The legendary Judson Dance Theater will be the subject of a talk by Judy Hussie-Taylor on Saturday at 4 p.m. at the Watermill Center. Between 1962 and 1966, hundreds of choreographers, visual artists, poets, musicians, and filmmakers experimented with modes of performance at the Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square in Greenwich Village.

In 2012, Ms. Hussie-Taylor, executive and artistic director of Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery, invited many of the original performers as well as a new generation of artists to consider Judson’s impact on their work. She will talk about organizing “Platform 2012: Judson Now,” which included live presentations by Steve Paxton, Lucinda Childs, David Gordon, Yvonne Rainer, Simone Forti, Meredith Monk, and Carolee Schneemann, among many others.

The talk is free. Reservations, which are required, may be made at watermillcenter.org.

“God of Carnage‚” by Yasmina Reza, opened at the Hampton Theatre Company in Quogue last week, the end of a standout season of productions that managed to be both funny and provocative at the same time.

The play, performed without an intermission, follows the afternoon get-together of two sets of parents who meet to discuss what to do after their 11-year-old sons have engaged in a playground battle. The couples, Alan and Annette Raleigh (Andrew Botsford and Rosemary Cline) and Michael and Veronica Novak (Joe Pallister and Jessica Ellwood), talk about “the soothing powers of culture‚” and “the art of co-existence,” sip espresso, and admire expensive flowers, while just underneath the veneer, all hell is about to break loose, Albee-style.

The meeting begins with awkward formality as the group samples Veronica’s clafouti and Alan answers a stream of business calls on his cell, and slowly degenerates into a name-calling, foot-stomping free-for-all. Whether it’s a casual confession by Michael about what he did with their daughter’s hamster, or Annette’s sudden onset of nausea (emetophobes beware), their real nature rises to the surface.

At some point, alliances form and are broken — one couple against the other, or the men against the women, or any other possible combination. Add in the expensive rum, and eventually all of the niceties are stripped away and dog-eat-dog triumphs over civility. The god of carnage is, as always, pleased by the sacrifice.

This is all done in fun, of course, and the audience gets a good dose of low-class humor as the high-class parents become children themselves. “God of Carnage‚” won the Tony Award for Best Play in 2009, and prior to that, the Olivier Award for Best New Comedy (which was also won by “Heroes,” another French-to-English translation served up earlier in the Quogue season). Roman Polanski adapted Reza’s play into the 2011 film “Carnage.”

The performances are all spot-on. Mr. Botsford plays Michael — who is really in two places at once as he tries to put out pharmaceutical fires on his cell while appearing interested in the parental conference — with a dash of well-placed confusion and a heaping helpful of arrogance, a winning comedy combination. Joe Pallister’s Michael is a real man forced to wear a monkey suit by his controlling wife, Veronica, played with panache by Jessica Ellwood, who tries to keep everything functioning smoothly. Rosemary Cline gets to make one of the largest leaps, from composed, cultured wealth management director to a frightened, sickly, spoiled child. All in all, the cast works together and works well.

Diana Marbury, who directs with aplomb, has also delivered a set that features a stylish neutral living room with a background of angry red, a portent of what the evening will bring.

“God of Carnage” lets the audience enjoy watching an urbanite, bourgeois train crash up close and personal, but with plenty of laughs emerging from the wreckage.

The play will remain in production through June 8, with performances Thursdays through Sundays. Tickets and showtimes are available at hamptontheatre.org.

Andrea Cote is a multimedia artist whose work includes photography, prints, paintings, sculptures, performances, and installations. “I do work that invites people to participate, that’s very public, but then I also have work that’s very private, done in the studio,” she said last week.

Ms. Cote’s public art projects will be the subject of a talk at Guild Hall on Saturday at 3 p.m. Her most recent was “Eyes on Main Street,” which was exhibited last year from May to October in downtown Riverhead. Her intention was to promote an awareness of the town’s diversity and the stories of its citizens.  

“Living in Flanders, I knew that Riverhead had been trying to draw people there to see what’s going on,” she said. “The East End Arts Council has been on Main Street for a long time, and the Suffolk Theater opened last year, but there are also a lot of vacant storefronts. I wanted a way to activate those empty windows.”

“Eyes on Main Street” consisted of a website, which is still accessible; posters placed in empty storefronts, and a window installation of 75 blindfolds on which Ms. Cote printed photographs of the eyes of local residents and business owners. “The blindfolds are quite beautiful on their own, but there’s something else that happens when you put them on a person. It becomes uncanny and striking.”

Each poster shows the artist standing in front of a Main Street location, wearing a blindfold printed with the eyes of the person associated with that site. The posters were imprinted with QR codes (barcodes containing information about the items to which they are attached), which, when scanned with a smartphone, opened a video portrait of the person. The videos are mini-documentaries that add up to a portrait of a community. A selection will be shown at the Pollock-Krasner House in Springs in September as part of the Artists on Film series.

Ms. Cote’s video “Memorized” is currently playing in the artist-members exhibition at Guild Hall. At the O, Miami Poetry Festival in 2013, she invited people to write their favorite line from a poem with chalk on a blackboard, photographed each one, and created a slideshow from the results. “I was a poetry minor,” she said. “I’m thinking about a piece using my own poetry and a chalkboard, for which I’ll cast my own chalk.”

The human body is often the generative element of her more private, studio-based work. For two decades she has used the body as both subject and object, often in the same work. For “Second Skin,” she cast a rubber mask of her face and took a series of self-portraits trying it on and otherwise handling it. “I was after a sense of vulnerability,” she explained. “I’m playing with what it means to shed one’s skin or adopt a persona.” The mask both exposes and hides what’s beneath it.

In a series of collages, Ms. Cote cut out her own naked figure from a sequence of photographs and treated the images as paper dolls, folding, twisting, and distorting them. She used an overhead projector aimed at a studio wall on which she had pinned other objects and photographed the resulting collages, which have the surreal feel of Man Ray’s Rayographs. Her body is both a representation and an object to be manipulated, and the distortions add an unsettling effect to some of the images.

Photography, printmaking, and casting figure prominently in Ms. Cote’s work. “There’s something about casting and printmaking that creates a record, an indexical mark,” she said. “I often have a setup, a conceptual framework for a piece, but then I just play with the materials. It becomes a performance in the studio, and the photographs are a record.”

In one work from graduate school, Ms. Cote interacted with a life-sized silhouette of herself, cut out of Mylar — peering through it, dancing with it, and hiding behind it, while she herself was naked. For the series “Body Print Mandalas” she created rubber casts of parts of her body, then inked and pressed them to Mylar, creating abstract patterns that are nonetheless recognizable for what they are. “In these works I am taking the body apart in fragments with the intent to weave them together in new and more ‘wholistic’ ways.”

Ms. Cote is now working on materials for a show in September at Art Sites in Riverhead, featuring live performances in the gallery, photographic work, and the opportunity for viewers to sit for castings.

She showed a visitor a recent cast of the face of Claire Watson, an artist from Water Mill. “I talk to people while I’m sculpting them,” she said, “and I record the conversations, which will be compiled into a sound piece shown with the portraits. So it becomes a whole experience between two people, with one trying to capture the other.”

She also plans to create a live mandala on the Art Sites floor using her body and Peconic River mud. Again, the body is present, in action, but it is also a tool. Once completed, the mandala will be a record, a kind of action painting using the body and mud instead of brushes and paint.

Ms. Cote was born in Brooklyn but grew up and went to college in Miami. After graduating with a B.F.A. in 1994, she and her sister “just got in the car and drove from Miami to Seattle.” There, she worked as an artist’s model (“Modeling was my introduction to performance”). After two years she moved to Philadelphia for a year, then enrolled at the State University at Purchase, where she earned an M.F.A. in sculpture in 2003.

Ms. Cote and her husband, Pierre Cote, a sculptor, left Brooklyn for Flanders in 2007 when his employer, Crozier Fine Arts, asked him to manage the company’s Southampton office. Soon after they relocated, Ms. Cote became pregnant. Their son, Nathaniel, is now 6.

In 2012, the Anthony Giordano Gallery at Dowling College presented “Body of Evidence,” a 13-year survey of Ms. Cote’s work. She has exhibited at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Delaware Art Museum, the Paul Robeson Galleries at Rutgers University’s Newark campus, and galleries both nationally and internationally. She has created performances for the Dumbo Arts Festival, the Neuberger Museum, and the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, to name just a few.

For the past year Ms. Cote has been the teaching artist in the Watermill Center’s Young Artists Residency Project. The after-school arts program, run in partnership with the Bridgehampton Child Care and Recreation Center, engages students ages 8 to 12 in visual and performance arts. “The kids get to see the collection, interact with the artists in residence, and work with different materials,” she said. “Upcoming is a live performance with video, text, dancing, and drumming. It’s fun working with the kids, and it keeps you on your toes.”

On July 18 she will lead a “gesture jam” on the terrace of the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill. The idea of the program, which is an inventive figure-drawing class, was born in Seattle, where Ms. Cote and her partner choreographed and improvised performances while artists sketched them. For the Parrish jam, musicians will provide the soundtrack and serve as the models at the same time.

William King

At Duck Creek Farm

The John Little Society will host an installation of three outdoor sculptures by William King, the noted East Hampton artist, at Duck Creek Farm in Springs from June 29 through the month of July.

The society, created to bring contemporary art to East Hampton, is seeking donations in support of arts programming at the historic farm, which was bought by Little, an Abstract Expressionist painter, in 1948 and purchased by the Town of East Hampton in 2006.

While donations of any amount will be appreciated, three categories of sponsorship have been established: Platinum ($250), Gold ($100), and Silver ($50). Sponsorship-level donations received by June 10 will be acknowledged in the exhibition announcement.

Checks, made payable  to the Town of East Hampton, with "Duck Creek Art Exhibition" specified on the face of the check, may be mailed to Jess Frost, 366 Three Mile Harbor Road, East Hampton 11937.

New at Halsey Mckay

Concurrent exhibitions of work by Matt Kenny and Adam Marnie will open Saturday at Halsey Mckay Gallery in East Hampton and remain on view through June 23.

“Other City,” Mr. Kenny’s first solo show at the gallery, includes three bodies of work that map the psychological and physical residue of New York City’s ever-expanding landscape.

“Recursions” continues Mr. Marnie’s engagement with site-specific installation and architectural intervention, with red inkjet prints mounted onto altered sheets of drywall, transforming the gallery space.

An opening reception will take place Sunday from noon to 4 p.m.

Ceramics at Ille

Ille Arts in Amagansett will host an exhibition of ceramics by Steve Keister, Jennie Jieun Lee, and Elizabeth Levine from Saturday through June 24, with an opening reception scheduled for Saturday from 5 to 7 p.m.

In Mr. Keister’s recent work, the cast forms are arranged to create relief images of birds, insects, and other creatures, loosely based on Mesoamerican glyphic images. Ms. Lee, who was born in Korea and grew up in New York, reinterprets historical forms and techniques through the lens of her personal history. Ms. Levine, who lives in Amagansett and New York City, will exhibit colorful earthenware flowers.

Schmidt to Sign

Bastienne Schmidt, a mixed-media artist who lives in Bridgehampton, will sign copies of her new book, “Topography of Quiet,” Saturday from 5 to 7 p.m. at BookHampton’s East Hampton store.

Inspired by her travels in Egypt, Vietnam, Japan, Burma, and Greece, the book explores, through paintings, drawings, and photographs, the interaction between nature and imagination and the sensation and memory of travel.

An exhibition of work drawn from “Topography of Quiet” will be held at Ille Arts in Amagansett from June 27 through July 8.

Peter Dayton in Chelsea

“Anarchy in My Head,” an exhibition of paintings, collages, and sculpture by Peter Dayton, opens today at Winston Wachter Fine Art in Chelsea with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m. The show will remain on view through July 31.

Mr. Dayton, who lives in East Hampton, has created a body of work that ranges from lush flower collages, through glossy surfboard paintings inspired by the work of such artists as Frank Stella and Kenneth Noland, to vinyl discs and record jackets that pay tribute to the music industry.

