also something else, “a kind of virtual reality attained without using electronics. I’m not a high-tech guy.” The juxtapositions of objects and images in his work are often funny and invariably eccentric. 

Mr. Tarr’s work deals with interiority, reflection, distortion, transparency, solidity, and a kind of magic or sleight of hand. He comes by both his career as an artist and his interest in magic honestly. His parents were Bill Tarr, an acclaimed sculptor, and Yvonne Young Tarr, an award-winning playwright and the author of more than 20 cookbooks. 

“I took art classes, but as a child I grew up helping my father. We used to hang out in the studio and just play.” He recalls being at a Whitney Biennial in the early 1960s, “when I was in single digits,” and roughhousing with one of his father’s pieces on view there until a guard shooed him away.

Less known in the art world was that Bill Tarr was the prolific author of a number of best-selling books on magic, the most famous of which were “Now You See It, Now You Don’t! Lessons in Sleight of Hand” (1976) and its sequel, “The Second Now You See It.” He recalls prominent magicians of a younger generation thanking his father for getting them started on ca eers in magic.

Nick Tarr was born in New York City but raised in Scarsdale, N.Y., where the family moved when he was 5. At that time his father had a studio on Greene Street in SoHo, to which he commuted by motorcycle. The Tarrs moved to Springs in 1976 and lived there, on Fireplace Road, until they relocated to Sarasota, Fla., in 1997. For many years one of Bill Tarr’s steel sculptures, a 40-foot-tall, 63-ton memorial to Martin Luther King Jr., which had been installed at P.S.6 in New York City, resided on the property. He also created “Gates of Hell,” a monumental bronze casting for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. He died in 2006, three years after his wife.

A former garage in Nick Tarr’s East Hampton house is filled with his father’s artwork, including steel sculptures, paintings, watercolors, and 16mm films. He is actively involved in preserving, documenting, and digitizing his father’s work. “When my dad passed away, I made every effort to save his work, because to me not only are they beautiful things, they represent work by somebody I think was a very brave man as an artist. He was my role model.”

Pointing out one of the steel sculptures, which are rather like massive collages of smaller elements, he said, “I worked with my father and learned a lot from him. I went on to do stuff that was very, very different. His pieces are all external surfaces, in a way, and I went on to do these boxes that are all interior spaces. I guess that’s how I could follow in my folks’ footsteps and still do something that was different.”

Mr. Tarr is also the curator of this summer’s Springs Invitational Exhibition, which will be held at Ashawagh Hall in in August. This year’s exhibition will honor four longtime members of the East End’s creative community, “not for shallow fame and ostentatious philanthropy but for a lifetime of achievement as artists diligently working to push the edges of the creative envelope,” he said. Those artists are Margie Kerr, Athos Zacharias, A.C. Mim, and Alex Russo. Mr. Tarr also made an effort to bring in younger artists not previously included in the exhibition.

The Southampton Theatre Conference at Stony Brook Southampton’s graduate arts campus is offering an opportunity to take part in a two-day master class in acting with Alec Baldwin and Bethany Caputo on July 11 and 12.

The class will focus on technique and its application to monologue and scene work. On the first day, students will work with Ms. Caputo, a Michael Chekhov International Association master teacher, to explore the Chekhov technique, a psychophysical approach to acting, as well as some of the basic tools and principles from Chekhov’s work with character. On July 12, Mr. Baldwin will join Ms. Caputo in a scene and monologue intensive, integrating some of the tools explored in the first day’s session.

A video audition is required for acceptance to the workshop, which is limited to 16 participants. Applicants can submit a reel link or a two-minute contemporary audition, monologue, or two-person scene, either comedy or drama, via Vimeo. The tuition is $550, and more information and an application form can be found at stonybrook.edu/theatreconf.

Mr. Baldwin, who lives in Amagansett and New York City, has won two Emmy Awards, three golden Globes, and seven Screen Actors Guild Awards as Best Actor in a Comedy Series for his work in NBC’s “30 Rock.” An Oscar and Tony nominee, he has starred in “The Hunt for Red October,” “Glengarry Glen Ross,” “Beetlejuice,” “Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation,” and many other films.

Ms. Caputo, an actress and teacher in New York City, appeared with Mr. Baldwin and Laurie Metcalf in Arthur Miller’s “All My Sons” last summer at the John Drew Theater at Guild Hall. She studied at the Moscow Art Theatre, where she was introduced to the Chekhov technique, and is on the faculty of the Michael Chekhov Acting Studio in New York and the Stony Brook University graduate department.

