Seeking to provide a haven for performing artists of all stripes, Josh Gladstone, the artistic director of Guild Hall’s John Drew Theater, along with Jennifer Brondo, the theater’s general manager, is launching an ambitious, yet relatively inexpensive, campaign to provide space, time, and yes, even some money to such artists.

    The John Drew Theater Lab “is an opportunity we are providing to performing artists who live on the East End, to share in the resources of this institution,” Mr. Gladstone said on Friday. Short of a full production, it gives artists working on a new piece, or those experimenting and expanding their own horizons, a nurturing place to go.

    The artists will be given a Tuesday night at the theater for staged readings or performances and will be able to use the facilities for rehearsal leading up to the Tuesday productions, which will be free to the public. But the support offered goes far beyond that. “We can help you, administratively, provide management assistance. We’ll give you some Jitney passes if you need to bring people in from the city,” Mr. Gladstone said. “We will give you, the artist, some money, not a lot, a $300 stipend which you can use any way you want. If you want to buy lunch for the actors, or pay for a night at a motel. . . . And we will include you in our marketing, in our e-blast to our members. We are making all the resources that are available to us available to local artists in the off-season.”

    The first reading will be Dominick Gaetano’s “Turing Test” directed by Aimee Todoroff, this week at 7:30 p.m.

    It is very important to both Mr. Gladstone and Ms. Brondo, who works at the desk next to Mr. Gladstone’s in a small basement office whose shelves are crammed with scripts and proposals, that the lab not be seen merely as a facility for theater folk, but for all performing artists.

    “We have some musicians with a new band. . . . They are going to talk about the songwriting process and play some acoustic music. Then there is a group of actors studying improv at Upright Citizens Brigade in New York. They are going to do an improv class. We want to provide chances for established artists who want to try new directions. Sawyer Avery, who you may have seen in ‘Anne Frank’ at Bay Street, we are giving him his directorial debut with a staged reading. He is bringing in a lot of actors who have performed here in the past for a reading of Neil Simon’s ‘Biloxi Blues,’ ” Mr. Gladstone said.

    Performing artists need a place to experiment, and, occasionally, even fail, Mr. Gladstone said.

    The calendar is quickly filling up. The submission process is simple: You send an email to Mr. Gladstone pitching your project or group in a couple of paragraphs. Obviously, not everybody who applies will be able to get a slot, but Mr. Gladstone is hoping that a true cross-section of the performing arts community will find a home at the lab.

    “We are always changing, always evolving,” Mr. Gladstone said about the mission of the theater. It is essential, he said, that the theater “have a real life in the community. Not just to be an ivory tower, but to be a resource for the community on every level.”

Gesture Jam at Parrish

    The Parrish Art Museum is hosting Gesture Jam, a hybrid figure-drawing class and social event, tomorrow at 6 p.m. Multiple models will pose with props and costumes, while the cafe will offer drinks for purchase and D.J. Mister Lama will spin tunes from his wide-ranging collection. The evening was conceived by Andrea Cote, a multimedia artist whose performances and installations have been presented at the Neuberger Museum, the Delaware Art Museum, and the Dumbo Arts Festival, as well as at various venues on the East End.

    Tickets are $10, free for members, children, and students, and include museum admission. Participants should bring their own sketchpads and dry-media drawing materials.

Art Advice for Collectors

    Ralph Lerner, a principal of Art World Advisors, will discuss “What Can You Do With Your Art?” on Sunday at 11 a.m. as part of Guild Hall’s ongoing Table Talk series. Mr. Lerner will explore proper ways to donate art, both during one’s life and at death; valuation issues, and how the Internal Revenue Service Art Panel operates. He will also discuss the sale of art at auction and provide a few caveats.

    Mr. Lerner is the co-author with Judith Bresler of “Art Law,” which, according to Barbara Jo Howard, Guild Hall’s director of marketing and communications, is “considered the gold standard in legal and tax guidance for visual art professionals, collectors, and their attorneys.”

    Mr. Lerner has had some legal troubles of his own recently, having been barred in October from practicing law for one year by the Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court for improperly charging clients of his previous firm. He is also a defendant in a lawsuit brought by the Cy Twombly Foundation, of which he is a director.

    A $10 donation has been suggested for the talk.

Underwater at Ashawagh

    “Oceans Matter,” an exhibition of underwater photographs by Stephanie Whiston, will open Monday at Ashawagh Hall in Springs and run through Feb. 7.

    Ms. Whiston, who lives in Montauk and has been painting landscapes and seascapes since childhood, took up underwater photography 20 years ago and has since captured images from the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean to the North Pacific to the South Atlantic — virtually anywhere there is water. Her photographs and the Marine Education Foundation, which she founded, are devoted to presenting rarely seen underwater life before the fragile habitats disappear.

    A reception will take place on Feb. 1 from 6 to 8 p.m.

Farther Afield

    “Beauty and the Beast: The Erotic Art of Ian Hornak” will open tomorrow at the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction at Indiana University, where it will be on view through April 4.