Hoie in Peace and War

“Bountiful Harvest,” an exhibition of Claus Hoie’s fruit and vegetable-inspired paintings, will open tomorrow at the Bridgehampton Museum and remain on view through Oct. 15. A reception will be held tomorrow from 5 to 7 p.m.

Created during the last three decades of Hoie’s life, the watercolors reflect his intellectual curiosity, imagination, and sense of humor. The paintings on view have been donated to the museum’s permanent collection by the Helen and Claus Hoie Charitable Foundation.

Five watercolors and one line drawing currently on view at the NATO ambassador’s residence in Brussels, Belgium, show the application of Hoie’s skills to a very different subject. Those works were created during World War II, when the artist was serving with the Army’s 99th Infantry Battalion. After the Brussels exhibition, the works will travel to other sites in Europe before being installed permanently at the Paris post of the American Legion.

Beach Scenes at Rogers

“Hail to the Beach,” an exhibition of paintings by Dinah Maxwell Smith, will open with a reception Saturday between 4 and 6 p.m. at the Southampton Historical Museum and remain on view through Oct. 8.

Ms. Smith, who lives in Southampton, uses a sensual handling of paint to depict naturalistic environments. Inspired by historical photographs, the work in the current exhibition features impressionistic paintings of Long Island beach scenes.

The show will take place at the Rogers Mansion, which is open Wednesday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Admission is $4, free for members and children under 18.

Abstract Paintings at Kramoris

“Open Paths,” a selection of abstract paintings by Christopher Engel, will open today at the Romany Kramoris Gallery in Sag Harbor, where it will be on view through June 26.

According to the gallery, the paintings were inspired by the interplay of light and wind on the water visible from Mr. Engel’s studio overlooking Long Pond in Sag Harbor, as well as his former summer studio off the coast of Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia.

Woodcuts of Old New York by Ted Davies will also be on view at the gallery. A reception will take place on June 14 from 4:30 to 6 p.m.

New at Crazy Monkey

A new exhibition featuring the work of Andrea McCafferty, Ellyn Tucker, and Bob Tucker will open at the Crazy Monkey Gallery in Amagansett today and run through June 30. Work by other gallery members will also be on view. A reception will be held Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m.

Antiques Treasures

St. Ann’s Outreach Program will host Antiques Treasures, a day of appraisals, on June 14 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at St. Ann’s Church in Bridgehampton. Appraisers will include Terry Wallace, Gary Weinshank, Marsha Malinowski, Leo­nard Davenport, Kevin Tierney, and Robert Barker. The $30 admission allows participants to bring three items for appraisal, which can be anything from decorative arts and fine arts to jewelry, silver, and small antiques. A reception and house tour will be held that night at a 300-year-old house in Water Mill. Tickets for the reception are $125 per person and $225 per couple. Tickets for the appraisal can be bought in advance by calling 537-1527. Money from the event will benefit the East End Hospice, the Dominican Sisters, and Maureen’s Haven.

To be a vital regional theater in America, the person in charge must be willing to take chances, to mine the theatrical landscape for new works he or she believes in. Scott Schwartz, the new artistic director at the Bay Street Theatre, has done just that, and has come up with a diamond in the rough in “Conviction,” a play by Carey Crim, with Mr. Schwartz directing. It received its world premiere on Saturday night.

Tom Hodges, brilliantly played by Garret Dillahunt, is a beloved high school teacher in a contemporary middle-class community who is accused of having sex with a 16-year-old female student, then is tried and found guilty of rape. “Conviction” is a study of the aftermath of all this for Tom, his family, and his friends.

Tom’s wife Leigh, played by the wonderful Sarah Paulson, has held together hearth and family, in the person of their son, Nicholas, portrayed by an excellent young talent, Daniel Burns, as best she can while Tom is away in prison. She has been supported by Bruce and Jayne Wagner, their best friends, played by another talented duo, Brian Hutchison and Elizabeth Reaser.

Ms. Crim has a lovely cinematic style of writing that is very natural, jumping in and out of scenes, taking the audience on a journey down a dark road with Tom and Leigh.