For those interested in producing a show at LTV, East Hampton’s public access television station, a production orientation will be held at the studio in Wainscott on Monday from 7 to 9 p.m. The session is a prerequisite for all producing at LTV as well as future workshops in directing and camerawork. Registration is with [email protected] or by calling 631-537-2777.

The Hamptons International Film Festival will bring back its popular SummerDocs series for the eighth time this summer, beginning on July 9 with “Author: The JT Leroy Story,” which examines the unraveling of a decade-long literary hoax and the perpetrator behind it.

“JT LeRoy” was the creation of Laura Albert, who at the time of her unmasking had written a decade’s worth of articles and books under the name of what she called her “avatar.” For her, it was a performance, but she was successfully sued for fraud by signing legal papers in her male alter ego’s name.

The film chronicles both her life as a punk rocker and phone-sex operator as well as her adventures as LeRoy, through rock and fashion shows and onto the red carpet in Cannes. It captures her own creative odyssey through the fictional character who became her own voice, until a New York Magazine article exposed the truth.

A discussion of the film following the screening will include Jeff Feuerzeig, its director, and David Nugent, the artistic director of the film festival. Alec Baldwin will moderate. 

Mr. Nugent and Mr. Baldwin are responsible for choosing the films in the series, which will also include “Betting on Zero” on Aug. 6 and “A Perfect Candidate” on Aug. 27 .

Two Photographers at Ille

Ille Arts in Amagansett will present concurrent solo shows of photographs by Koichiro Kurita and Takeshi Shikama from Saturday through July 13, with a reception Saturday from 5 to 7 p.m.

Mr. Kurita turned to fine art photography after an encounter with Thoreau’s “Walden,” “moved by the absolute freedom of the spirit unconstrained by society’s rules and the ability to enjoy harmony with nature.”

Mr. Shikama, too, is drawn to nature, especially forests, as the subjects of his large-format camera. He has photographed both natural and urban landscapes in Japan, the Pacific Northwest, Europe, and Britain.

New at Studio 11

“From Memory,” an exhibition of paintings by Louise Crandell, will open at Studio 11 in Red Horse Plaza in East Hampton with a reception Saturday from 5 to 8 p.m. and remain on view through July 10.

Ms. Crandell, who lives in East Marion and New York City, will show ethereal paintings, mostly in shades of gray, created with oil and wax on linen. While some canvases are suggestive of landscapes, they are primarily abstract, often minimal, in some cases reminiscent of Mark Rothko’s work.

Eric Fischl at Art Barge

The Victor D’Amico Institute of Art on Napeague, better known as the Art Barge, will inaugurate its 2016 “Artists Speak” series on Wednesday at 6 p.m. when Eric Fischl, an internationally acclaimed painter who lives on North Haven, who will be interviewed by Ellen T. White, a journalist.

Future sessions will feature Donald Sultan in July and Laurie Anderson in August. Advance reservations are required, and tickets can be purchased for $20 at theartbarge.org.

Plein Air Weekend

The second incarnation of the Hamptons Plein Air Invitational, featuring work by 21 artists, will take place Saturday and Sunday at Ashawagh Hall in Springs, with a reception set for Saturday from 5 to 8 p.m.

In addition to showing their work, artists will gather to paint at Pussy’s Pond in Springs tomorrow from 3:30 to 5 p.m., around Ashawagh Hall on Saturday, and on the grounds of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center on Sunday.   

Studio Mates at Carriage House

Charles Ly and Scott Bluedorn, who share a studio in East Hampton, will also share space in the Jackson Carriage House in Amagansett today through Sunday. Mr. Ly creates drawings and paintings of repeating forms of nature that suggest textile patterns. Mr. Bluedorn will show photographs and small maquettes of whimsical fantasy architecture. The exhibition is presented in conjunction with Grain Surfboards.

New at Sara Nightingale

“Natural Forces,” a solo exhibition of works on paper and canvas by Steven Kinder, will be on view at the Sara Nightingale Gallery in Water Mill from Saturday through July 18, with a reception set for Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m.

Created between 2013 and this year, Mr. Kinder’s large-scale works explore his fascination with dynamic tension found in nature, including tidal pools, sunbursts, black holes, and combustion. The works in the exhibition include elements of both drawing and painting.

Group Show at RJD

“Parallel Universe,” a group exhibition featuring the work of Igor and Marina, Russian painters, will open at the RJD Gallery in Sag Harbor with a reception Saturday from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. and run through July 17.

Based in Chicago, Igor and Marina blend elements from Dutch and Italian Renaissance painting with more contemporary components, among them hints of the Russian avant-garde. Works by Salvatore Alessi, Margaret Bowland, Jennifer Gennari, Margo Selski, Phillip Thomas, Armando Valero, and Andrei Zadorine will also be on view. 

