At a time when Iowa is dominating the headlines because of its imminent caucuses to help select the next president, the sobering differences between the mores and beliefs of middle America and those of the coastal elites could not be clearer.

It is no surprise that our country is divided geographically, but in the past decade, as the gulf between the have-nots and the have-everythings at the very top of the wealth pyramid has expanded, these divisions have become more complex.

The Hampton Theatre Company’s impeccably timed production of “Dead Accounts,” beginning next Thursday at the Quogue Community Hall, could serve as a primer for those flummoxed by the cult of Donald Trump and/or Bernie Sanders. Yet, it will also tap into that complexity in ways that audiences may find challenging.

Theresa Rebeck’s dark comedy focuses on Jack Leonard, a Cincinnati native who briefly dipped his feet in the world of New York finance. He suddenly returns home sans wife, but with millions in new assets. His sister, Lorna, has stayed home in Ohio to help their mother take care of their father, who is ill. 

Andrew Botsford, the director of the play, sees “Dead Accounts” as the issues of American political and economic divides writ large, but also as the interpersonal workings of a family that, as Ms. Rebeck says in a forward she wrote for the play, “doesn’t know how to talk to each other anymore.”

The play was not warmly received by critics when it was performed in New York in 2012, with Katie Holmes and Jack Butz in starring roles. Mr. Botsford said he didn’t read the original reviews until rehearsals started so they wouldn’t shape his interpretation, but he thinks the critics got it wrong. “It’s hard to say what this play is. They seemed to want it to fit into either a comedy or tragedy category, but it seems to be both.” 

Still, The Wall Street Journal’s critic was able to determine that the play was “a dead-serious comedy about what happens to people who, like Jack and Lorna, wake up one morning and realize that their lives haven’t lived up to their dreams.”

After he participated in a summer workshop with Halley Feiffer at Stony Brook Southampton, where the actress and playwright asked participants to find either the tragic in the comic or the comic in the tragic, Mr. Botsford said this play appealed to him. “Shakespeare’s tragedies have comic relief at times, but life is both at all times. You tend to laugh, because things can get so dark.”

He said that Ms. Rebeck “writes characters who are not that likable but are very human.” When he asked John Carlin to read for the role of Jack, Mr. Carlin replied that he would need to find a way to make the character likable. Mr. Botsford did not see it that way, but he said Mr. Carlin, who reached out to Ms. Rebeck, “responded to the character in his own way,” and he found his interpretation very effective. “At the end of the play it’s up to the audience and actors to decide where do we leave these characters in their journey.”

God and money (or mammon from the Bible) become huge themes in the play. How the characters reconcile their relationships to both has a lot to do with the play’s drama and humor. “The spiritual lesson from the Bible is that you can’t serve both God and mammon, you have to take your pick. But in reality, you need some of each.”

In addition to Mr. Carlin, Peter Connolly, Rebecca Edana, Diana Marbury, and Mary McGloin star in the play. The sets were designed by Peter-Tolin Baker, with lighting design by Sebastian Paczynski and costumes by Teresa Lebrun. Ms. McGloin, a newcomer to the company, plays Lorna, portrayed in New York by Ms. Holmes. Their mother is played by Ms. Marbury, who is the company’s artistic director.

Ms. Rebeck has written many well-received plays including “Omnium Gatherum,” a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in drama that she co-wrote with Alexandra Gertstein-Vassilaros. She is also known for creating the television series “Smash,” about the making of a Broadway musical. She was born in Ohio and went to high school in Cincinnati.

The play is not a comic romp, nor is it “A Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” Mr. Botsford said. Yet, “there are soliloquies that are Shakespearean” in their tone and content. “I think the reason why it was savaged was that it wasn’t done right. I believe we are doing it beautifully, and I hope audiences agree.”

“Dead Accounts” runs at the Quogue Community Hall from next Thursday through Jan. 31 with shows on Thursdays and Fridays at 7, Saturdays at 8, and Sundays at 2:30. The performance on Jan. 21 will be followed by a talkback with members of the cast and the director.

Tickets can be reserved through the company’s website or through Ovation Tix.

“In America today, what we are seeing is the disappearance of the great middle class,” said Senator Bernie Sanders, a candidate for the Democratic Party’s nomination for president. At the same time, Mr. Sanders continued, nearly all of the new wealth created is going to the top 1 percent. The rich are getting richer, and the gap between them and everyone else continues to expand. In order for that to change, “we need a political revolution in this country.” 