Mr. Schwartz has put together Broadway-level talent here, both onstage and off, which is not surprising, since he is a top director. Anna Louizos’s set maximizes this small space, making it seem much larger, with several playing areas. Her work, along with that of the lighting designer Mike Billings, gives us a visually beautiful bathtub scene. Her set becomes a sixth character in the play’s journey toward its inevitable conclusion. Bart Fasbender is a gifted composer and sound designer, maintaining and propelling the mood of the piece through its several scene changes. Jessica Ford’s costumes enhance the naturalistic feel of the piece, ditto Kathy Fabian’s prop design.

Mr. Schwartz has helped this stellar cast find the nuances, and, so important in a dark play, the humor.

This is, at essence, a ghost story. These are characters haunted by the past, the present, and each other.

The play starts with a scene that serves as a prequel. Ms. Crim holds up a mirror to the audience, creating educated, upper middle class characters. Mr. Dillahunt does a remarkable job creating, essentially, two characters, two men with very different worldviews. We see his passion for his work in the beginning and his emptiness afterward.

The second scene begins the play’s true journey, with Ms. Paulson’s beautifully created Leigh seeking something she can never have: certitude. She has desperately kept the worldview of her husband outside the four walls of her home. But those walls are pierced by her friend Jayne, the only character in the play who does have certitude, as well as by anonymous callers who threaten and taunt Leigh. Ms. Paulson plays Leigh beautifully, allowing her to go to the emotional edge without falling off.

Mr. Hutchison’s Bruce is a great buddy for Tom, and together they give us one of the funniest scenes in the show in the second act, as they return from a basketball game, allowing the audience to exhale. Ms. Crim has a wonderful sense of humor, and, when she revisits this piece, she may want to add a couple of more moments like that in the second act.

Ms. Reaser, who is a fine actress, has a tough assignment (are there any easy ones here?). Because Jayne is the only character with a sense of sureness, she is frequently the driving force onstage.

Mr. Burns is a dynamo of talent, as he does several transitions in the show.

“Twenty-three-and-a-half hours of the day, I’m sure,” Leigh tells Tom toward the end of the play. “But there are other times, those lone moments that manage to burrow in like a tick,” she says, concluding, “When I’m in that doubting place, I hate myself for loving you.”

In this production on opening night, the first scene seemed quite peppy, a little too much so. That may be in the writing, or it may be in the acting, but a little less would be a lot more. Things settled down in the second scene, and really took off in the lovely third scene between Tom and Leigh, when you hear the most potent tool a playwright or an actor has: silence.

Again, this is a diamond in the rough. It needs some cutting and polishing. It runs right now a little over two hours with one intermission. There are three other theatrical entities involved as producers here, the Rubicon Theater in California, Dead Posh Productions in London, and the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre in Canada, where surely this exciting new play will continue its journey toward its final form.

    The Hamptons International Film Festival will once again present its SummerDocs series of films this season at Guild Hall in East Hampton. Now in its sixth year, the series will premiere on June 21 with “Life Itself,” a film by Steve James, the director of “Hoop Dreams,” about the film critic Roger Ebert.

    Alec Baldwin, who is on the panel selecting the films and serves as the host of the series, will introduce the film and interview Chaz Ebert, Mr. Ebert’s widow, after the screening. The film is scheduled for theatrical release in July.

    The next film in the series will be shown on July 25. “Keep on Keepin’ On”  follows Clark Terry, an aging jazz legend who played with Duke Ellington and Count Basie and helped train Miles Davis and Quincy Jones, and his relationship with a budding prodigy. Mr. Terry, who at 89 is in failing health, mentors Justin Kaulflin, a 23-year-old pianist who has “uncanny talent that threatens to be undone by his nerves.”

    Mr. Kaulflin prepares for a competition that could make his career as his mentor sees his own trajectory come to a close. Al Hicks, an Australian, directed the film and will be in attendance to speak with Mr. Baldwin after the screening. Quincy Jones and Paula DuPre Pesmen were the producers.

    There will be four screenings in all. The last two will be announced at a later date.Tickets for the screenings, which typically sell out in advance, are available at guildhall.org or at the Guild Hall box office.

