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.

    For the fourth consecutive year, the Animal Rescue Fund of the Hamptons is turning its thrift shop in Sagaponack into a designer showhouse for the Memorial Day weekend. Six rooms will be styled by well-known interior designers from New York City and the East End for the event, which will launch with a preview cocktail party Saturday at 5 p.m. The shop will be open on Sunday and Monday from 10 a.m. until 4 p.m.

    This year’s designers are John Bjornen of Bjornen Design in Sag Harbor, Suzanne Caldwell and Maria Greenlaw of Design House in Southampton, Byron C. James of House of Oasis in New York, Scott Sanders from New York, Chris Mead and Zoe Hoare of English Country Antiques in Bridgehampton, and Rob Winterrowd from New York.

    A recent visit to the thrift shop provided a few hints of what visitors can expect this weekend. Ms. Caldwell and Ms. Greenlaw were busy assembling a wood-and-canvas cot for what they envision as a sleeping porch. “We see it as a good place to relax, to come back from the beach and be able to throw your stuff down, take a nap, play cards, or have tea,” said Ms. Greenlaw. With the exception of the cot, everything in the room, including lanterns, an elaborate birdcage, wicker baskets painted by the designers, and straw hats, is from the ARF thrift shop.

    Ms. Hoare was outfitting another room, which she and Mr. Mead refer to as “English country style with a twist.” Pepper, Ms. Hoare’s Staffordshire bull terrier, was on hand, greeting visitors but ignoring a life-sized Great Dane, a stuffed animal Ms. Hoare made clear was not part of the décor.

    “I’m using some bark lamps, lots of earthy colors, because it’s my style,” she said. Two prints, images of dogs, came from Ian Mason, an English artist, via a supplier of English Country Antiques. In fact, everything in the room comes from the Bridgehampton store except for two wooden chairs. “They’re from ARF. I just ell in love with them. I like to mix rustic and quite clean lines, with a touch of eccentricity thrown in.”

    John Bjornen’s room is the “captain’s cabin. I imagine a captain who is old and craggy and who has settled back in with all the pieces he has collected in his travels around the world. Some will be nautical, but some won’t.” Everything in the room is from ARF’s shop, including a gateleg table, two nautical-themed prints, and a couple of midcentury chairs. “I was inspired by the pieces that were already here,” he said. “The cabin can be a fun place. I’m sure the captain has got many stories to tell.”

    Byron C. James will dedicate his room to Christmas Eve Harrington, his Jack Russell terrier. The “All About Eve” room is inspired by the birthday party Margo Channing threw for her boyfriend in the film. Scott Sanders’s “Blue, White, and Bailey” will have a cool, beachy feel that is certain to have his dog Bailey’s tail wagging in anticipation of summer. Rod Winterrowd’s room, “The Hound Cave,” will be a summer hangout “where anything goes any night of the week in the Hamptons.” Dogs and cats will be welcomed.

    All the designers are animal lovers who are donating their time and expertise to help the ARF dogs and cats. Whether from the thrift shop or from the designers’ own collections, every item in the showhouse will be for sale.

    “We salute the designers who have brought such creativity to their assignment, and look forward to seeing everyone. Please bring your friends; it is a fun way to support the animals,” said Sara Davison, executive director of ARF.

    For those who want first dibs, tickets for the preview hour, from 5 to 6 p.m. on Saturday, are $250. After 6, admission to the cocktail party is $150. A selection of ARF cats and dogs available for adoption will be among the guests at the Saturday party. The suggested donation for people visiting Sunday and Monday is $10; children will be admitted free.

    The shop is at 17 Montauk Highway in Sagaponack, at the corner of Poxabogue Lane.

    Tilman Hecker, a resident artist at the Watermill Center, will present “Midnight,” a work in progress for video, light, and three performers, Saturday at 8 p.m. Though the project is inspired by Mozart’s musical scores, his music is not part of the event. Instead, the artists will visualize Mozart’s music through four elements: video, lighting, and the movement of two performers, which correspond to piano, voice, winds, and strings in Mozart’s compositions.

    Mr. Hecker was born in Karlsburg, Germany, in 1980 and studied architecture and theatrical production in Berlin and Paris. During his studies he worked with Robert Wilson and Achim Freyer as assistant director and collaborator. He made his directorial debut with Mozart’s “Mandina amabile” at Berlin’s Radial System V in July 2009.

    The performance is free, but reservations are required and may be made at watermillcenter.org.