“At Sea” in Bridgehampton

“At Sea,” an exhibition of photographs by EJ Camp, Claudia Ward, and Michele Dragonetti and paintings by Jill Krutick, is on view at the White Room Gallery in Bridgehampton through June 26.

Both Ms. Camp and Ms. Ward focus their lenses on the waters of the East End, while Ms. Dragonetti creates dramatic, abstract portraits of the region’s painted boat hulls. Ms. Krutick’s colorful, abstract paintings interpret natural beauty in a manner consistent with the theme of summer and surf.

At Eric Firestone in N.Y.C.

“Santa Cruz,” a solo exhibition of painting and sculpture by Wendy White, will open Tuesday at the Eric Firestone Loft at 4 Great Jones Street in Manhattan. A reception will be held Tuesday from 6 to 8 p.m., and the show will continue through July 30.

Drawing on 1980s surf and skate culture, the work in the show arose from the artist’s childhood longing for the sun-splashed lifestyle represented by Santa Cruz, an iconic skateboard brand. Ms. White’s work explores the boundaries between painting, sculpture, and installation.

Art Hamptons Returns

Art Hamptons will return for its ninth iteration next Thursday, two weeks ahead of its competitors Market Art & Design and Art Southampton, and will continue through June 26. Although the fair is under new ownership, having been purchased last fall by Urban Expositions, its format and location, a private estate at 900 Lumber Lane in Bridgehampton, remain unchanged.

This year’s special programs include a private tour of LongHouse Reserve in East Hampton; panel discussions on contemporary Cuban art, collecting, and the history of the East End as an artists’ colony, and a book signing for “Punks, Poets, and Provocateurs,” a volume of New York photographs from the late 1970s and early 1980s by Marcia Resnick.

Participating South Fork galleries are Chase Edwards Contemporary, the Hooke Sculpture Gallery, Karyn Mannix Contemporary, Lawrence Fine Art, RJD Gallery, and Sara Nightingale Gallery. Tickets can be purchased and detailed information found at arthamptons.com.

Three at Kramoris

Work by three painters will open today at the Romany Kramoris Gallery in Sag Harbor and continue through July 7. A reception will happen Saturday afternoon from 4 to 5:30.

While Isabel Pavao’s recent paintings derive from nature, they transform their sources into compositions that reflect on the act of painting. Both Herbert August and Casey Chalem Anderson are also inspired by nature, but both artists, who live on the East End, steer away in their recent work from literal realism toward abstraction.

One-Night Stand

46 Green Street Studios, a gallery and studio space located in Hudson, N.Y., will come to East Hampton for a one-night stand on Saturday from 4 to 7 p.m. with a show of paintings by 11 gallery artists. The exhibition will take place in a private residence at 1 Cobblers Court.

Joel Grey, whose memoir, “Master of Ceremonies,” was published in February, will appear onstage at the Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor on Saturday afternoon at 5 — not as master of ceremonies at the Kit Kat Klub in 1931 Berlin but as himself, an Oscar and Tony Award-winning actor, singer, dancer, and, perhaps less publicly but with no less commitment, a photographer.

Mr. Grey, 84, will read selections from his memoir, which chronicles with unflinching honesty his life onstage and off, from his childhood through his long and illustrious career on stage, screen, and television. While he is invariably associated with “Cabaret,” both on Broadway and in film, his many theater roles include Amos Hart in “Chicago” and the Wizard of Oz in “Wicked.”

In addition to the reading, Scott Schwartz, the theater’s artistic director, will lead a conversation with the actor about his life and career. Tickets, priced at $20, are available online and at the Bay Street box office.

The Southampton Writers Conference at Stony Brook Southampton will offer a master class led by Roger Rosenblatt, a novelist and longtime essayist for the “PBS NewsHour” and Time magazine, from July 6 through July 16. To encourage broader participation by East End residents, the conference is offering a locals’ discount of $100 off the standard $975 fee for those who apply by June 20.

The class, designed for all levels of experience, will feature noted guest writers and will examine the art and craft of writing for every genre, including a multimedia array of music, film clips, and other works of art to deepen the discussion. Participants will have access to everything offered during the conference except for graduate, credit-bearing workshops. The class is open to everyone; no writing samples are required.

More information and applications can be found at stonybrook.edu/writers.

The Perlman Music Program will present “Classical Collaborations,” a concert of chamber music, at the Southampton Cultural Center tomorrow at 7 p.m. Young artist participants from the program will perform works by Beethoven, Brahms, and Elgar, and Patrick Romano will conduct the Perlman Music Program Chorus. A reception will follow the program. Tickets are $25, free for those 18 and under.

