Free outdoor concerts will rock Montauk’s village green and the dockside stage at Gosman’s this summer, starting at 6:30 p.m. Monday with a performance on the green by Joe Delia and Thieves. Also on the green, an open mike with Ray Red will happen Wednesday from 5:30 to 8 p.m.

The Gosman’s concerts will kick off July 6 at 6 p.m. with the Nancy Atlas Project. Gene Casey and the Lone Sharks, Mamalee Rose and Friends, HooDoo Loungers, and Randy Jackson will also perform on the dockside stage during the summer.

Concertgoers have been encouraged to bring coolers, picnic suppers, blankets, and lawn chairs for seating. The most up-to-date information, including schedule changes, can be found by following the “events” link on the home page of montaukchamber.com.

A concert of American music, including Broadway favorites, love songs, and patriotic tunes, will take place Sunday at 5 p.m. at the Old Whalers Church in Sag Harbor. A supper of hot dogs and ice cream on the church lawn will follow the performance.

The Rev. Mark Phillips, church pastor, Dominick Abbate, music director, and David Cummings, bell choir director, planned the program, which they have informally titled “Music We Don’t Sing in Church.” In addition to the church’s voice and bell choirs, the concert will include two notable soloists, Michael Bodnyk and Susan Vinski.

There is no admission charge for the event, but donations to the building fund will be appreciated.

Crossroads Music in Amagansett will present a concert by the Complete Unknowns, a band that celebrates the music of Bob Dylan, on Wednesday at the John Drew Theater at Guild Hall in East Hampton. Tickets are $20, or $18 for members, with prime orchestra seats at $40, $38 for members. The show will begin with a guitar performance by Matty Liot at 7:30 p.m. On Saturday, a preview mini-concert will be held at Innersleeve Records in Amagansett at 6 p.m.

The band is made up of Michael Weiskopf on guitar, harmonica, and vocals; Randolph Hudson III on guitar, synthesizer, and vocals; Klyph Black on guitar and vocals; Jim Lawler on drums; Stuart Sherman on keyboards, and Taka Shimizu on bass and vocals.

Mr. Weiskopf also writes and performs original music. His second release, “Suffering Fools,” was released in April.

Patrons who preorder a prime orchestra seat will receive a free CD. They can choose from “Suffering Fools” or “Second Time Around,” by Mr. Black’s band, Black and Sparrow.

The Complete Unknowns recently appeared at events marking Mr. Dylan’s 73rd birthday, including the annual festival at the Warwick Valley Winery and Distillery in Warwick, N.Y., and at the B.B. King Blues Club and Grill in Manhattan. On Monday the band, now in its sixth year, will perform at the renowned Cafe Wha? in Greenwich Village.

“To me, that’s sacred ground,” Mr. Weiskopf said of the venue that Mr. Dylan visited upon arriving in New York from his home state of Minnesota in the early 1960s. “He got into Manhattan right off the George Washington Bridge, took the subway downtown, and the first place he went into was Cafe Wha?”

At Guild Hall, the audience can expect a broad mix of songs from Mr. Dylan’s five-decade-plus catalog. In the 50th-anniversary year of the albums “The Times They Are a-Changin’ ” and “Another Side of Bob Dylan,” songs from those releases will be offered. “Some acoustic stuff, some really deep tracks” are also in store, Mr. Weiskopf said.

With anniversaries of even greater significance approaching — Mr. Dylan “plugging in” and playing electric guitar with a rock ’n’ roll band at the Newport Folk Festival and the albums “Bringing It All Back Home” and “Highway 61 Revisited,” all in 1965 — the Complete Unknowns are acknowledging these seminal albums and events that, Mr. Weiskopf observed, “twisted the folk and rock worlds on their head.”

While Mr. Weiskopf is unavoidably the focal point of the group, performing the lead vocal and playing acoustic guitar and harmonica as Mr. Dylan does, he is quick to credit the musicians around him. “Everybody that plays in the group brings something of the music that is so important in what Dylan does,” he said. He referred to “all the great players that have joined him over the years,” such as Mark Knopfler and the late guitarists Mike Bloomfield and Jerry Garcia. “Between Klyph and Randy,” he said, “someone can summon one of those voices.”

Text and subtext rule in Judith Hudson’s most recent work. First there was the “Sex Advice Drawings” series, beginning in 2008 and continuing up through the present. Now comes a related “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” on view at Tripoli Gallery in Southampton.

