The Southampton Historical Museum has reopened, with “Downton Abbey Style in Southampton: 1900 to 1920,” on view through April 26, and several special programs. Today at 6:30 p.m. Deborah O’Shaughnessy will conduct a Linzer tart baking workshop, co-sponsored by the Rogers Memorial Library. Space is limited to eight participants, and reservations, which are required, may be made by calling 283-2494. The cost is $35, $25 for members.

    “Conversations with Local Residents” will feature the reminiscences of three couples about their relationships, from courtship through decades of marriage. Soup and cookies will follow the free program, which will take place next Thursday at 11 a.m.

    Every Wednesday at 2 p.m. Mimi Finger leads a knitting circle, for both beginning and advanced knitters, which features the sharing of techniques as well as local gossip. The program is $5 per session, free for members.

    All programs take place at the Rogers Mansion.

    Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, age-defying former Beatles, performed together at the Grammy Awards in Los Angeles on Jan. 26. Mr. McCartney picked up five Grammys, and Mr. Starr accepted the Recording Academy’s Lifetime Achievement Award on behalf of his former band mates. He and Mr. McCartney, the latter a familiar face to many in Amagansett and surrounding hamlets, have maintained active touring and recording schedules into their 70s.

    Along with Yoko Ono and Olivia Harrison, the widows of John Lennon and George Harrison, the two living Beatles continue, through their words and deeds, to promote the utopian ideals that flourished with their former band’s stratospheric artistic and commercial success — peace and universal love — and disciplines, like meditation and vegetarianism, that engender that dream.

    With the kind of vitality these septuagenarian hippies possess, it may be difficult to believe that a half century stands between tomorrow and Feb. 7, 1964, when a British pop quartet landed on American shores to change everything forever.

    But it really was 50 years ago today — or it soon will be — and humanity, the fortunate recipient of the Beatles’ unparalleled body of work, will mark the anniversary in ways befitting royalty, if not deities.

    On the South Fork, the Beatles’ historic first visit to America will be celebrated with three nights of music and film at the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor. Corresponding with HarborFrost, Sag Harbor’s fourth annual winter celebration, “It Was 50 Years Ago Today . . .” starts tomorrow at 8 p.m. with “Legends: The Beatles,” a film compilation by Joe Lauro. Mr. Lauro is the president of Historic Films Archive, a Greenport library of musical performance and other entertainment footage spanning a century.

    “Legends” includes the first known film of the Beatles, in a 1962 performance at the Cavern Club in the Beatles’ hometown of Liverpool, England, as well as their final public performance, an unannounced January 1969 lunchtime gig on the roof of their offices in London. The film also features some of the oddball “cover” recordings inspired by — and to cash in on — the Beatles’ explosive success in America and around the world, including performances by Frank Sinatra and Eartha Kitt.

    Mr. Lauro called the presentation “part theatrical, mainly film.” The film, he said, will include “other people from the period covering their tunes, as well as some footage I like to think people haven’t seen, from press conferences, fans, and promos that never got re-released to barbers wanting to get them in the chair to cut their hair off!”

    On Saturday at 8 p.m., local artists will pay tribute to the Fab Four in “Celebrating the Beatles.” Corky Laing, a Greenport resident who was the drummer of the band Mountain, is on the bill, along with Nancy Atlas, Gene Casey, MamaLee Rose and Friends, Caroline Doctorow, Jim Turner, Inda Eaton, Joe Delia, Dawnette Darden, and Mr. Lauro. Ms. Darden and Mr. Lauro are in the band the HooDoo Loungers.

    A house band will perform between acts that, Mr. Lauro said, will include performances as diverse as a choir performing a capella to a solo piano medley. “The house band is going to keep it real pure,” he said. “We’re trying to do the stuff as close as guys in our middle age trying to imitate people in their early 20s can.”

    On Sunday at 7 p.m., the entire Feb. 9, 1964, broadcast of “The Ed Sullivan Show” will be shown following a screening of rare film of the Beatles’ first visit to New York City. The “Ed Sullivan” broadcast started at 8 p.m., and this anniversary showing will coincide with that storied broadcast, 50 years to the minute later.

    “I’ll never forget it,” Mr. Lauro said of the original broadcast. “My sister and her friend Mary were out of their minds. They were about 12; I was 6 or 7. I was caught up in the whole thing.”

    To make the weekend even more fab, a variety of Beatles memorabilia will be on view throughout the theater, Mr. Lauro said.

    Tickets for “Legends: The Beatles” are $15. For Saturday night’s concert, tickets are $25 in advance and $35 on the day of the show and include a glass of house wine for adults. Admission for “The Beatles on Ed Sullivan” is $5. The theater is also offering a Fab 4 Fan pass for $40, granting admission to all three nights.

    Fifty years on, people around the world continue to feel the Beatles’ influence — music, film, visual art, poetry, fashion, and attitudes were profoundly shaped by the 1960s, with the Beatles always at the forefront. Innumerable teen idols and “next big things” have come and, thankfully, gone since that long-ago Sunday evening broadcast. But while the music industry and the spectacle of celebrity have grown by orders of magnitude since, and largely because of, the Beatles, no artist has generated the same degree of mania, inspiration, adulation, or flat-out joy.

    Like Shakespeare before them, a phenomenon such as the Beatles surely cannot arise more than once in a millennium. Or can it? “Tomorrow never knows,” as Mr. Starr once said, but it doesn’t matter anyway. The Beatles’ mind-bendingly brilliant artistic achieve­ments are ageless and timeless. Fifty years on, the world remains riveted, enchanted, and grateful.

    Those who saw Jack Ceglic’s work at Ille Arts this summer would have been surprised by the most recent projects in his East Hampton studio last month. Although the familiar revealing and colorful portraits of friends and neighbors were well in evidence, hanging on the walls and most available surfaces were compositions expressed in the blackest of charcoal pastel.

    The medium was not that surprising. Mr. Ceglic has worked in monochromatic and black and white drawings before. The real revelation was the subject matter — still lifes of fruits and vegetables, cooked food, and even the remains of meals eaten in his studio.

    The artist said he began carrying food out of his kitchen and into his next-door workspace late last year, still not sure just why he felt compelled to do it. He was inspired by the feelings and smells around food and the question of how to capture that abstraction. “When I bring in a cooked chicken, I’m reacting to the smell as I’m drawing it. It has a form and shape but what I think about is the smell and why do you react to that smell.”

    These were not fully formed ideas. “I don’t know where they are going,” he admitted. “I would have tried to hide them, but I haven’t sprayed them yet,” in order set them. Still, they pleased him and he does plan to show them, which is a good thing, because they are quite powerful.

    Slightly abstract and personal or more faithfully rendered, the pieces of fruit, fish carcasses, and shank bones have a resonance far beyond the Sunday painter’s exploration of comestibles on hand. It is clear something deeper is going on here, a respect for life and the many hands of growers and fishermen that helped bring these items to the table.

    This concern with food, its procurement, and its preparation and enjoyment stems from a long past involvement that began with a grocery store his mother owned and continued through his own association and partnership in Dean & DeLuca, a store that he helped found in 1979 and gave its iconic visual identity in the original stores and a series of early offshoots, including one in East Hampton from 1986 to 1990 in the space now occupied by Theory on Newtown Lane. (Mr. Ceglic has had a place in East Hampton since 1980, beginning with a small house on McGuirk Street and then his current house and studio on Huntting Avenue.)

    The years he spent with the store, where the typeface “Ceglic” was made from his handwriting and is still in use there to this day, put him squarely in the design field. Yet from his early days at Parsons, he spent most of his career balancing a more commercial pursuit of his artistic ability in fashion illustration and design with a devotion to portrait painting in his spare time.

    “I did some group shows early on and had my first show in 1960 at the Greer Gallery, which was where MoMA has expanded to today.” Then as years went on, he starting examining and studying architecture, which led to his own building designs and even garden design.

    The steel structure that serves as his studio looks cold and drafty from the outside. Inside, however, the foot-thick walls keep the heat in tight and even on a dark snowy day the wide glass windows and garage-style glass doors keep the space light and bright, seeming at once part of nature, with deer peeking in, as well as a sturdy and tight refuge from the elements.

    It’s his own design and an aesthetic that over the years has attracted friends and associates like his former business and life partner Joel B. Dean (who died in 2004) and Joe Mantello, Ron Rifkin, and Jon Robin Baitz. They wanted a sleek look that still reminded them of the vernacular architecture of the region, not unlike the new Parrish Art Museum, Mr. Ceglic said, although his house designs precede that colossal rendering of similar ideas by a decade. “I have a very simple idea about architecture that I love and architecture that I make. I don’t want them to say ‘this is a Jack design,’ I just want them to be happy in the space.”

    When he was designing the Dean & DeLuca stores, he worked with existing spaces and would research their previous uses. “Every space felt like Dean & DeLuca, but respected the space. The East Hampton store felt like East Hampton and not like New York City. When I went before the Washington, D.C., design review board, because we were converting an old market, I told them that when Dean & DeLuca leaves, you will never know we were there.”

    His most recent and final architectural project was in Sagaponack, where he helped restore and renovate a historic structure with his current partner Manuel Fernandez-Cas­te­leiro, keeping the facade intact as well as its traditional finishes while bringing it up to date in form and function. He said he chose to walk away from architecture to pursue his artwork completely.

    One of the projects he was working on that day in the studio involved a conceptual installation he is preparing for a future show at Five Myles, a Brooklyn exhibition space. It will also rely on the abstract associations of food and is inspired by his mother’s store. “I want to recreate the idea of what I felt about it.” He had an open notebook at his desk where small drawings of butter and eggs along with the handwritten words were taking shape.

    “My mother’s store was where a lot of images I used for Dean & DeLuca came to me.” His design concepts for the store did not end with building structure and layout. They continued with seasonal themes he developed for featured products. “One year I thought of Diamond Jim Brady and his girlfriend Lillian Russell. I pictured them coming to the store in their carriage and thought about what they would like for the holidays.” That year the store featured oysters and copper butter warmers, which came from that inspiration.

    “The still lifes I did for the store were not about making something pretty or ‘look at me,’ but about telling a story. I like to tell a story.” These were never overt. The customer never knew that the pretty copper butter warmers were chosen with Russell in mind, but the hint of old New York was there along with the aroma of the oyster stew the store’s chef was composing in the kitchen.

    In a way, it was like portraiture. “People were always part of it in the way they move and how they live. My interest in portraiture comes from my interest in people. I would watch them and the design became what they were.” He said Dean & DeLuca, for him, was also about putting “Joel and Giorgio’s ideas into three-dimensional form so people could say ‘Oh, that’s what they like,” whether it was French cookware, specially sourced and roasted coffee, extra virgin olive oil, sun-dried tomatoes, or artisanal cheese that most Americans were seeing for the first time.

    Mr. Ceglic’s work can be seen at Lyons Weir Gallery in Chelsea today through Feb. 22 in a group show also mentioned in this week’s Art Scene. His portraits can also be seen in the book “Jack: Drawings and Paintings of Jack Ceglic,” which was published in September by Pointed Leaf Press. The imprint was started by Susie Slesin, a former guest editor of The Star’s Home Book supplements, one of which featured Mr. Ceglic’s house on Huntting Avenue.

Busy Day at Watermill

    The Watermill Center has scheduled a full afternoon of activities Saturday, including an exhibition of new work by Jose Carlos Casado at 3 and a dance-theater work-in-progress by Jack Ferver at 4. Both artists are currently in residence at the center.

    Mr. Casado’s “Sacrifice” is a series of sculptures, videos, drawings, installations, and performance, with a large-scale sculpture as the centerpiece.  Titled “Sacrifice.v02,” the sculpture is said to be inspired by violent political events and the body in motion, created with 3-D technologies. Among its sources are Rembrandt’s “Carcass of Beef” and Francis Bacon’s “Three Studies for a Crucifixion.”

    In “Chambre,” Mr. Ferver, a choreographer, writer, and performer, and Marc Swanson, a visual artist, collaborate to create an original work that is both dance-theater performance and art installation. Inspired by Jean Genet’s play “The Maids,” the work explores otherness, societal notions of difference, and the class divide.

    A formal tour of the center’s building, grounds, and collection will be offered at 2 p.m. A moderated talk and reception with the artists will follow the presentation of “Chambre.” Saturday’s events are free, but reservations are required and may be secured at watermillcenter.org.

“Africa to Abstract”

    “From Africa to Abstract: Journey of a People Through Art and Image,” a new exhibition celebrating Black History Month, is on view at the Southampton Cultural Center through March 4. A reception will take place Saturday from 4 to 6 p.m.