    The artist, who lived and worked in East Hampton from 1970 until his death in 2002, was a photorealist best known for his landscapes and still lifes. The erotic paintings and drawings in the Kinsey exhibition were executed in 1968 and exhibited at that time at the Stable Gallery in New York.

New Art Professors

    Suffolk Community College will introduce two new art professors with an exhibition of their work from Monday through Feb. 15, at the Lyceum Gallery on the Riverhead campus.

    Meredith Starr, who will teach drawing and two-dimensional design, creates drawings and prints layered with video and sound. Richard Mack, professor of graphic design, makes large-scale collages that celebrate the beauty of typography.

Paintings by Thacher

    “Detours,” the first solo exhibition of paintings by Anita Thacher, an artist with a house on Shelter Island, is on view through Feb. 24 at Microscope Gallery in Brooklyn. Widely known for her work with film, video, light installation, and public art, including a projection piece at the Greenport train station, she has emphasized painting in recent years.

    Setting up a season is the most important responsibility of a theater’s artistic director. Josh Gladstone, the artistic director of the John Drew Theater at Guild Hall, in conjunction with its board of directors, is halfway home to completing this year’s two-show season.

    The first play, “Red,” by John Logan, will be directed by Stephen Hamilton, employing the same intimate staging that Mr. Hamilton used so successfully with “Uncle Vanya” in 2012 and “The Cripple of Inishman” last year. Once again, the entire audience will be seated on the stage, this time in the midst of Mark Rothko’s studio in the late 1950s. The production will star Victor Slezak.

    Mr. Hamilton’s approach to staging has advantages both artistic and financial. Not only does it give the audience a close-up theatrical experience, it also cuts the size of the house down from 360 to 75. The reduction in potential income is balanced by savings on licensing fees and salaries for the union actors.

    “Red” will open on May 21 and run through June 8, with performances Wednesdays through Sundays.

    The second show, which will use the entire theater and run in the pivotal July-August months, has not yet been selected. Much rides on the choice. Last year, Blythe Danner, starring in Noel Coward’s “Tonight at 8:30,” proved a popular draw. The year before, the black comedy “Luv” by Murray Schisgal did not do well at the box office, despite excellent reviews.

    One reason “Luv” never found an audience was timing; it opened in June. A July opening for the main show of the year is optimal, Mr. Gladstone said this week. Another reason for the poor draw was the lack of a marquee name.

    Balancing art and commerce when making these choices is difficult. “It is not random,” said Mr. Gladstone. “We are looking for a celebrity-driven, marquee name. Or, a recognizable property to produce, whether that be a revival or a new play by a known playwright. A play that makes monetary sense, a small cast, a single set.” In East Hampton, he said, audiences demand both star power and artistic success, which can be an elusive combination.

    After a couple of seasons of lighter fare, the John Drew may return to a drama for its main summer show. Arthur Miller’s “All My Sons” is a possibility, but the choice may well hang on which actors it can attract to perform on the local stage.

     Another possibility is a new play, apparently Broadway-bound, “Clever Little Lies” by Joe DiPietro, which would star Marlo Thomas. “It would be a joint production with George Street Playhouse,” Mr. Gladstone said, which is where the director saw it during its debut run last month. The play, which impressed him with its humor and emotional depth, was critically well received, as was Ms. Thomas’s performance.

    There are a few other possibilities in the mix as well. Mr. Gladstone will present the options to the Guild Hall board on Jan. 30, and a decision should be announced shortly afterward.

    The LongHouse Reserve’s winter benefit, to be held on Feb. 14 at the Museum of Arts and Design in Manhattan, will feature a performance of “Ballads and Stories” by Bill T. Jones and Dancers. The Valentine’s Day event will begin with a reception at 6 p.m., followed by the performance at 7 and dinner at 8:30 at Adelaide de Menil’s duplex in the Gainsborough Studios building on Central Park South.

    Tickets are $185 for the reception and performance and $600 for priority seating, reception, performance, and dinner. A silk scarf and V.I.P. seating, in addition to the other perquisites, come with a $1,250 purchase. Tickets are available at longhouse.org.

    The East Hampton Historical Society’s winter lecture series starts on Friday, Jan. 31, at 7 p.m. The series, “In Their Own Words: Voices From East Hampton’s Past,” will begin with “Frozen in Hudson’s Bay: William King’s Log of the Whaling Barque Concordia, 1864-1865.” Richard Barons, executive director of the society, will narrate and Ken Collum, a trustee, will be the voice of William King.

    Subsequent lectures, scheduled for the last Friday of each month through April, will focus on Howard Payne’s 1838 recollections of his boyhood, Cornelia Huntington’s diary from 1820 to 1860, and the Rev. Nathaniel Huntting’s records of East Hampton from 1696 to 1753. Free refreshments will be served before each talk.

    The Perlman Music Program has scheduled three concerts by alumni at the Clark Arts Center on its Shelter Island campus. Wanzhen Li, a violinist, will inaugurate the series on Saturday at 7:30 p.m., accompanied on piano by Michael Bukhman. Future performers are Gabriela Martinez, piano, on March 29 and Areta Zhulla, violin, on May 10.