The “Sex Advice Drawings” were a brilliant feminine usurpation of what has been a male-dominated milieu: the off-color joke as art. Richard Prince has made Playboy-related themes and sex jokes his subject matter for decades. It’s fresh and lively to see a woman not only take on the mantle but do it with such brio and her own sense of truth and irony. There is some deep, dark stuff going down, both on the surface and below, but there is more gritty strength here than self-pity or melancholy.

In the new works she uses watercolor to depict flesh and skin in a rich and subtle way. Sometimes pink and dewy, other times more sallow and aged. Often the placement of skin on skin, be it bodies touching or hands or feet, is the subject. As the different series developed, it is clear that she shifted from the low, coarse humor of the modern day to the subtler but no less bawdy classicism of Shakespeare.

As the artist said, “Shakespeare is the master of one-liners, which are funny because they are forever relevant and contemporary. When he wrote ‘truth, reason, and love keep little company together nowadays,’ ‘nowadays’ will always apply.”

Sure it’s all in good fun to be tricked into falling in love with an ass when it’s literally depicted on stage, but what about when it happens more figuratively with devastating emotional consequences? There is a lot of empathy here for human folly, and often the drawings with their bleeding color and the vulnerability of unconscious naked bodies exposed to the elements seem fraught with peril. When that’s not enough, she ups the ante, binding the wrists and ankles of her subjects, placing them in double jeopardy.

There are Puck-like creatures and strange animal beings as well as the languid asses and rather sexy lions. Whole parallel worlds of beasts both fact-based and fanciful become the partners of dreams, and all are teeming with Freudian meaning.

Free association rules the day here. It is a world where Puck as a subject leads to numerous drawings of clowns, and depictions of sleeping nudes spark an interest in more discreet elements of flesh, and even depictions of freckles, a striking contrast between the real and the idealized bodies of the dreams.

The handmade paper these drawings are executed on is rough-edged and an important part of many of them, determining shape and fissures in the surface. The watercolor is deep and sumptuous, the blues a true heavenly midnight and the depth of a lion’s mane a tangle of ambers and caramels. The text floats on top in opaque white blocks or in flowing black cursive. When the pieces lack text, the title helps fill in meaning and dark humor. There is much implied motion here, whether in the turbulent skies or the varied atmosphere around her beasts. The figures, however, remain still.

Dark humor, or even sadness comes out in other ways as well. Her series of “Players,” which are depictions of clowns, has an air of mawkish tragedy. Their made-up faces appear as death masks, no matter how joyful the color. Taking her theme another turn, she ends up with an “Unrequited Love Series” featuring Frankenstein’s monster and King Kong, and no less repugnant.

What are rather fun are the limited edition floor pieces she has commissioned from her drawing. “I know a bank where the wild thyme blows” is an image of an ass rolling in the grass with legs akimbo. It captures pure animalistic sensual pleasure and its placement on the floor to be walked on accentuates its baseness. At the same time, its implied joy at being walked over points to the foibles of human nature.

The exhibition will remain on view through July 13.

Revolution, art, and puns by the dozen mark the premiere of Tom Stoppard’s “Travesties” at the Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor this week. In the play, Henry Carr, an English consular officer played by Richard Kind, tells of his relationships with James Joyce in the midst of writing “Ulysses,” Tristan Tzara as the Dadaist movement picked up speed, and Lenin at the start of the Russian Revolution. Carr’s life intersected with these big leaguers of the 20th century during World War I in Zurich — or so he claims: Carr’s account includes “accurate memories and sometimes inaccurate ones,” says Michael Benz, who plays Tzara, the nihilist poet.

The play showcases Mr. Stoppard’s innovative writing style as he constructs dialogue and plot that highlight the politics and philosophy of the three 20th-century leaders. The play’s farcical nature and abundant wordplay steers “Travesties” through the waters of Marxism, Dadaism, and Modernism, ultimately pointing to questions of art, politics, art in politics, and politics in art. “Travesties” incorporates Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest,” bouncing off Wilde’s comedy, mimicking it, and adding to it. Mr. Benz explained that “the play has got a little bit for everybody. There’s the play within a play. There are magic tricks interspliced with soliloquies on the essence of what it is to be an artist.” He laughed, adding, “And I wear a monocle.”

Also appearing in “Travesties” are Carson Elrod as Joyce, Andrew Weems as Lenin, Aloysius Gigl, Isabel Keating, Julia Motyka, and Emily Trask.

The high jinks and hilarity of the production are written into the script — pies in the face, striptease, singing, dancing, adroit rhetoric — but Judith Dolan, the play’s costume designer, emphasized how Gregory Boyd, the director, especially brings the playfulness of the production to life with a balance of attention to performance and design sensibility. She described working with Mr. Boyd as “so much fun. He is always inventing, and so successfully.” Mr. Benz agreed. “Greg is not just a master of the theater and directing, but he’s a master of Stoppard as well.”

Ms. Dolan describes the costumes of the play as “vintage, as well as theatrical. Not Halloweenish, but flippant.” The costumes function as a historical representation of clothing in 1917, but also stitched into them are the ideologies of their wearers. The process of inventing the costumes included “looking at the culture and art of the period as well as what people were wearing in fashionable circles. The characters come from fashionable backgrounds with a real concern for how they look all the time, which makes it fun for when they let their hair down,” Ms. Dolan said. To incorporate the characters’ beliefs into the costumes, she would brainstorm with a collage for each character, very much in the spirit of Dadaism. The collages were satirical, a play on words, and often personal to Ms. Dolan herself.

The costume designer mentioned that each character has a unique identity and style as an artist, making the most salient feature of the play “the joy that it brings to language and the idea of different kinds of artists that exist.” In order to embody these “artists and their language in costume” she said she worked to make Tzara’s clothes “represent the new sensibility of improvisation at the time, with light fabric so as not to confine the actor’s body.” Lenin, “who wasn’t an artist but used images for propaganda,” is often dressed in black and white along with his wife. To capture the “crazy collage of words that Joyce presents, every time he comes in, he always is mismatched.”

Ms. Dolan worked with Mr. Boyd on two productions of “Travesties” prior to this one. She explained that while they would start out recreating the last production, “with a new cast, new things happen — it is the different charm of the actors.” Mr. Benz said they are focused on having fun and not getting “bogged down,” so that they can “maintain clarity of speech, keep it pacey, and find the joy in the play.”

“Travesties” will be staged Wednesdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m., Sundays at 2 and 7 p.m., and Tuesdays at 7 through July 20. Tickets start at $54, with $30 tickets available for those under 30, and free admission to the Sunday matinee for high school and college students.

The Capitol dome that greets visitors emerging from Union Station is a jarring welcome to Washington, D.C. Constructed to be a reassuring monument to probity and permanence, it now stands for the nation’s crippling divisions, personified by the voting members of the United States Congress. Seeing it in the flesh, unmediated by pixels or screens, it is a palpable and potent talisman of dysfunction.

How transformative, then, to be whisked away to the U.S. State Department to a reception and dinner where government and private endeavor join to put the nation’s best face forward as we greet the world, the implied din of competing viewpoints quelled by those working for a greater good.

That is the history and present function of the Foundation for Art and Preservation in Embassies, an organization that works hand in hand with the State Department to provide art to America’s diplomatic buildings around the world. It is the kind of world where liberal Hollywood, in the guise of Meryl Streep, can participate in a celebration of Alice Walton, a Walmart heiress, purely for her efforts to promote American art in an atmosphere devoid of the divisive dialogue that is Fox News and MSNBC’s bread and butter.

A small but varied sampling of the type of work the foundation has secured for the government through donations and commissions for this mission is now on view at Guild Hall. It includes artwork by Ellsworth Kelly, Vija Celmins, Chuck Close, John Baldessari, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, Susan Rothenberg, and many others. Robert Storr, the man who put the show together, is the dean of the Yale School of Art, a former curator at the Museum of Modern Art, and the chairman of the organization’s professional fine arts committee.

It is a sober task and one that he and the artists who work with the foundation treat with great seriousness. Some have criticized the committee’s choices as tame, but Mr. Storr disagrees. In a telephone conversation last week, he said that the artists who participate understand the gravity required. “No artist has chafed at any restrictions that might have arisen from the diplomatic mission,” he said. “It just hasn’t come up as an issue.”

Since all the committee members are busy professionals within the field of visual arts, much of their discussion about new acquisitions is done over the phone. This can be as simple as one work, often original prints in a limited edition just for FAPE or, lately, photographs, or more complex site-specific works commissioned for different places. Artists like Lynda Benglis, Maya Lin, Ellsworth Kelly, Joel Shapiro, and Sol Lewitt have had such artworks installed in embassies in India, China, Germany, and Turkey.

A good portion of the art serves a public relations purpose and is put on view in the main floors accessible to visitors, but Mr. Storr said much of it is in private offices as well. “Embassy workers spend hours and hours there writing up policy statements or processing passports,” he explained. “We want to give them something that engages their mind when they look up.”

He hopes, for example, that someone’s initial wariness of abstract art might shift to engagement and pride of possession. For that to happen, “it has to be intrinsically interesting.”

Although Mr. Storr has had the luxury through MoMA and other venues of having his pick of the best art and exhibition spaces, the work he does for FAPE is challenging in other ways. He is limited by the art that already exists or comes into the collection and the space available to display it, be it hallways or office walls.

“Yes, it’s a challenge,” he acknowledged, “but it can be done, and I have done it a lot. It’s like solving a puzzle step by step.”

At the beginning of his career, he said, he worked with a large corporate art collection. “I was a hammer-and-nails guy, hanging paintings above the desk. I know from way back how to solve those problems.”

Artists who agree to design print editions specifically for FAPE may look to the history and symbols of the nation as an inspiration. Flags are common images, as are color abstractions featuring red, white, and blue. A recent Carrie Mae Weems donation is a self-portrait in front of the Lincoln Memorial.

Just as often, symbolism that might be read into works was never the artist’s intent. “If someone is determined to see symbolism, you can’t stop them,” said Mr. Storr, but neither FAPE nor the artists, nor the diplomatic missions and embassies themselves, put forward ideological readings.

Mr. Storr will moderate a panel discussion with Tina Barney, Ms. Benglis, and Mr. Shapiro on Saturday from 3 to 4 p.m. at Guild Hall on the role of the artist working with his organization. One of the central questions will be how to make artwork independent of politics. Most artists, he said, are “keen to do just that. They are not trying to do nationalistic art. They want to represent the best we can offer in visual culture.”

The show will be on view through July 27. A reception will be held after the panel discussion from 4 to 6 p.m.

 “1 Way Up,” a documentary about two London teenagers struggling to escape their gang-torn neighborhood by competing in a BMX bike competition, will be screened at Guild Hall on Saturday at 3:30 p.m., in advance of its theatrical premiere in London.

Directed by Amy Mathieson, the film is a production of Shine Global, a nonprofit film production company in New York dedicated to ending the abuse and exploitation of children. Tickets to the benefit screening, at $25, $10 for children, are available at the Guild Hall box office.

Maria Bacardi, a Cuban-born singer who lives in East Hampton, will perform “Romance and Rosés” at the Wolffer Estate Vineyard in Sagaponack next Thursday from 5 to 8 p.m. as part of the winery’s Twilight Thursdays series. David Oquendo will accompany her on guitar.

Ms. Bacardi’s debut album, “Deseo,” released last year, is a collection of traditional ballads of love and longing performed in the Cuban bolero style and sung in Spanish, French, and English. The performance is free. Glasses and bottles of wine and cheese and charcuterie plates will be available.

Akiko Kobayashi, a violinist, and Eric Siepkes, a pianist, will give a free concert of works by Beethoven and DeFalla at the Montauk Library on Sunday at 3:30 p.m. The duo met at an international music festival in 2009 and have been performing together ever since.

Ms. Kobayashi has appeared as a soloist with orchestras including the Tokyo Suginami Kokaido Chamber Orchestra, the Yonkers Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Jamaica Symphony. Mr. Siepkes has given recitals at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall, the Baruch Center of Performing Arts in New York, and the Chicago Cultural Center.

The Choral Society of the Hamptons is joining forces with Guild Hall on Sunday to celebrate the life and music of Leonard Bernstein, with a 6 p.m. screening there of Susan Lacy’s “Leonard Bernstein: Reaching for the Note” and a related panel discussion. On June 28, the choral society will present “Bernstein! From Bible to Broadway” at the Bridgehampton Presbyterian Church.

“Leonard Bernstein: Reaching for the Note,” an award-winning 1998 documentary, was produced for the PBS series American Masters. Ms. Lacy will participate in the panel discussion with two of the maestro’s children, Alexander Bernstein and Nina Bernstein Simmons, and Cornelia Foss, an artist whose late husband was Lukas Foss, the composer. Adam Green, the theater critic of Vogue, whose father, Adolph Green, performed in Bernstein’s musical theater pieces, will moderate the discussion, which will follow the two-hour film.

Ms. Lacy was the creator and executive producer of American Masters from its inception in 1986 until last September, when she left PBS to produce and direct documentary films for HBO. Speaking from her Sag Harbor home the day after a red-eye flight from Los Angeles, she said, “The reason I chose to leave the series I created and love is twofold. When I started the series I didn’t realize I was going to become a filmmaker, but over the course of almost 30 years, I did. I loved every part of working on the series, but I really loved making my own films. So when I was given the opportunity to just do that after 35 years at PBS, I couldn’t turn it down. There was also a lot of appeal to being able to make films without having to raise the money for them.”