    Curated by Tina Andrews, the show includes work by Brent Bailer, Rosa Hanna Scott, Jacquelyn Flowers, Dianne Smith, Danny Simmons, and Ms. Andrews. Abstract and representational painting, sculpture, pastels, and mixed media represent the African-American experience in the United States. The artists hail from Washington, D.C., Harlem, Brooklyn, and East Hampton.

East End Artists in Chelsea

    The Lyons Wier Gallery in Manhattan is presenting “Seeking Engagement NSA (No Strings Attached),” an exhibition curated by Beth McNeill that features eight East End artists, from next Thursday through Feb. 22. An artists’ reception will be held next Thursday evening from 6 to 9.

    Included in the show are Jack Ceglic, Tom Dash, Tapp Francke, Julia Greffenius, Jeff Muhs, Nika Nesgoda, Darius Yektai, and Gavin Zeigler. Ms. McNeill, an independent curator and the proprietor of McNeill Art Group in Southampton, is interested in how art engages an audience. To that end, she has invited visitors to the exhibition to leave a response to the works, which will be shared on social media.

Competition at Crazy Monkey

    The Crazy Monkey Gallery in Amagansett is pitting its artist members against one another in its ninth annual art competition, and the public has been invited to pick the winners. Participating artists in the show, which will open on Saturday with a reception from 5 to 7 p.m., are Andrea McCafferty, Daniel Schoenheimer, Barbara Bilotta, June Kaplan, Jim Hayden, Jana Hayden, Bob Tucker, Ellyn Tucker, Mark E. Zimmerman, Lance Corey, Beth O’Donnell, Melissa Hin, Bobbie Brown, Beth Barry, Dianne Marxe, Anna Franklin, and Sheila Rotner.

    Categories for the competition, which will run through Feb. 23, are best in show, most original, and most thought-provoking. Winners will be announced on March 1 during the opening reception for the gallery’s next exhibition. The artist judged best in show will have a feature show at the gallery.

Walter Bernard in New York

    The Atlantic Gallery in New York City will host an exhibition of recent works in watercolor and oil by Walter Bernard and Matthew Levine from Wednesday through Feb. 8. Mr. Bernard, a longtime East End resident, has designed and art-directed many notable publications, including New York magazine, Time, The Atlantic Monthly, and Fortune, to name but a few.

    The Walter Bernard Consultancy is a group of colleagues, including Milton Glaser, Mirko Ilic, Tom Bentkowski, and Mr. Bernard, who, working both together and separately, have designed more than 100 magazines, books, and newspapers.

    In addition to his design work, Mr. Bernard is a painter. He studied with David Levine and Aaron Shickler and still attends a weekly painting class started in 1954 by those two artists. He has been a participant in the annual Artists and Writers Softball Game in East Hampton for 40 years and has designed the posters for the popular fund-raiser for more than a decade.

    Mr. Levine, the son of the late David Levine, is a painter of figures and landscapes who lives in Westport, Conn. Receptions for the artists will take place on Wednesday from 5 to 9 p.m. and on Feb. 8 from 2 to 5 p.m.

Almond Zigmund Installation

    Almond Zigmund, an artist who divides her time between East Hampton and Brooklyn, is creating a new, site-specific installation at the Children’s Museum of the Arts in Manhattan. Commissioned by the museum as part of its new Bridge Projects series, Ms. Zigmund’s installation, “Plane Site,” will be on view from Tuesday through June 1.

    A reception will be held on Tuesday evening from 6:30 to 8.

    “Dr. Du Bois and Miss Ovington,” a new play by Clare Coss now showing in New York at the Castillo Theater, thrusts its audience into the 1915 struggle within the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People: Should the N.A.A.C.P. be a philanthropic organization run by whites for the betterment of blacks, or should it be run by blacks with white support?

    This two-character play gives us the creative genius of the black W.E.B. Du Bois, played by Tim Simonson, and a white socialist champion of racial equality (as well as women’s rights), Mary White Ovington, played by Kathleen Chalfant. The two give fine performances that provide insight into these historic figures, but the play does not get below the skin.

    It must be pointed out that this is a showcase production, that is, a production designed to explore the potential and possible directions the play can go. It runs slightly under an hour and a half, with no intermission, and remains a work in progress.