    Tickets are $25, free for guests 18 and younger, and include a reception for the artist after each performance. More information and tickets are available from perlmanmusicprogram.org.

    A viewer doesn’t need to know Elizabeth Huey’s complicated relationship with psychology to sense something not quite right in the superficially sunny images on the walls at Harper’s Books in East Hampton.

    A large selection of the artist’s acrylic- and oil-on-wood paintings as well as some of her mixed-media works on paper were chosen by Jess Frost for an exhibition titled “Radiant Swim.” Albeit brighter than her earlier works, they resemble them in ways obvious and surprising. They are, like her other paintings, composites of different photographs, some taken by the artist and others found snapshops, collected over time.

    The light in her sun-splashed images is excruciatingly and inescapably radiant, the kind of light chosen to make cockroaches scurry. The settings and clothing are decidedly retro, not surprising when one views the photographs on display in vitrines in the gallery, curling up at the edges with date stamps mostly from the mid-20th century, but also much earlier as well. The photos are predominantly of a postwar United States, with implications of great aspirations and nascent unrest.

    At this gray and chilly time of year, it is tempting to take in the paintings with a sidelong glance and blissfully glide among them, stopping only briefly to take in their vibrant palettes. Yet with the accretion of images, one begins to discern a parallel plane on which these works operate. It is highlighted by the artist’s use of materials, the acrylics absorbing light and adding a rough texture while the oils encourage a glossy slippage of surface.

    Downstairs in the front room, it’s all fun and games. There are Ping-Pong, “sauna domes,” diving boards, and soft-winded sails. The mind is lolled by the tranquility, the respite. Water lies at the center of each painting, providing a wet refuge, a cooling liquid middle, a purifying balm. Does one need to know that in a more harrowing series of paintings Ms. Huey depicted Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung playing billiards as taken from a 1909 photograph? Not quite yet. The weight of her earlier series dealing with the abuses of early mental health care and the not always successful attempts to rectify them, do not really reveal themselves in full flower until later in the show.

    Downstairs, the only overtly menacing setback in the paintings might be a sunburn as in “Terrace at Dawn.” In “Observation Pool,” a rendering of the 1960s equivalent of the swim-up bar, made memorable in a scene from the 1983 film version of Tom Wolfe’s “The Right Stuff,” what could be more relaxing than having a dry martini while others cavort and recreate in the water around you and for you? The substance of her subjects begins to be felt upstairs when they trigger the mind to begin thinking in terms of objective correlatives.

    Once in the mezzanine gallery, paintings such as “Haven for the Tender Hearted” offer a more twisted and uncanny take on the same themes explored downstairs. A colossal doll head looks down on yet another pool, with loungers and swimmers in modern bathing attire. Just off to the side of the pool, however, some of the trademark imagery of Ms. Huey’s earlier series is in evidence. There are women in garb from much earlier decades, a vaguely institutional Tudor-style structure, and the aforementioned gigantic head (given some explanation through a photograph of a similar head as some sort of beachside amusement in a nearby vitrine). Even more noteworthy from a contemporary perspective is a blue-robed figure that to anyone steeped in Renaissance-era imagery looks mighty Christ-like, holding a hand up in a gesture of benediction. That he is diminutive compared to the apparently “false idol” looming above starts to raise all kinds of lines of inquiry about this picture.

    Once that threshold is crossed, Eden falls away and nothing in the other paintings ever looks the same again. “Bath Ablaze” could be a chic sunset-dappled Eero Saarinen-designed setting from a film or a modern-day Hieronymus Bosch rendering of a soul on fire. While it’s up to the viewer, the artist’s title is suggestive of a more menacing allusion.

    Hints of a transgressive intent are also evident in the drawings where an accumulation of clothed and nude figures suggest a multitude of moods, personae, and symbols, heavily fraught and deeply psychological.

    In the end, there is still free will and it is up to viewer to decide where and how these works will take them. What will you be having today? A day at the beach or a dark night of the soul? The gallery takes the order and the artist serves it up, at least until Feb. 18.

    Sunday’s matinee performance of “Sex: What She’s Really Thinking,” by Ilene Beckerman and Michael Disher, was packed, and an appreciative audience filled the Southampton Cultural Center with laughter throughout the show.

    If you are coming to see a work of new, jaw-dropping ideas about the differences and similarities between men and women, then boy, did you take a wrong turn. If you want to hear about how men want sex while women want love, about how babies ruin your sex life, about unhappily married couples (he wants guess what and she doesn’t), then you have come to the right place.

    The writing is sexist to the nth degree, full of rash generalizations, and doesn’t contain a single original idea.

    That being said, it is extremely funny.

    Done as a series of short unrelated skits (think “Laugh In,” if you can remember it), “Sex” features an outstanding cast of five women and two men, who perform perhaps 100 different roles in the 90-minute production.

    The show has its moments of raunch as women discuss, well, sex and what they’re really thinking, along with vibrators, