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.

On a recent Tuesday afternoon, Amy Kirwin, the Southampton Arts Center’s new director of programs, took a visitor on a tour of the Job’s Lane building that was the longtime home of the Parrish Art Museum. With the shops replaced by exhibition space and a temporary wall removed to admit daylight into another gallery, the exhibition area feels brighter and roomier. 

An even more dramatic change has taken place in the executive office. Where at one time six or seven Parrish staff members were crammed into the small space, there are now only two full-time employees: Ms. Kirwin and Julie Fitzgerald, the director of operations. The building’s other office spaces, which require a G.P.S. to find, are at the moment unoccupied.

The new position has an element of déjà vu for Ms. Kirwin, who was hired away from the Parrish, where she had worked for six years, two of them at the Job’s Lane building. As a result, she knows every inch of her not-so-new workplace.

Despite the small staff, which also includes a part-time person who works in the galleries and helps with social media, the center has embarked on its fourth summer with a vengeance, with the first of three art shows now on view and an ambitious slate of programs set to launch later this month.

“It helps to have a board that’s really engaged,” Ms. Kirwin said. “We have a program committee where we talk, and I hear their ideas and help implement them. The board members know great people, and they bring them in. We want to start programming at least 10 months out of the year, to stay active and make this a really vital part of the community.”

The path to her current position ran for many years through the theater world. Her family moved from Princeton, N.J., where she was born, to northern California and then to St. Louis before settling in Los Angeles when she was 12. She began acting soon after, taking workshops, starting a drama club in high school, and eventually attending the University of Kansas, which is known for its theater and film programs.

She intended to return to the West Coast to pursue a career in film and television — “I was never keen to be a stage actor” — but when offered a work-study scholarship in 1995 to Circle in the Square Theater School on Broadway, she moved to New York City. “I went to Circle for two years, and it kind of burned me out for acting. After graduation, I began to audition, and I learned I really don’t like to audition.”

Not wanting to leave the theater world, for the next 13 years she worked at theaters in the city, starting as box office manager of “Forbidden Broadway” and eventually, after helping create and manage 59E59, a new three-theater complex, becoming manager of partnership marketing for the Broadway League and the Tony Awards.

While at the latter position, she met Peter Kirwin, a Southampton native, whom she married in August 2010. “I tried for about two weeks to commute to my job in the city, but it was not working. Then the Parrish job in the benefits office opened up.”

Once the museum moved to Water Mill, its programming agenda, run by Andrea Grover, curator of special projects, increased exponentially. “It became clear she needed help with both creating programs and managing them,” said Ms. Kirwin, “so part of my job became working with her and also running the programs. She is a very gracious person and loves to collaborate, as do I.”

Ms. Kirwin developed the outdoor music events, including Jazz en Plein Air and Sounds of Summer, as well as yoga and meditation on the terrace. “I focused mostly on the types of programs that appeal to a wide audience.”

When the opportunity arose to head programming at the Southampton Arts Center, “I thought it could be really great for me to be able to go out on my own and get more creative. So I went for it, and here I am.”

This summer’s programs include music, film, talks, kids’ programs, and, in addition to exhibitions, yoga and meditation on the center’s lawn. The films will include outdoor Friday night screenings in partnership with the Hamptons International Film Festival and documentaries in cooperation with the Telluride Mountain Film Festival and React to Film.

Performances will launch on June 25 with an outdoor concert by the Thunderballs, a roots reggae band from Massachusetts. Also on the schedule are Jake Lear, a bluesman; Jazz at Lincoln Center; Miss Rosie, an Americana folk band; Pianofest; Jazz on the Steps; “Broadway to Boheme,” with the opera singer Melissa Zapin; the George Gee Orchestra, a swing band, and, wrapping up the season on Sept. 3, the HooDoo Loungers.

The current art exhibition, “East End Collected 2,” a large group show organized by the artist Paton Miller, will mark its final weekend on Saturday evening at 7:30 with a performance by Nancy Atlas, one of the principal rockers on the East End scene.

On June 24, the center will open “Water/Bodies,” an exhibition presented with the New York Academy of Art and organized by David Kratz, the academy’s president, and Eric Fischl. The work in the show will embrace the sea, the beach, the pool, sunbathers, the nude, and the nature of pleasure. Participating artists include Ross Bleckner, Ralph Gibson, April Gornik, Michael Halsband, Jill Musnicki, David Salle, and Mr. Fischl.