    The play opens with Du Bois giving a lecture at Oberlin College, using slides to illustrate the racism blacks face, while Ovington speaks on the same subject to a church audience. Then they get together and start to tussle.

    We are in the New York office of the fledgling N.A.A.C.P. A drumbeat for war in Europe is pounding outside on Fifth Avenue. In what is perhaps the strongest element of the play’s well-rendered set, designed by Chris Cumberbatch, a map on an office wall is dotted with pins marking locations of lynchings around the country; they are concentrated in the Deep South.

    As editor of “The Crisis,” the N.A.A.C.P.’s journal, Du Bois is demanding that the white board of directors give him autonomy. Mr. Simonson offers what is apparently an exact likeness of Du Bois, in both manner and speech. He has a letter of resignation tucked in his jacket pocket, which he repeatedly threatens to hand in.

    Ms. Chalfant, who is wonderful in the role of Ovington, believes in Du Bois and thinks he is essentially right, but, at the same time, believes he must compromise on occasion. Both actors seemed a bit ill-at-ease at the top of the show, where the playwright has them locking horns. It was only during a quiet moment, when Du Bois sings along with a recording, that the actors seemed truly connected to the material and each other, drawing in the audience, and this reviewer.

    The lead into that moment was problematic. Du Bois goes to his office, pulls the record out of its sleeve, and calls in Ovington. Mr. Simonson has drawn the exterior of the character very well, but the way this occurs is mechanical. You are in the heat of an argument, you have left the room, you see a record, you pick it up — and stop. A pause, in which the actor conveys what Du Bois may be thinking — asking himself what the music and Ovington mean to him — is missing. It is the kind of effect the director, Gabrielle L. Kurlander, needs to catch.

    There are other uneven moments, where the director’s  intentions are unclear. For example, when Ms. Chalfant uses a period telephone on Ovington’s desk, she shouts.  When Mr. Simonson uses it as Du Bois, he doesn’t.

    The play is, however, at its best when it is quiet. The two spar, then flirt, then spar again. When it gets noisy, when they battle about political points, it slides, without intending to, into agitprop. Ms. Coss faithfully gives the audience a lot of information. What is missing is the soul.

    The historic Du Bois is rich and fascinating, and filled with inner conflicts. For example, he is a pacifist, yet wants black soldiers to lead the way and excel if the nation goes to war. In this play, he moves through these conflicts a little too easily.

    “Why don’t you take your jacket off, in this heat?” Ovington asks at one point. “I’m used to being uncomfortable,” Du Bois answers. It’s funny, but I wish we could have gotten a little deeper into that inner conflict.

    Perhaps Ms. Coss’s adherence to a realistic setting and arc for the piece is the problem. With a little less realism and a little more magic, we might approach the pith of these two complicated souls. Nevertheless, all involved should be complimented for bringing history to life.

    The play will run through Feb. 16. Tickets are $25, $20 for students and senior citizens.

    Clare Coss’s play “Emmett, Down in My Heart,” which was inspired by the story of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old African-American boy who was lynched for whistling at a white woman in Mississippi, will open on Feb. 22 at the Tucson Symphony Center and run through March 9. Ms. Coss’s play was named winner of the first 2012 national play contest by the Tucson Alliance of Dramatic Artists in honor of Black History Month.

    The Lounge, a new music series featuring singers and instrumentalists, will open tomorrow at 6 p.m. at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill with Edith and Bennett. Edith Gawler and Bennett Konesni are musicians and scholars of work songs who play old-time fiddle and banjo music, Swedish dance tunes, and farmers ballads and hollers. Ms. Gawler and Mr. Konesni divide their time between Shelter Island and Belfast, Me.

    The museum’s Lichtenstein Theater has been transformed into an informal club setting for the series. Future programs will spotlight Sophia Bastian, a singer-songwriter, on Feb. 14 and the Richie Siegler All-Star Quartet on March 14. Tickets cost $10 but are free for members, students, and children, and include museum admission. Reservations have been recommended and can be made at parrishart.org.

    “Coretta: Promise to the Dream,” a one-woman show by Tina Andrews that dramatizes the life of Coretta Scott King, will have its world premiere on Friday, Feb. 7, at 8 p.m. at Center Stage at the Southampton Cultural Center. Ms. Andrews, an actress, writer, and director who has worked extensively in film, theater, and television, began researching the project in 2003. She developed a relationship with Mrs. King, the widow of the slain civil rights leader the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and recorded more than 120 hours of interviews with her in the family home in Atlanta.

    Ms. Andrews portrays Mrs. King from her teenage years in the cotton fields of Alabama to her career as a concert singer, from meeting and marrying Dr. King to the fight to make his birthday a national holiday. Ms. Andrews’s own career has included roles in “Hello, Dolly” on Broadway, “Roots” on television, and “Carny” and “Conrack” on film, to name just a few of her acting credits. She also wrote and produced the television movies “Sally Hemmings: An American Scandal” and “Jackie Bouvier Kennedy Onassis.”

    “Coretta” will be performed Thursdays at 7:30 p.m., Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m., and Sundays at 2:30 p.m. through Feb. 23. Tickets cost $22 for adults, $12 for students under 21, and $20 for senior citizens on Fridays, and can be purchased at the door 40 minutes prior to curtain or at scc-arts.org.

    Sawyer Avery, who is directing as well as playing the lead in Tuesday night’s staged reading of Neil Simon’s “Biloxi Blues” at Guild Hall’s John Drew Theater, has a gravitas about him unusual for a 21-year-old. He loves sitting in cramped coffeehouses, talking theater and art. He attends two to three plays a week in New York. After sitting down Saturday morning at Jack’s Stir Brew Coffee on West 10th Street in New York, he was on his way to go museum-hopping with his girlfriend, starting at the Museum of Modern Art.

    He is serious about his passion, which is theater. “I love to act. I’ll do what I can to get my fix,” he said. He talks about theater the way a junkie talks about smack. Sitting in the back of an acting class is a high for Mr. Avery, whether he is working on a scene, or just watching, soaking in the work of the actors around him.

    Maybe you can blame his parents for his habit. When he was 15, Kate Capshaw and Steven Spielberg gave their youngest child a gift: Enrollment in an acting workshop at Edgemar Center for the Arts in Santa Monica, Calif. “I started going every Wednesday night,” he recalled. “Sometimes I would work on scenes, sometimes I would sit in the back, drink coffee, and watch other actors work.”

    He quickly knew what he wanted, and he knew where he needed to go to get it — New York. “I left home when I was 18,” he said.

    After three years, though he returns to the West Coast from time to time, he is beginning to see himself as a New Yorker. “Somebody once said, ‘New York is steaming hot in the summer, freezing cold in the winter, and very expensive, but I wouldn’t live any place else,’ ” Mr. Avery said.

    At the same time, he sees a future for theater work for himself on the South Fork. “The great part about working out there is that you get to work on your craft, while not having the pressure of Manhattan,” he said.

    He uses yoga to keep himself centered spiritually as well as physically.

    He was accepted into the Atlantic Repertory Theater’s conservatory when he came to New York. After completing four of five semesters at the conservatory, he was cast in “Belgrade Trilogy” by Biljana Sbrljanovi at the 4th Street Theater in late 2012.

    In November, he appeared in “The Diary of Anne Frank,” directed by Joe Minutillo at the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor. It was a strong ensemble cast. The experience, particularly Mr. Minutillo’s work with the cast, made a deep impression on Mr. Avery.

    “I learned a lot about acting,” Mr. Avery said. “It was incredible. I really enjoyed it. I felt the cast was family. I think that feeling should be in every production. I think that is the director’s responsibility. Joe set up an environment where we could laugh and cry.” It was an experience that piqued Mr. Avery’s interest in trying his hand at directing.

    He was, at the time, working on a scene from “Biloxi Blues” with his acting coach, Larry Moss. He works with Mr. Moss whenever he can. Mr. Avery brought a copy of the script for “Biloxi Blues” to rehearsal one day, and got into a discussion about it with a fellow cast member, Josh Gladstone. Mr. Gladstone, who is the artistic director of the John Drew, was in the process of setting up a new program designed to allow performing artists the space to spread their wings and experiment. A reading of “Biloxi Blues,” directed by Mr. Avery, seemed a perfect fit.

  c. It is the middle of a semi-autobiographical trilogy that follows Eugene Morris Jerome from his teenage years (“Brighton Beach Memoirs”) to his days in basic training during World War II (“Biloxi Blues”) to finding early success as a comedy writer (“Broadway Bound”). Matthew Broderick created Eugene in all three plays, making it a unique work in Broadway history. Usually, actors outgrow a part. In Mr. Broderick’s case, he grew through the part, over the course of the mid-1980s.