    Classical piano, opera, and folk are the musical offerings this week at the Rogers Memorial Library in Southampton. On Sunday at 3 p.m., Misuzu Tanaka, a prizewinning concert pianist, will perform a program of works from the height of the Romantic period to the early 20th century, including Chopin’s Scherzo No. 4 in E major, Op. 54, Bartok’s Scherzo no. 4 in E major, and Schumann’s Sonata No. 3 in F minor, Op. 14, originally titled “Concerto sans Orchestre.” A reception for the artist will follow.

    Opera of the Hamptons and the Friends of the Rogers Memorial Library will present their annual lunchtime opera program on Wednesday at noon. This year’s selection is “Porgy and Bess,” with Richard Hobson, baritone, Robert Wilson, music director, and Barbara Giancola, artistic director.

    Fans of folk music can attend a sing-along in memory of Pete and Toshi Seeger today at 6 p.m. All three programs are free.

    The Hampton Library in Bridgehampton has initiated a community outreach program that will offer free screenings of films from prior Hamptons Take 2 Documentary Film Festivals on the third Wednesday of the month. The first offering, scheduled for Wednesday at 7 p.m., will be “Patriocracy.” Directed by Brian Malone, the 2012 film explores the extreme polarization in America, which, it posits, prevents the country from tackling its most serious problems.

    Insights into the problem are offered by politicians, journalists, and academics of all persuasions, among whom are Bob Schieffer, CBS News’ chief Washington correspondent; Pat Buchanan, a two-time candidate for the Republican presidential nomination; Senator Mark Warner, and Mickey Edwards, a former U.S. representative from Oklahoma who has taught at Harvard, Georgetown, and Princeton since leaving office.

    “Plimpton! Starring George Plimpton as Himself,” which will have its nationwide broadcast premiere tomorrow at 9 p.m. on PBS and locally on WNET, is a spellbinding film that chronicles the life of a singular man. George Plimpton grew up in a duplex apartment on upper Fifth Avenue, attended St. Bernard’s School, Phillips Exeter Academy, Harvard -— where he was a classmate and close friend of Robert F. Kennedy — and Cambridge University. But even if you know nothing about his background, you have only to hear him speak to know he was a patrician. And one of the many pleasures of “Plimpton!” is that you get to hear him speak a great deal.

    But before Cambridge, before Harvard, there was Exeter, and we learn from Plimpton’s brother Oakes that the Plimpton family “was Exeter” and that George was kicked out of the prestigious private school. Plimpton’s son Taylor then reads “How Failing at Exeter Made a Success out of George Plimpton,” an essay his father wrote for the Phillips Exeter Academy Bulletin in 2002.

    In Plimpton’s own words, “I bring you greetings from the Daytona Beach High School,” from which he received his diploma before setting off for Harvard, which had already accepted him. “Thus I come to you as sort of an outsider, as if you were being addressed by Satan, once an archangel, but then tossed out of Heaven.”

    A recurring theme of the film is how Plimpton managed to be both a part of the privileged milieu into which he was born, and apart from it as well. His father was a prominent attorney and a founding partner of the white-shoe firm Debevoise and Plimpton. But George was reading English at Cambridge in 1953 when he received a phone call from Peter Matthiessen, who was starting a magazine in Paris and wanted Plimpton to edit it.

    Rather than list the writers published in The Paris Review over the next 60 years, suffice it to say that every writer of note was interviewed or otherwise published in the magazine — except for Plimpton.

    Where Plimpton was published was in Sports Illustrated, which arranged for him to pitch in 1958 in a postseason all-star baseball game with a roster including Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle. The result was “Out of My League,” published in 1961 and the first of Plimpton’s forays into participatory journalism.

    He subsequently played basketball with the Boston Celtics, boxed with Archie Moore, played the triangle and gong with the New York Philharmonic, performed as a stand-up comedian in Las Vegas, played hockey with the Boston Bruins, and photographed wildlife in Africa, to name just a few of his endeavors. But it was “Paper Lion,” the story of his stint as a Detroit Lions quarterback, that made The New York Times’s best-seller list and him a celebrity.

    Plimpton had a house in Sagaponack and was part of what Vanity Fair magazine called “the Sagg Main set,” which also included Truman Capote, James Jones, and Kurt Vonnegut. One of the many fascinating aspects of the film is how friends and colleagues viewed Plimpton’s adventures in popular culture. James Salter thought he was “writing in a genre that didn’t permit greatness” and Rose Styron recalls that Plimpton didn’t feel he was up to the level of more “serious” novelists. Peter Matthiessen thought his friend was a dabbler who could have been taken more seriously if he hadn’t expressed himself through mass media. But Tom Wolfe praised “Paper Lion,” ranking Plimpton with Truman Capote and Hunter S. Thompson.

    Plimpton’s relationship with the Kennedys is an important part of the film. When he invited Freddy Espy, whom he later married, on their first date, it was to have “dinner with the president,” she tells us. He was particularly close to Bobby and Ethel Kennedy and was a frequent guest at Hickory Hill and Hyannis Port, according to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who remembers that the adventurous Mr. P. “always launched his ship at high tide.”

    The Plimptons were with Bobby Kennedy when he decided to run for president and, tragically, when he was assassinated at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. The film includes a recording of Plimpton’s police deposition regarding the assassination, and we learn that he was not only in the hotel kitchen with Kennedy when he was shot but also helped restrain Sirhan Sirhan. He never spoke publicly or wrote about that night.

    Plimpton’s public life shielded a very private person. Sarah Dudley, who became his second wife in 1991, says, “He wasn’t really your mate, he was everybody’s mate.” His sister, Sarah, says he wasn’t somebody you could get really close to, and according to his daughter Medora, “He never let people in.”

    In 2003, Plimpton returned to Detroit for a 40th reunion of the Detroit Lions team he played with for “Paper Lion.” We see the handsome, white-haired Plimpton waving to the crowd, accepting the applause, and we hear him on the soundtrack reading from the book. It is a particularly poignant moment, all the more so because he died four days later.

    In a kind of coda, Taylor Plimpton reads his father’s list of things he would like to do before dying and breaks down, while onscreen we see footage of Plimpton typing, flying a kite with his children, and walking the streets of New York.

    According to Sarah Dudley, “He was a natural performer and he loved being onstage. And storytelling was his great gift — with himself, of course, as the subject of all his stories.”

    The film, like its subject, tells a fascinating story, with never-before-seen archival footage and photographs and the insights and recollections of friends, family, and public figures.

    “Plimpton! Starring George Plimpton as Himself” was produced, written, and directed by Tom Bean and Luke Poling and edited by Casey Brooks, who grew up in East Hampton. The film was shown at the Hamptons International Film Festival in 2012.

    If you were to dismiss the floral studies of Linda Etcoff and the knitted pieces of Laurie Lambrecht as mere women’s work, you would not only be incorrect but would miss out on two worthy exhibitions at the Drawing Room gallery in East Hampton.

    It helps to have a little background on both, particularly the work of Ms. Lambrecht. A photographer by training, she has also had a distinguished career as a knitwear designer. These two metiers crossed paths when she found herself inspired by the tropical wilderness around Captiva, Fla., where she is the photographer for the archives of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation’s artists-in-residence program.

    Her abstracted photos of pure dark and light-infused color, collected from the Florida landscape, became the inspiration for a series of knitted work in cotton, wool, mohair, and silk yarns. Taking the concept one step further, she then photographed the results, bringing them back to their two-dimensional source.

    Her exhibition consists, first, of those first photographs, each called “Jungle Road.” They are light-filled and diffuse, some reminiscent of Tiffany windows. There is a strong sense of place, even while the details may not describe much, and they are intense in tone and hue.

    Then come the knitted pieces, rich in texture and begging to be touched. The easel-sized knits channel the blues, greens, and earth tones of their progenitors and are called “Compositions.”

    Finally, the last photographs, titled with months, capturing much of the texture of their models, even in a perfectly flat medium. The prints are overall larger than the knits but include a lot of white space, so that the image seems to preserve the same dimensions as the source.

    The entire exercise is an illustrated reflection on artistic inspiration and how one idea or image can morph and change as an art object through the prisms of a creative vision. There is something so satisfying in seeing the progression through to the end.

    Ms. Etcoff is an accomplished painter of interiors and still-life elements, but her work really comes alive in her pastel, charcoal, and crayon drawings. Functioning more as studies, these drawings of sunflowers, amaryllis, paperwhites, hyacinth, and cornflowers tend to be serial snapshots not tied to any setting or defined space.

    As such, they seem to be pure flights of personal whim and fancy, as if she is racing to capture a certain element of the flower’s being before the light changes or her brain channels it differently. The drawings have a brisk pace and can be busy with images or very, very spare. But they never scrimp on detail or saturated color.

    There are yellows in “Siena Sunflowers” that are so pure and beautiful they seem improbable, yet completely naturalistic within her composition. The reds of her amaryllis are equally distinct and striking. But the works with very little color have a similar transcendence. On the surface, these works may seem minor in the great scheme of artistic endeavor, but in some ways they say everything about why one sets about to create or recreate a world visually.

    Ms. Etcoff’s purity of purpose and its outcome testify to a creative mind at work, channeling information and using it to make drawings that redefine the object depicted into a preternatural subject elevated beyond its highest form. While doing nature one better, she then smudges these images, erasing or even sanding the surface, giving them an ethereal air, again all her own.

    These two shows will be at the gallery through Sunday.