The Pat DeRosa Orchestra will present a free concert of jazz standards at the Montauk Library on Wednesday evening at 7:30. Mr. DeRosa, a saxophonist now in his mid-90s, has played with the Tommy Tucker Orchestra, John Coltrane, Lionel Hampton, Tex Beneke, Percy Faith, and Dick Hyman, as well as in films, important jazz venues in New York City, and at Richard Nixon’s inaugural ball.

The orchestra includes Patricia DeRosa Padden, his daughter, on piano and vocals; Nichole DeRosa Padden, his granddaughter, on flute and vocals, and Bob Beck on drums.

In Jonathan Tolins’s excellent new play, “The Forgotten Woman,” which is now having its world premiere at the Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor through June 19, an opera singer named Margaret seems to have it all. She is a rising diva set to star at the Civic Opera House in Chicago for an important series of concerts. She is a mother, a wife, and enjoys a prosperous living. She has a dedicated husband, Rudolph, who supports her career and serves as her voice coach. And her agent, Eric, is intently vying to sign her to a long-term contract.

When an old friend writing for a prominent Chicago newspaper comes to town to interview her, however, the facade of Margaret’s life slowly begins to unravel.

The writer, Steve, is a celebrity interviewer who describes his subjects (tellingly, as it turns out) as “black holes of neediness.” Steve, we soon learn, is a kind of seducer, a parasite-writer who disarms his subjects in order to suck whatever material he can to fuel his poison pen. Almost immediately we learn that Steve and Margaret went to the same high school and starred in the class play together, and he ends up using this relationship against her. This parasitic technique is also a kind of literary device, of course, allowing Mr. Tolins to deconstruct Margaret before our eyes. 

As the play opens, Rudolph and Eric pace anxiously in a midlevel Chicago hotel suite, awaiting the arrival of an interviewer from whom they are hoping to glean a winning profile (the hotel-room set, incidentally, is beautifully put together by Tim Mackabee, its creepy antiseptic quality serving to enhance the sterile veneer of Margaret’s life). When Steve shows up and he and Margaret identify each other as old friends, the glad-handing goes into overdrive. Margaret is their cash cow, and husband and agent can’t help but interrupt the interviewer every time the exchange moves away from the puff piece they desire. We see right away that this is a woman in a glass cage, but Margaret is so blowsy and honest that the audience can tell the glass will shatter long before it actually does.

As the play progresses, the “black hole of neediness” becomes a metaphor for nearly all the characters, but it’s Margaret for whom the emptiness looms largest.

The performers are uniformly excellent, especially Mr. Goldstein, who gives a subtle turn as a writer who uses his burly handsomeness as a weapon of disarmament. He is immensely likable as the play begins, affable and unpretentious, and it is a testimony to the actor that even after his personal corruption is exposed, you still don’t have the heart to dismiss him as a villain.

Both Robert Stanton as Rudolph and Mark Junek as Eric do well to capture the desperation of men whose livelihoods hang in the balance of Margaret’s mercurial nature. They are at turns obsequious and scolding with their star, and as Rudolph goes for his second scotch from the hotel minibar you begin to feel that all is not right in the marriage. Mr. Stanton’s big scene, where he lectures Steve on the death of Western culture, is carried off with just the right amount of pre tension and true moral outrage — he is by turns insufferable and entirely justified. And Mr. Junek finds a real chemistry with Ashile Atkinson, who plays Margaret. He too is a betrayer, as it turns out, but their unspoken friendship is so credible that the viewer cannot help but believe it when she forgives him. 

The plum role, of course, is Ms. Atkinson’s as Margaret, and it is not an easy one. A self-described “fat girl,” Margaret is a little vulgar and spends a good amount of the play excoriating herself and professing her personal emptiness. Ms. Atkinson is obliged to shuttle from humiliation to dignity, sometimes in the same scene, and while the character seems off-putting at first, Ms. Atkinson eventually wins over the audience with Margaret’s brutal honesty and quest for self-respect. And she wrests real emotion from the play’s climax, where, after all her illusions have been stripped, she can’t help but bellow, “What’s happening to my life!”

Underused is Justin Mark as Jordan, a bellboy who surveys the goings-on in Margaret’s suite with a rueful smile that becomes a subtle version of a Greek chorus.

Is the ending a little tidy? Not everything works out for Margaret in “The Forgotten Woman,” but there’s something a little mechanistic: All the gears mesh at the play’s conclusion. Let no one say Mr. Tolins is a writer of loose ends.  Nevertheless, this is a funny and emotionally satisfying new play that will most likely have a life after its run in Sag Harbor. In the meantime, enjoy this excellent kick-off to Bay Street’s summer season.