     Several elements of the play caught Mr. Avery’s eye. “My favorite plays are the ones that are serious, but the comedy comes out through the urgency of the drama. ‘Biloxi Blues’ has a great combination of comedy and drama,” Mr. Avery said.

    Another element that attracted him to the piece is its setting in the World War II years, coming off, as he is, from a production of “Anne Frank,” set in Holland during the Holocaust. This is another view of the war, as seen from across the ocean.

    Because the character of Eugene is essentially onstage throughout the play, Mr. Avery felt he needed someone else to be his eyes. That job is going to Megan Minutillo, Mr. Minutillo’s daughter. She made an impression on Mr. Avery when he saw a cabaret show she had put together in New York with some friends.

    The cast for the reading comes from several places. For many of them, this is a chance to experiment, as well. Chloe Dirksen, for example, who played the very pulled together character of Miep in “Anne Frank” with panache, here will be reading the part of Rowena, a prostitute. Jessica Mortellaro, who played the title role in that production, is reading the part of Daisy on Tuesday. Christopher Imbrosciano, who played the title role in last year’s production of “The Cripple of Inishmaan” at the John Drew, is in the cast, as are other actors from both “Anne Frank” and “Cripple,” and two more who are recent graduates of New York University’s theater program.

    Mr. Avery doesn’t have a roadmap for the rehearsal process, other than the play, itself. The company is getting together for about four hours on Sunday to get to know each other and do a read-through, then will do another four-hour session the next day. Tuesday will be lighter, with the reading that night at 7:30 at the John Drew. Admission is free, but donations are welcomed, for what is not a performance, but rather an experiment in the theatrical process.

    A conversation with Rick Liss, a painter and filmmaker from Amagansett, involves poking around in the dusty corners of history, specifically the cultural history of the East End and New York City over the past 60 years. Some artifacts have disappeared; Mr. Liss lost 30 years of work when Hurricane Sandy flooded his loft building in the South Street Seaport area in 2012.

    But even that work was all but unseen for many years. “When I came out of art school in the mid-1970s,” Mr. Liss recalled, “there were so many artists who had no financial security. I decided the starving artist condition was something I had to avoid. I realized I could make a living in the film business and maintain an art practice, but probably wouldn’t have time to promote myself as an artist.”

    So he became a propmaster, joining a union that represents virtually all behind-the-scenes workers necessary to the functioning of the entertainment industry. “I was extraordinarily lucky to work in movies,” he said. “I worked on features and commercials during the day, made nonobjective paintings at night, and built lofts in SoHo the rest of the time.”

    Not long after he turned in his retirement papers last year, Mr. Liss was selected by Ned Smyth for the Parrish Art Museum’s recent “Artists Choose Artists” exhibition. He has also made his first film since completing “No York City” in 1983. “When I was working in the film business, I had no desire to shoot film. All I wanted to do in my creative life was paint. As soon as I retired, I picked up a camera for the first time in 30 years. Film was finally fun again.”

    The new film, “Costa Rica>Munich>Amagansett,” is a seven-minute travelogue that reflects the filmmaker’s admiration for the experimental, or “personal,” cinema of the 1960s. “I see it as plein-air filmmaking,” he said. “For the sake of purity it was important to do each scene as one take, and with as little cutting as possible.”

    In 2011, Mr. Liss decided to digitize “No York City,” and Jesse, his 28-year-old son, put the film on YouTube. “It went viral,” Mr. Liss said with a disbelieving smile. “Before that, if I Googled myself, there were no results. Suddenly reviews were popping up on Huffington Post, Salon.com, and a bunch of other sites.” Laughing Squid, an art and culture blog, called it “a wonderful six-minute film that combines fast-motion images of the sights and people of 1980s New York with humorous sound dubbing and a driving electronic score by Laurie Anderson.”

    Mr. Liss’s studio is filled with recent work. In the Parrish exhibition he showed three paintings from his “No Parking” series, which are executed on the backs of No Parking signs. The surface is sanded, primed, painted with acrylic, and then mounted on a mirror, which reflects the reversed image of the original sign.

    “I’ve always loved the graphics of signs,” the artist said.