    The Madoo Conservancy in Saga­ponack will hold a memorial service for Robert Dash, Madoo’s founder, on Sunday at 5 p.m. Several of Mr. Dash’s friends will speak, and Barnsley, his Norwich terrier, will lead visitors around the garden, visiting the “hermit’s hut,” the quincunx gardens, the potager, and the “bridge of the bankrupt painter.”

    Mr. Dash was a painter and writer whose artwork is in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Yale University Art Gallery, among others. The Beineke Library at Yale acquired his archives of poetry, manuscripts, and letters in 2010.

    In honor of Mr. Dash, clams and Bloody Marys will be served — “on us,” according to the conservancy.

    The East Hampton Historical Society’s annual trustees’ tag sale will be held Saturday from 9 a.m. until noon on the back lawn of the society’s headquarters, the Osborn-Jackson House on Main Street.

    Items both useful and collectible will include furniture, lighting, household items, folk art, and decorative home accessories. A midcentury Dunbar table, a set of Windsor dining chairs, garden planters, and glassware are among the offerings.

    The tag sale is a benefit for the historical society.

    The Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill will launch Sounds of Summer, the first of two summer music series, with a performance by the HooDoo Loungers tomorrow at 6 p.m. Billed as the East Coast’s New Orleans party band, the group’s repertoire ranges from classic Mardi Gras-style music to its own original tunes.

    The nine-piece band features two lead vocalists, a three-piece horn section, and a rhythm section. David Deitch, who sings and plays keyboard and accordion, is the music director and arranger. Joe Lauro, a bassist and vocalist, is familiar to East End music fans and has performed with Gene Casey and the Lone Sharks.

    Future Sounds of Summer shows will feature the Next Level Band (June 6), Mambo Loco (July 4), Edith and Bennett (Aug. 1), and the Ebony Hillbillies (Sept. 5).

    Jazz en Plein Air will return to the Parrish on Friday, May 30, at 6 p.m. with drummer Eliot Zigmund, accompanied by Ed MacEachen on guitar and Mick Eckroth on organ. Richie Siegler, jazz musician and founding director of Escola de Samba BOOM, will program the series.

    Tickets to both music series are free with museum admission, which is $10 for adults, $8 for senior citizens, and free for members, students with ID, and children under 18.

    They came together in a rehearsal studio on 42nd Street in the Broadway district on May 5 to embark on an artistic journey.

    “Conviction,” a drama by Carey Crim that will begin its world premiere run at the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor on Tuesday, was about to receive its first read through, the very first step in what would have to be an intense rehearsal period.

    Jessie Vacchiano, the production stage manager, had pulled two long tables together, and 15 people sat around them with Ms. Crim at the head. To her right was Scott Schwartz, the theater’s new artistic director, who is directing this first production of the season.

    That the rehearsal schedule was so short is necessitated by the realities of modern regional theater. Mr. Schwartz has assembled a cast with strong credits crossing over from theater to television and film. While theater may be an actor’s true love, it is the latter two that pay the bills.

    On Ms. Crim’s left were Garret Dillahunt, Sarah Paulson, and Daniel Burns. Mr. Dillahunt plays Tom Hodges, a popular high school teacher who has been accused of sexual misconduct with a student. Ms. Paulson plays his wife, Leigh, and Mr. Burns his son, Nicholas.

    Opposite the threesome sat Brian Hutchison and Elizabeth Reasor, cast as a couple who start the play as the Hodges family’s closest friends. Also at the table were designers, assistant stage managers, and another actor, Chloe Dirksen, Ms. Paulson’s understudy, who is scheduled to step in for one performance.

    Ms. Vacchiano handed out the scripts, and the actors began going page by page on their own, using bright yellow highlighters to mark out their lines.

    Surrounding the core group at the table were another 20 or so people, seated in a semicircle, including more designers, assistants, and some of the theater’s producing team. Co-producing “Conviction,” along with Bay Street, are Rubicon Theatre in California, Dead Posh Productions of London, and Canada’s Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre.

    Jessica Ford, the costume designer, pulled actors away from the table one at a time to take measurements. “Ladies and gentleman, we’re starting,” Ms. Vacchiano announced. Everyone took their seats.