The final exhibition will be “Winning the White House: From Press Prints to Selfies,” presented with the International Center for Photography, and will range from official portraits and campaign ads to selfies and televised debates.

The programs for children and families include Stories on the Steps, with storytellers from the Rogers Memorial Library; Studio on the Steps, with the artists Aurelio Torres and Andrea Cote; live concerts, puppet shows, Baby Loves Disco, an afternoon family dance party; and a performance by Chris (Shockwave) Sullivan, a beatboxer, percussionist, improviser, and comedian.

“I love new challenges,” said Ms. Kirwin. “And it’s very gratifying to see people enjoying something you’ve created. It’s the best feeling.” With a jam-packed schedule, details of which can be found on the center’s website, 

Ms. Kirwin will have a busy, but very rewarding, summer.

If dance is already an art form in itself, then the Trisha Brown Dance Company’s appearances this weekend at the Watermill Center can be likened to an established painter reimagining her most brilliant work in mixed media.

The postmodern dance company will perform pieces from its repertoire, in whole or in part, in various outdoor settings on the grounds of the Watermill Center on Saturday and Sunday at 5 p.m. The audience will follow the dancers across the Watermill Center’s gardens, fields, and other spaces, where the dances have been aligned to the lines, look, and feel of each particular place. The company’s artistic directors have dubbed its outdoor performance series “In Plain Site,” and say the format frees the work from the limitations of the traditional stage.

The outdoor spaces are an ideal setting for this particular series, according to Diane Madden, who is one of the company’s two associate artistic directors. “What has been designed there in terms of natural setting and visual art is incredible,” she said. “It’s sort of the peak of that kind of visual art setting, and makes a lot of sense for us to be presenting Trisha’s choreography in our new programming.”

The Trisha Brown Dance Company’s appearances this weekend will also be a homecoming of sorts for the company. Ms. Brown, its now-retired founding director, worked as an artist resident at the center in the early 1990s, before it underwent renovations, to produce some of the pieces that will be shown on Saturday and Sunday. Her company, now in the hands of Ms. Madden and Carolyn Lucas, will kick off the Watermill Center’s new “reACT” series, which commemorates the 10th anniversary of the Center’s current facility by inviting former artist residents back for new installations. Later performances in the series will include a full-length contemporary opera.

The performance itself will include pieces taken from Ms. Brown’s 30-year body of work. Ms. Madden said it will represent everything from “the early dances she made starting in the 1960s that are without musical accompaniment and are very task-oriented and playful,” to Ms. Brown’s later, “much more choreographically complex dances,” to work from her “Back to Zero” phase, in which she pared her choreography down to what she called its evocative unconscious movement. Ms. Brown was the first woman to win a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship Genius Award for her work.

“In Plain Site” is different each time it is performed in a new venue, so this particular iteration can only be seen at the Watermill Center. This weekend’s shows will also be the first in which a full-length dance plus excerpts of others will be shown. Ms. Madden said this series typically includes only excerpts.

“I’m personally very excited because I think the company is one of the top dance companies in the U.S. and certainly in New York,” William Wagner, the Watermill Center’s managing director, said.

Saying this weekend’s performances are important, Mr. Wagner added, “It’s going to be a unique, one-of-a-kind opportunity, and I think it really illustrates this new artistic life that the company is beginning to experience now. I hope the community comes out and sees one of the most groundbreaking choreographers of our time on the East End.”

Ms. Madden, too, said the “reACT” performances are important, not just for the dance company but also for the venue itself.

“I think it’s a significant center for making artwork and also art that is blurring the lines between different art forms in the most interesting way,” Ms. Madden said. “The kind of work that the company did there . . . embodies how the Watermill Center wants to be supporting the arts, which is almost like a think tank, and on top of that it’s a really incredible space.”

East End Photographers

The East End Photographers Group will take over Ashawagh Hall in Springs on Saturday for nine days with an exhibition of work by 25 of its members. An opening reception, with music by Job Potter and Friends, happens on Saturday from 5 to 8 p.m., and a closing reception will be held June 12.

The show, which will be open from 1 to 5 p.m. on weekdays and from noon to 5 on weekends, will include traditional, digital, and alternative photographic processes.

Dan Rizzie at Marcelle

The Peter Marcelle Project in Southampton will launch its summer exhibition schedule Saturday with a solo show of work by Dan Rizzie. A reception will take place on June 11 from 6 to 8 p.m., and the show will continue through June 19.

Mr. Rizzie, who lives in Sag Harbor, is known for his detailed collage work and the textural quality of his surfaces, which are often influenced by the rhythms of the natural world and his wide travels.