    He is also enamored of maps. “To me, maps give you a cubist view of the here and now, which your brain recognizes immediately. ‘Content in a glimpse’ was how de Kooning put it. I feel that way about puzzles, too.” On a work table in his studio are wooden prototypes for puzzle pieces, created by a set shop in the city, which, when produced in quantity, will be assembled and painted, like the signs, so that “no color gets more time and space than any other.”

    Mr. Liss has been connected to the cultural life of the East End since he was born, in 1951. His parents, Sam and Terry Liss, who adopted him at birth, were economists with the U.S. Department of Agriculture by profession and political radicals by nature. During the 1930s, Terry Liss raised a substantial amount of money for the Abraham Lincoln Brigade to fight Franco in Spain; she remained a national activist into the ’70s.

    By 1951, both parents had lost their jobs and were blacklisted. Having to start over, the family moved that year to Amagansett. Sam’s brother Joe, a successful young writer for television, was already immersed in the South Fork’s creative world. His best friends were Arthur Miller and Harold Rosenberg. Before long, Sam and Terry Liss counted among their friends and acquaintances Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson, and Jimmy Ernst, to name just a few. “I remember sitting on Pollock’s lap playing horsey,” Mr. Liss said.

    The Lisses’ plan was to start a children’s camp. The only suitable property they could find was the Elm Tree Inn, just west of the Amagansett firehouse, which had 30 cottages on five acres. The camp never materialized. Instead they opened the Elm Tree as a bar-restaurant with a French chef and Larry Rivers’s jazz band playing on weekends.

    “The Elm Tree was open to everyone,” Mr. Liss said, “gay, straight, white, black. It was a who’s who of the art world, show business, and politics.” Its popularity with celebrities both gay and straight had its downside, though. “The townies would hang out on weekends and shout and scream at patrons as they were leaving. Eventually my parents were framed for serving liquor to under-age drinkers and lost their liquor license.”

    Rick Liss went to the Amagansett School — Larry Cantwell was in his class — but when he was in fourth grade the family moved back to the city. Recalling his adolescence, he said, “I couldn’t read. I had dyslexic issues. My mother used to show my drawings to Saul Steinberg, and he’d say they should keep encouraging me. Since I couldn’t read, she was happy I could do something.”

    During the summer of 1965, when Mr. Liss was 14, his mother took him to de Kooning’s studio in Springs. “I didn’t know who he was. My mother hoped I could apprentice with him, but he was obviously reluctant to have to deal with a teenage boy in the studio.” A friendship gradually developed. “Over the next 15 years, I would go over from time to time and hang out with him.”

    After graduating from the High School of Music and Art, Mr. Liss attended the Rhode Island School of Design for two years, then spent a semester in Manhattan at the Studio School. He was living in SoHo and doing loft construction when he enrolled at Cooper Union. He graduated in 1976 with a B.F.A., focusing on both painting and film. His film instructors were D.A. Pennebaker, a pioneer of cinema verité and a longtime Sag Harbor homeowner, and Hollis Frampton and Jonas Mekas, two important figures in the underground, or avant-garde, film world.

    “My takeaway from Cooper was meeting these guys up close. Hollis put a lot of ideas on the table, including a definition of avant-garde as ‘inventing a new language to discuss a taboo,’ and I’ve lived by that. Doug Sanderson taught a drawing class and brought in people like Brice Marden, Al Held, Agnes Martin, and Dorothea Rockburne. My years there were extraordinary.”

    He eventually moved from SoHo to the South Street Seaport and, making a living in the film business, stopped building lofts for other people. “I had it made,” he said. “I had a job, I had health insurance, I had a great lease on a big loft in the shadow of Wall Street, and I was painting.”

    Then Sandy hit. “The water flooded my ground-floor studio and wiped me out. It was the darkest moment in my life since my parents died.”

    Disaster grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, and the New York Foundation for the Arts enabled Mr. Liss to focus on recovery. He is selling his two lofts in the building “to fund my retirement.”

    In addition to his new film and studio work, the artist is embarking on the renovation and expansion of his house and studio in Amagansett, which his mother built in the early 1950s, just east of the Amagansett firehouse. Models and floor plans share studio space with his recent paintings. Retirement for Rick Liss means leaving the film industry behind, but marks a new and productive chapter in his career as a visual artist.