Ms. Lacy majored in American studies at the University of Virginia, where she received a B.A., and at George Washington University, where she earned a master’s. “I thought I was going to be either a journalist or a scholar,” she said, “but I found my way to Channel 13.” There, she started working with Jack Venza, who created the Great Performances series and became her mentor. “I learned a lot working for a person whose mantra was, if we can’t make the film as excellent as the artist whose work we’re profiling, then we shouldn’t be in this business.”

Mr. Venza set a high standard for television programs on drama, dance, and music. One day Ms. Lacy realized, quite suddenly, that there were no programs about artists.

Because her particular interest was American cultural history, she decided to focus on American artists. “Nobody thought this was a good idea,” she recalled. “I had to convince people that stories about people who create are amazing stories.”

She insisted that the series run in prime time, and recommended that it debut during the summer, when, in the early days of cable, network programming consisted mostly of reruns. “Because there was nothing else on, and the programs were good, it gave the critics something to write about.” After the first season, PBS decided to try a second. It was only after 10 years that Ms. Lacy began to relax and think the series might last. It has; after 28 years, 215 films, and 27 Emmy Awards, it is still going strong.

Ms. Lacy’s parents were both musicians, and she was raised in a house full of music. “Leonard Bernstein was a hero. I used to get teased that I started American Masters so I could make a film about Lenny, and there’s a bit of truth to that.” Early on, she approached the Bernstein children, who agreed to participate. “The three children were not involved in the making of the film, but they are a big part of why it is so successful. Their honesty about their father, and their insights, really separate the film from anything else that has been done about him.” Ms. Lacy explained that one of the fundamental principles of American Masters was that the films had to be independent from editorial control by either the subject or the families.

In an email this week, Bernstein’s older daughter, Jamie, a filmmaker, concert narrator, and broadcaster, discussed the family’s initial concerns. “I remember how anxious my siblings and I were at the prospect of this in-depth, rather intimate film coming into the world so relatively soon after losing our father,” she said. “We had barely had time to process the loss ourselves . . . and so Alexander, Nina, and I felt a keen trepidation as we sat down, each in turn, to be interviewed by Susan.”

“Susan’s fierce intelligence and compassion reassured us throughout that difficult process that she was doing this for love. We could have felt manipulated or exploited by such an experience, but we never did, and the resulting film glows with the authenticity of Susan’s own heart.”

One of the first things Ms. Lacy did was visit the Library of Congress, home of the Leonard Bernstein Collection. In a room “as big as my house in Sag Harbor,” there were 50,000 photographs, the white suit Bernstein wore in Israel, pencils he used to write scores, and all his letters and diaries.

Ms. Lacy didn’t have a title for the film until she came across this text in an essay written by Bernstein: “In the beginning was the note, and the note was with God, and whosoever can reach for that note, reach high and bring it back to us to our earthly ears, he is a composer, and to the extent of his reach, partakes of the divine.”

“Lenny saw composing as the most important thing one could do on this planet,” Ms. Lacy said, “and I think he was a little disappointed that his own ‘serious’ work was not taken as seriously as he hoped during his lifetime. You look at that film and realize he saw himself in relation to Mahler as Salieri did to Mozart.”

Ms. Lacy has made films about living artists, Paul Simon, Joni Mitchell, and Lena Horne among them, as well as subjects no longer alive. “The advantage of working with people who are alive is that they can become a big part of telling the story,” she said. “I was happy that there were so many of Lenny’s letters and diaries that his ‘voice’ was in the film. And that voice belongs to Harris Yulin, a wonderful actor who has a home in Bridgehampton. I thought Harris added so much to the film, because it never felt like a narration.”

Ms. Lacy stays in touch with Bernstein’s children. Alexander runs the Bernstein Family Foundation and is founding chairman of the Leonard Bernstein Center for Learning. Ms. Simmons worked with the Library of Congress to make the Bernstein Archives digitally available to the public. The fruits of that collaboration can be seen at the library’s American Memory website. Jamie is currently working on a film about El Sistema, a Venezuelan youth orchestra program that uses music to bring social transformation to disadvantaged children around the world.

At first, Ms. Lacy remembered, she submitted individual shows for Emmy consideration, but in 1999 she began to submit the series. It has been nominated every year since. It won nine times, three of which were for shows she directed: “Judy Garland: By Myself,” “Inventing David Geffen,” and “Reaching for the Note.” The series has also won 13 Peabody awards.

“I’ve just taken a turn in my life to focus on producing, directing, and writing films, and I’m loving that,” she said. “I miss working with the variety of subjects I was working with at American Masters, but I’m really proud of the legacy I created there, and I hope it continues.”