New Design Fair

Just when you thought the East End had enough, if not more than enough, summer art fairs, a new one, Hamptons Contemporary Design and Decor Fair, has not only joined the mix, but has taken pole position, opening tomorrow at the Southampton Elks fairground and continuing through Sunday.

Claiming to be “the first of its kind world-class international home and decor show in the Hamptons,” the fair is a new project by an old hand, Rick Friedman, creator of ArtHamptons. In addition to featuring various aspects of home design, the event will include book signings by architects, designers, and decorators. 

Day passes are $20; V.I.P. passes are $100 per couple. More information is available at hamptonscontemporary. com.

Abstract Paintings at Markel

A show of recent paintings by Marcelyn McNeil will open tomorrow at Kathryn Markel Fine Arts in Bridgehampton and remain on view through June 19.

Ms. McNeil’s abstract paintings are composed of large, irregular shapes that engage each other to create an illusory pictorial space, while at the same time asserting the flatness of the picture plane. “The work is about push and pull,” the artist has said, referring to Hans Hofmann’s theory about how the illusion of space, depth, and movement could be created abstractly on a canvas.

Dennis Oppenheim at Storm King

“Terrestrial Studio,” a survey of several decades of work by Dennis Oppenheim, is on view through Nov. 13 at the Storm King Art Center in New Windsor, N.Y.

Mr. Oppenheim, who divided his time between New York City and a house in Springs until his death in 2011, was a protean artist whose radical aspirations found expression in Land Art, Body Art, Conceptual Art, performance, video, installations, and sculpture.

The Storm King exhibition traces his career-long engagement with outdoor space, from “Dead Furrow,” a somewhat Minimalist earthwork from 1967, to “Cactus Grove” (2009) and “Alternative Landscape Components” (2006), in which monolithic sculptures are modeled after the natural world in steel, aluminum, acrylic, fiberglass, and other materials.

In addition to outdoor work, the exhibition includes audio pieces, films of several of the artist’s performances, and photographic documentation of large-scale land-altering earthworks.

Plein Air Painters

The Nature Conservancy, at 142 Route 114 in East Hampton, will present “People and Places of the Nature Conservancy,” an exhibition of work by members of the Wednesday Group, from Saturday, when there will be an opening reception from noon to 2 p.m., until July 1.

The works in the show will focus on people enjoying the vistas of East End lands that are protected by the conservancy. The Wednesday Group consists of artists who paint en plein air. 

Artists Under the Influence

The Chase Edwards Gallery in Bridgehampton is presenting “Under the Influence” through June 11. Recent paintings by Athos Zacharias, Tim Bessell, Matt Neuman, and Kal Mansur explore influence, inspiration, and the impact of personal friendships with such artists as Willem de Kooning, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Donald Judd, and Frank Stella.

 Reception at Harper’s Books

Harper’s Books in East Hampton will celebrate the publication of “We Are Gods in the Chrysalis,” a compilation of work by Meghan Boody, an artist who grew up in Bridgehampton and now lives on the North Fork, on Saturday from 5 to 7 p.m. Ms. Boody will sign copies of the book, which was published by Kerber Verlag in March.

Winners’ Circle

The Southampton Cultural Center will show work by the winners of its 2015 juried art exhibition from Tuesday through June 28, with a reception set for June 11 from 4 to 6 p.m. The artists, who were selected by Christina Strassfield, chief curator and museum director of Guild Hall, are John Cappello, Ruth Nasca, and Sara Douglas.

There’s a popular posting you may have seen on social media, in which photographs and quotes by Kanye West and Jimi Hendrix are paired. The former declares himself “a creative genius, and there’s no other way to word it.” That is juxtaposed with the latter’s declaration that “I wouldn’t say that I’m the greatest guitarist ever. I’d say probably that I’m the greatest guitarist sitting in this chair.” 

The shyness and humility of Hendrix, who indisputably revolutionized the guitar and rock ’n’ roll and, 46 years after his death at age 27, continues to influence music, is emblematic of musicians from another, very different, era. It came to mind while gazing at the Australian painter Adoni Astrinakis’s depiction of the musician, which is a prominent feature in “The Golden Age of Rock ’n’ Roll,” a two-part exhibit at the Mannix Studio of Art in East Hampton (Part 1) and the White Room Gallery in Bridgehampton (Part 2). Mannix hosted an opening reception on Saturday, the White Room on Sunday. 

Mr. Astrinakis’s painting, part of his first American gallery show, depicts a pensive Hendrix, alone against a stark background, his gaze far from the viewer and his mind apparently farther away still. Those who were in his presence sometimes describe him as otherworldly, as though the laws of gravity and the material world simply did not apply. 

The artist’s rendering of Hendrix, from his “27 Club” collection, depicting the eerily substantial number of musicians who died at that age, is one of the standout works of “The Golden Age of Rock ’n’ Roll.” Also featured from that collection at the White Room are a brash and doomed Amy Winehouse, her right arm thrown across her body as though guarding her soul against those who would steal it, and Kurt Cobain, hands up as if in self-defense, similarly ill at ease in the world. 

Of course, the White Room exhibit, which runs through Sunday, is full of rock ’n’ roll’s rampant jubilation as well. On a wall adjacent to the brooding Hendrix is Steve Joester’s collage of a circa-1970s Mick Jagger, androgynous and positively electrifying amid swaggering performance.

Also represented in the Bridgehampton show are Laura Benjamin’s candy-wrapper collages of Michael Jackson, Mr. Jagger, and Elvis Presley; the artist Evad’s glitter-on-canvas renderings of the late David Bowie, Prince, and John Lennon, as well as Mr. Jagger (again). Photography, such as Bonnie Lautenberg’s depictions of provocative contemporary artists including Lady Gaga and Miley Cyrus, and EJ Camp’s work for Rolling Stone magazine depicting Annie Lennox, Willie Nelson, and Billy Idol, are also on display. 

Photography dominates at the Mannix Studio’s exhibition, which runs through June 19 and was the catalyst for “The Golden Age of Rock ’n’ Roll,” said Karyn Mannix, the studio’s proprietor. Chris Foster, a Londoner who relocated to the South Fork, had given Ms. Mannix’s brother a print of one of his 1970s photos of Bowie. “I said we should work together,” she recalled telling Mr. Foster, “and then David Bowie died. It’s the perfect thing for the grand opening, and this is really iconic rock ’n’ roll. There are no modern people in here.” 

Here, the glam and the grit of rock ’n’ roll, some as manifested in 1970s New York City, are prominent. Pop artists including Boy George and Elton John are depicted, as are the early-’70s British rockers the Faces, featuring a much-younger Rod Stewart and Ron Wood, but so are punk rockers like the Ramones, Johnny Thunders, Cheetah Chrome, and the Kretins. Also featured are Susan Wood Richardson’s photographs of Lennon and Yoko Ono, which were exhibited last summer and fall at the Mulford Farm Museum in East Hampton. Another highlight is a series of portraits by the late Jack Mitchell, including David Byrne, Philip Glass, and Cat Stevens.

Saturday’s reception at the Mannix Studio included a book-signing of “Punks, Poets, and Provocateurs: New York City Bad Boys, 1977-1982” by Marcia Resnick, and art created by children in the classes offered at Mannix.

Like the art form itself, “The Golden Age of Rock ’n’ Roll” portrays youthful expression in its sprawling, disparate emotion, exuberance, vulnerability, and power. Each exhibit is a self-contained joy; taken together, they form a dazzling, glittering portrait of their subject. 

The Barnes Landing Association will present its Anna Mirabai Lytton Writers and Artists Showcase on Saturday afternoon from 2 to 3:30 at the Barnes Landing Meeting House, which is at the intersection of Barnes Hole Road and Waters Edge in Springs.

The event, named in honor of a young writer and student who died in 2013 in a traffic accident, will include brief readings by Lisa Dickler Awano, Hiroo Dickler Awano, Rameshwar Das, Carol Goodale, Meredith Hasemann, Valerie King, Kate Rabinowitz, Dee Slavutin, and Carole Stone. The visual artists David Bennett, Susan Friend, Douglas Goodale, and Spring Wang will present and discuss their work. A cocktail party for the neighborhood will follow the program.

The HooDoo Loungers, widely acknowledged as the East Coast New Orleans party band, will perform at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill tomorrow evening at 6 as part of the museum’s “Sounds of Summer” series of outdoor concerts.

The band features two lead vocalists, a three-piece horn section, and a rhythm section, among whose members are David Deitch, the band’s music director and arranger, keyboard and accordion player, and vocalist, and Joe Lauro, a bassist familiar to the East End music scene through his films, live music programming, and his own musicianship.