The Occupy Wall Street phenomenon of 2011 may have disintegrated after police, coordinated by the Department of Homeland Security, forcibly cleared “the 99 percent” from Zuccotti Park, near Wall Street in Manhattan. Or, perhaps, the protest was only a prelude to that revolution Mr. Sanders both advocates and represents. 

Ted Rall, a political cartoonist, graphic novelist, and author known for his intensely critical view of the American government, has produced several graphic journals bluntly chronicling recent history, among them “The Book of Obama: From Hope and Change to the Age of Revolt,” “After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back as Honored Guests: Unembedded in Afghanistan,” and, with the journalist and author Greg Palast, “Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in Nine Easy Steps.” Last year, he produced “Snowden,” an account of Edward Snowden, the former C.I.A. employee who revealed numerous global surveillance programs run by the governments of the United States and other countries. 

With “Bernie,” a graphic novel about the presidential candidate that will be released on Tuesday, Mr. Rall issues what he expects to be the second in a trilogy representing a departure from his previous work. He will talk about his new book at the Amagansett Library on Wednesday from 6 to 7 p.m. 

“I’m always criticizing what others are doing wrong, how the system sucks,” Mr. Rall, who lives in East Hampton, said last week. “People always criticize me for not putting up an alternative. Snowden, to me, was real, unvarnished, as pure a hero as you could have: He risked everything for an important principle bigger than himself.” 

The positive reception given “Snowden,” he said, prompted an exploration for another, “someone really admirable who is trying to effect change in a different way. I thought about Bernie. Snowden is a rebel; Bernie is a rebel within the system that’s managed to stay pure. He hasn’t gotten disgustingly corrupted, the way Hillary did.”

Indeed, Mr. Sanders, Mr. Rall suggests, represents a progressive alternative to Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party’s establishment candidate and frontrunner for the nomination. “She’s a warmonger,” Mr. Rall said of the former senator, secretary of state, and first lady. “She never met a war she didn’t like, from Bosnia to Libya and Syria. She hasn’t learned any lessons. She supported all these wars that have created all sorts of chaos, and killed hundreds of thousands for no good reason. I can’t look past that.” 

In “Bernie,” Mr. Rall offers both a biography of the self-described Democratic Socialist senator from Vermont and a history of the Democratic Party since the 1972 presidential election, in which Richard Nixon was re-elected in a 49-states-to-1 landslide. Conservative Democrats, most of them from Southern states, seized the party’s reins, and the “New Left” that emerged in the late 1960s was marginalized. Efforts to help the poor were out; reliance on corporate money was in. “Affirming the soon-to-be cliché that given the choice between a fake conservative and a real conservative people will vote for the real one,” President Jimmy Carter’s defeat at the hands of the Republican candidate, Ronald Reagan, was “humiliatingly broad,” Mr. Rall writes. Reagan won two landslide elections in the 1980s, and his vice president, George H.W. Bush, easily won the next one. 

The two-term presidencies of the Democrats Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, Mr. Rall argues, represent the triumph of the “centrist counterrevolution” perpetrated by pro-business Democrats. Mr. Obama’s staffing choices and the federal bailout of banks responsible for the 2008 financial meltdown, through “out-of-control lending practices and widespread corruption,” are among the evidence he cites. 

Once upon a time, Mr. Rall posits, Occupy Wall Street might have been incorporated into government and influenced policy. “But not in 2011,” he writes. “Liberals were barely tolerated within the Democratic Party. When party bigwigs talked to them at all, it was to tell them to shut up.” 

Enter Mr. Sanders, “long ridiculed and marginalized by the mainstream political class and its allies in the media.” Polls indicate that ideas advocated by the senator, such as government regulation of business and more even income distribution, are popular with voters. 

With Elizabeth Warren, the progressive senator from Massachusetts, on the sidelines, Mr. Sanders announced his candidacy last April. 

“Bernie’s crowds were huge and getting bigger,” Mr. Rall writes. “Meanwhile, support for the ‘inevitable’ Hillary Clinton seemed more dutiful than enthusiastic.” Current polls show Mr. Sanders and Mrs. Clinton neck and neck in the upcoming Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary. 

“Bernie” is not a hagiography, Mr. Rall said. The antiwar left’s criticism of Mr. Sanders’s support for Israel and Mr. Obama’s targeted assassination of suspected terrorists aren’t excluded from the narrative. “His finest moment was not during the Gaza war,” Mr. Rall said. “The point is, people need to understand that whether you like Bernie or not, he represents an important moment in American politics.” 

Whatever one’s political persuasion, “Bernie” is quick and thoroughly entertaining, delivering both an incisive read of post-Vietnam War political history and Mr. Rall’s distinct, abstract comic art.

The Met: Live in HD will return to Guild Hall with Bizet’s opera “Les Pecheurs de Perles” on Saturday at 1 p.m. Premiered in Paris in 1863, the opera was last performed at the Met in 1916, with Enrico Caruso, Frieda Hempel, and Giuseppe De Luca in the lead roles.

Set in ancient Ceylon, the opera is the story of Leila, a beautiful Hindu priestess, who is pursued by the rival pearl-divers Nadir and Zurga, whose friendship is threatened by their love of the same woman. Their duet “Au fond du temple saint” is said to be one of the best-known songs in Western opera.

The new two-and-a-half-hour production is directed by Penny Woolcock and stars Diana Damrau, Matthew Polenzani, and Mariusz Kwiecien. Tickets are $22, $20 for members, and $15 for students.

The Watermill Center will hold two open rehearsals on Saturday afternoon. Boomerang, a physically nuanced dance and performance group created in 2012 by Matty Davis, Kora Radella, and Adrian Galvin, will show a new work commissioned by Dixon Place on the Lower East Side, where it will premiere in March. The group’s work is based on the idea that the body is a repository for both physical and psychological life, and its performances draw upon the histories of the people with whom they work. The rehearsal will run from 3 to 4 p.m.

An open rehearsal of “Lullaby Movement,” a work by the resident artists Sophia Brous, an interdisciplinary performer from Australia, and the British multi-instrumentalists David Coulter and Leo Abrahams, will take place from 4:30 to 6. The work explores the melodies and multi-layered meanings of lullabies drawn from societies throughout the world.

Both programs are free, but reservations are required.

“Sordid Lives,” a black comedy by the Texas-born writer, director, and producer Del Shores, will open this evening at 7:30 at the Southampton Cultural Center and run through Jan. 31. The play premiered in Los Angeles in 1996 and won 14 Drama-Logue Awards.

The sordid lives of the title belong to three generations of a colorful family from a small Texas town who gather for the funeral of their elderly matriarch, who died during a tryst in a seedy motel room with her much younger, married neighbor. As preparations ensue, comic, sad, and shabby truths about the dysfunctional family emerge. 

According to Michael Disher, who will direct the play with Joan Lyons, “Sometimes you just feel compelled to play a theatrical wild card, a piece with little social relevance but a ton of laughs. And could that be such a bad thing in January?”

Ms. Lyons agreed. “Each new season, behind the scenes, we agonize over which shows to choose that span theatrical genres to appeal to differing audiences. . . . I think the real message to be learned from this production is that sometimes you don’t need to push the deeper meaning of the script or send any message at all, just to let your audience have fun.”

“Sordid Lives” was not only a stage play but also a feature film and a television series featuring Delta Burke, Beau Bridges, and Olivia Newton-John. 

The cast of the Center Stage production includes Tom Gregory, Edward Kassar, John Leonard, Deborah Marshall, Joseph Marshall, JoAnna Mincarelli, Mary Sabo, Frances Sherman, Danielle Shuman, Kristin Whiting, Gerri Wilson, and Scott Wilson. Show times are Thursdays at 7:30 p.m., Fridays and Saturdays at 8, and Sunday afternoons at 2:30. Tickets, which can be purchased at the center’s website, are $22, $12 for students under 21 with identification.

The cultural center has also announced open auditions for “South Pacific: In Concert” on Jan. 24 and Jan. 25 at 6 p.m. in its Levitas Center for the Arts. Auditions will begin promptly; late arrivals will be seen at the discretion of the director, Mr. Disher. Readings will be from the script, and actors have been asked to prepare 32 bars of a musical theater standard.

Cast size is variable; various ages and vocal types are needed. The production is non-union and non-paying. More detailed information is available from [email protected].

Laurie Anderson, who has a house in Springs, will be at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill on Friday, Jan. 8, for a screening of her film “Heart of a Dog.”

Its themes include death, memory, and Buddhist teachings. When Ms. Anderson’s dog Lolabelle died in 2011, she used her mourning process to inspire her creatively, through artwork, music, and a film. “Heart of a Dog” comprises childhood memories, video diaries, philosophical musings, tributes to artists, writers, and musicians, and much more. Serving as narrator, she also animates and scores the film, making it a personal yet accessible vision of her life and art.