    Within a day or two, Ms. Vacchiano will have marked the floor of the studio with spike tape to recreate the set design in real space. Set pieces will be brought in as needed to further the actors’ understanding of the actual playing space. Ms. Vacchiano will record every move the actors make during rehearsal in a prompt book. These recorded movements, called blocking, allow actors to know where their fellow thespians will be at all times. The prompt book, which becomes the production’s bible and roadmap, is a script where blocking as well as all the cues, from lights to music to sound, are marked. As revisions are made to the script, Ms. Vacchiano would record them, too.

    The actors will experiment with their movements onstage during the rehearsal process, with each variation recorded. Eventually, they will lock in on their blocking. It will be Ms. Dirksen’s responsibility, when she steps in to play the role as directed by Mr. Schwartz and recorded in Ms. Vacchiano’s prompt book.

    “Any process of creating new work in theater is a process of stepping into the unknown,” Mr. Schwartz told those assembled on May 5. “This process will be a journey of discovery. Right now, it is very exciting, but it is also mysterious. There are twists and turns, bumps in the road, that we can’t see now.”

    Ms. Crim spoke to the room about the impetus for creating “Conviction,” describing two cases that caught her eye in which a teacher was accused of having sexual relations with a teenage student. “How does that effect the family?” she asked. “What do you do when you don’t know?”

    “This is a play about relationships, and lives changed by a single event,” Mr. Schwartz added.

    Theater designers have a somewhat unique position in the arts, in that their work is both creative and practical. The most beautiful set or costume in the world is useless if the actors can’t enter and exit easily, or get a quick change done backstage in time for the next scene.

    The set designer spoke to the group next. Anna Louizos stood next to an illuminated scale model. “This is a thrust space. Sightlines are crucial,” said Ms. Louizos, who has been nominated twice for Tony Awards for her work on Broadway. “One of the visual images we talk about early on is, ‘This is a glass house.’ ” Ms. Louizos designed a naturalistic set that is, in essence, a skeleton of a house.

    While she would still do little nip-and-tucks, her journey with “Conviction” was almost complete by May 5, at least for this production. She began working on the design last September in consultation with Mr. Schwartz.

    Mr. Schwartz touched on the practical elements of the design. There are two aisles that run through the audience, right to the stage. “We may use the voms for exits.” Also, he told the group, the only upstage exit is stage left. “We have to keep this in mind as we block.”

    Ms. Ford, the costume designer, had already met with Mr. Schwartz “to make sure that I was at the right starting point,” she said. She stood by sketches she had done for the cast and explained her vision to the company. She stressed the realistic quality of the show. It is her goal that the costumes reflect the audience, in a sense. “These are real people in the suburbs,” she said.

    One scene from “Conviction” shows the two men coming home from a basketball game. “Can they be Bulls fans?” the costume designer asked, having a certain look in mind. Mr. Hutchison pointed out that “there is a mention of Cape May” in the play, far from Chicago.

    “Oh well. Go, Dragons!” Ms. Ford joked, making up a team name.

    “I was thinking of the transitions, and how we are going to make them,” she said later about that first reading. A quick change backstage during a play is a complicated maneuver. “You have to rehearse them in time. You choreograph it like you would a dance,” she said. Instead of using buttons and zippers, costume designers will frequently substitute Velcro.

    The sound designer’s job illustrates the combination of form and function in theater. Throughout the read-through that day, Bart Fassbender took notes, particularly focusing on the scene changes Ms. Crim wrote into the play. Music will cover the transitions from scene to scene, he said. The sound design, he said, is something you get a feel for during the rehearsal process, what will fit the mood and texture of the piece. One thing there won’t be are microphones for the actors. “There really aren’t any bad seats in the theater,” he said about Bay Street’s intimate house.

    “We want to focus on the different layers,” Mr. Schwartz said before the company took its first break. “We want to be honest. This is such an honest piece,” he said.

    The break done, Ms. Vacchiano reassembled the company around the table to begin the read through. She clicked her stopwatch. “Lights fade,” an assistant stage manager read. The actors began reading. They were on their way.