Guests have been encouraged to bring lawn chairs and blankets, and would-be picnickers can purchase food and beverages at the museum’s outpost of the Golden Pear Cafe. Tickets are $10, free for members, students, and children.

The idea of German Expressionist comedy seems rather oxymoronic, but in the hands of Steve Martin it becomes zany social commentary. In his play “The Underpants,” a young bourgeois couple copes with infamy and flirts with infidelity, learning something about each other in the process.

At a recent rehearsal of the play, a fast-paced rollercoaster of a romp that will be mounted at Guild Hall starting next Thursday, the cast seemed both familiar with and questioning of the text and staging. Having worked through one round of rehearsals and performances in Syracuse for a few weeks last fall, they did not appear to have tired of it in the least. Knowing their characters intimately, they are still finding new ways to interpret them, and making it all seem fresh.

“We closed in Syracuse thinking we were done. There was no plan for a revival,” said Bill Fennelly, the director of both productions, who returns here with the full cast and design team.

Tuck Milligan, one of the actors, was instrumental in bringing the play to East Hampton. Mr. Milligan, a regular on Guild Hall’s stage who was seen in its recent production of “The Night Alive,” suggested to Josh Gladstone, the theater’s artistic director, that he consider putting on “The Underpants.”

“Tuck worked his magic,” Mr. Fennelly said. “These things never happen.”

The opportunity to be back on stage together was exciting for all involved. The actors, who had veered somewhat from Mr. Fennelly’s original direction following his departure after the opening weekend in Syracuse, all agreed that they needed to delve deeper into their roles and start anew.

“All the things we thought about changing when we were doing the performance, this gave us a way to look at that,” said Mark David Watson, who plays Theo Maske, the husband. Even better, he said, was that Mr. Fennelly told them he was not interested in mounting an identical production.

While some directors might approach the play as a cynical take on adultery, Mr. Fennelly said he preferred to see it as “a young marriage that is out of whack. . . . I feel Steve Martin has tremendous heart, and the play really shows a transformation and metamorphosis.”

Louise, the young wife whose underpants (or bloomers, given the setting) fall during a parade, is the central character, played by Marianna McClellan. She might not have the most lines, but she’s on stage the most, typically reacting to something happening even when not speaking. One of the most challenging things about her role, she said during a rehearsal break, was building that stamina again — and remembering to breathe.

After a few weeks’ performances in Syracuse, there were things “that never felt quite right, but we made it work,” she said. “There were other things the audience didn’t respond to in the way you imagined they would.” She sees this as a chance to fix those things.

Mr. Fennelly said that 75 percent of the staging would remain the same, “but there are moments that we’re breaking open. There’s a logical evolution in the characters and relationships we’ve been building for so long.”

For Mr. Watson, having performed the play before an audience already meant that he “didn’t have to start at such a high pitch. I didn’t haveto push the jokes as much. The audience will follow.” He’s enjoying the chance to reexamine the material, finding that a deeper read of the characters helps feed the laughs, which often come from the couple’s misunderstandings of each other.

The cast, which also includes Michael Brian Dunn, Daniel Passer, and Sabrina Profitt, had a lot of questions about blocking — where to move and stand on stage. Even with scenes they knew had worked, they kept experimenting to see if new approaches were even better.

“This time around, we’re going for it more, we’re less tentative,” Ms. McClellan said. “We have the confidence and know that we have some version that works, but then we are taking it to the next level. It’s fun to see these characters in the extreme.”

One significant change is the addition of an intermission. “I initially thought it was important not to take a break, because Louise’s evolution is a very fast rollercoaster of 72 hours, and it’s useful to see it unbroken,” Mr. Fennelly said. “And it is fine to see, but it’s not a necessity.”

Guild Hall is planning to have an outdoor beer garden behind the building in conjunction with the play, so an intermission became an even more attractive prospect. And the play itself, what with musical transitions and a few additions — “not a ton, and not extraneous,” Mr. Fennelly said — is a bit longer than it was originally. It ran an hour and 45 minutes in Syracuse, and they were getting some complaints.

“There’s a totally clear place to take a pause, then re-launch with even more zaniness,” the director said. “The play really does come in for a beautiful landing. Taking a break in the middle will allow the audience not to feel the rush of their bladders, and they can receive the beautiful transformation that happens to Louise and Theo and the marriage at the end of the play.”

“The Underpants” will open on June 11 after two previews, next Thursday and on Friday, June 10. It will continue through June 26 with performances Tuesdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m. Tickets range from $40 to $120, with discounts for members, and are available at the Guild Hall box office or online.