The 6 p.m. program costs $10 and is free for members, children, and students.

Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor has welcomed back Nancy Atlas for another winter season of Fireside Sessions, concerts that feature the musician and a special guest. The program begins on Saturday with Randi Fishenfeld, a classically trained violinist who has used her talents as an electric fiddler with artists such as Clarence Clemons, Bruce Springsteen, B.B. King, and Foghat.

Ms. Atlas has long been a fixture on the South Fork music scene with her band the Nancy Atlas Project. Other artists she will collaborate with this season are Simon Kirke on drums, Clark Gayton on trombone, Andy Aledort on guitar, and Danny Kean on keyboard.

The concerts take place Saturday evenings at 8, and tickets are $25. Last year’s series sold out, so advance purchase has been recommended through the theater’s website or by calling the box office, which is open Tuesday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.

On Saturday and Sunday, Christian Scheider will present a two-day mini-marathon of the cinematic work of Jacques Tati at the Amagansett Library.

The French director, who died in 1982, had a background in music hall and mime performance that he mined to perfect the art of the sight gag. His career spanned 1932 to 1978, and in 2010 a film, “The Illusionist,” was made from his writing. He was known specifically for his recurring character Monsieur Hulot, a bumbling man lost in a modern age.

The free program will be held from noon to 3 p.m. both days.

Daniel Jones, the focus of a show at the Tulla Booth Gallery in Sag Harbor, has been taking pictures on Long Island for most of his life. The Southold photographer varies from literal to abstract renderings of seascapes for the most part, and likes to return to the same vistas over and over again to plot the subtle and dramatic changes in atmosphere.

At sites like Flying Point or Cooper’s Beach in Southampton, he might take a straightforward landscape photo that has an abstract quality or actually move the camera to create a blurry effect. He uses large-format cameras but works digitally. He does not, however, modify them on the computer, preferring the images as they were originally taken.

As much as we witness the same landscapes every day, he reminds us that small changes in cloud cover, different times of day, currents and tides, and wave heights can all alter the vista in seemingly infinite ways. All he has to do is show up with his camera and let his eye and nature do the rest.

The large-format images capture great detail when they are in focus and direct, taking on an almost hyper-real quality.

His abstractions remind us that much of our world is visually organized horizontally. When a photo of vertical bands is presented, it seems like some manipulation, maybe made by the movement of the camera up and down, rather than side to side. Instead it turns out that the image in purples and greens is of tall iris stalks.

A simple old rowboat, painted white and red on the exterior and blue on the interior, is another subject the artist returns to with regularity. In a version called “Fogged In,” the haze that gathers at the horizon makes the setting look abstract, but it is the mist that does the work for him. At the same time, a halo of blue and the faint suggestion of clouds hint at a clearer dawn just past the mooring.

While Mr. Jones’s color photographs are predominantly abstract or abstracted, his black-and-white photos are clear and crisp. In still harbors, he is drawn to the compositional possibilities of ferry pilings and other structures and appurtenances in the water. On the ocean, the focus is waves, big and messy. On the beach itself, the crisscross of storm fences and the patterns they make are a recurring theme. He also is drawn to the way wind and water sculpt sand into various topographical terrains.

Sometimes it is a simple view of a building, like the Cedar Point Lighthouse and its stark presence in the landscape, that attracts his attention. But he photographs views of New York City and architectural studies as well.

Ms. Booth’s gallery has a good mix of all of these genres, and they can be seen through Jan. 30.

For 30 years, Alexis Rockman has rendered the natural world, producing both detailed oil paintings depicting the dystopian consequences of climate change, genetic engineering, and industrial pollution, and more immediate field drawings of plants and animals encountered on his travels.

“East End Field Drawings” at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill represents 85 plant and animal species, all made with sand, soil, or organic material collected from 18 sites between Bridgehampton and Montauk. The drawings are not actually created on site but in his studio, in part because birds in flight or schools of fish are unwilling subjects.

“I’ll get images anywhere I can find them,” he said. “Some are things I see, but there are many things not on the Internet or anywhere. For example, it’s very difficult to find a reference for mosquitos in flight.”

Among the places he has visited are Guyana, Antarctica, the Los Angeles tar pits, Tasmania, and the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island. The Los Angeles field drawings were made with tar on gessoed paper, while wombat fecal matter and acrylic polymer were the mediums used in his drawing of a Tasmanian wombat.

Mr. Rockman’s interest in the natural world has its roots in his childhood in New York City. His mother, Diane diZerega Wall, an anthropology professor and historical archeologist at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, worked early in her career as Margaret Mead’s secretary at the American Museum of Natural History.

“She loved animals and humans, and I was mesmerized and wanted to recreate with living things the types of things I saw at the museum.” He pointed to the wall in the Parrish’s lobby gallery where the field drawings will be on view through Jan. 18. “I was always drawing frogs. That spring peeper over there is very much like a pose in a drawing I made when I was 5 years old.”

His interest waned in the ninth grade, when “I decided girls and basketball were where it was at. After high school I realized I should go to some kind of art school, because there was no other place for me. However, art was very minimal and conceptual at the time and I felt no affinity with that.”

His interest in film and animation led him to the Rhode Island School of Design and then to the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. “I found my way into the art department because that’s where the smartest people were.” Meanwhile, by the time he entered S.V.A. in 1983, the art world had changed, with a younger generation having moved away from formalism toward work that was political, personal, and expressive.

“Even as a kid, I knew the history of extinction, what had already happened to animals and plants. I felt it was a fascinating moment to bring that to a fine-art context. I knew Barbara Kruger very early on, and since she and other artists were doing political work, I saw a niche for something nobody else was doing.”

While the natural world has been Mr. Rockman’s focus from the outset, he noted that he has deliberately changed his approach in terms of the language of painting. “If you look at a painting from 1986, I’d paint a turtle on the acrylic ground and it would be dripping and oozing. The field drawings involve a type of muscle I used in my paintings when they were less complicated.” Along the way he spent two years making dioramas, one of which, “Golf Course,” includes trash, Astroturf, golf balls, soil, and a cast plastic human femur, among other components.

By the early 1990s he was producing detailed, often panoramic oil paintings on wood, and has continued to do so, combining a scientist’s knowledge of the natural world with a seemingly inexhaustible visual imagination. The result is a fact-based but frightening vision of the myriad horrific ways climate change, genetic mutations, and pollution are likely to alter the landscape, urban spaces, and the plants and animals that inhabit them. “What I’m doing and need to do has a very clear agenda,” he said. “I end up painting very meticulous things.”

Mr. Rockman’s project brings to mind the dystopian fiction of the English writer J.G. Ballard, especially such early novels as “The Drowned World” from 1962, in which solar radiation has caused the polar ice caps to melt and the worldwide temperature to soar.

In 2009, the film director Ang Lee asked Mr. Rockman to help him develop the look of his film "Life of Pi." "My friend Jean Castelli had been working with Ang since the mid-1990s, and I knew he was working on 'Life of Pi.' After I met Ang and read the script, he told me things he needed help with. He had to show the studio his vision. So I developed the island and that underwater sequence, which didn't exist yet, and some other stuff. I made five elaborate watercolors.”

The artist is working on several other projects, including one with Mr. Castelli, that involve film. “Those projects would have been impossible even five years ago, so I would say the awareness of climate change has increased dramatically. But that should have happened 20 years ago. There are so many powerful forces of capitalism that have just destroyed the earth. Not that communism would have done a better job. It’s really human nature. I’m so furious and sad about all that stuff that it’s why I do what I do.”

Mr. Rockman first came to the East End in the late 1980s. Since 2003, he and Dorothy Spears, a writer who contributes regularly to The New York Times, Art in America, and other publications, have been renting in Sag Harbor when not in the city. "The East End project had been gestating in my brain somewhere for a while before I went ahead with it last year," he said.

In conjunction with the exhibition, the Parrish selected Mr. Rockman as its second artist-in-residence. He spent the week of Dec. 14 leading over 400 students in hands-on workshops to create original field drawings using materials they gathered from sites of their own choosing -— usually their backyards. A visitor to the museum’s theater that week found the artist with some 75 students from the Riverhead Charter School, answering questions and responding to the drawings they were busy making.

“The reason I did this project,” he said, “was because I’ve gone all over the world and done this kind of thing — the field drawings — so why don’t I do it where I spend most of my time. It was a great opportunity to learn what’s out here. Part of my pitch to the museum was that it would be educational, which it is, and which is really what I care about.”

The field drawings are not only a stylistic alternative to paintings that are densely populated with plants and animals surviving and mutating in a dystopian future, they also take the artist out of the studio. Several weeks ago he went on a field trip with the curator of collections at the Museum of Natural History to go fossil hunting in the five boroughs.

“We found a mastodon in northern Manhattan, a walrus on Rockaway Beach, a phytosaur in the Palisades, and a squirrel in my backyard.”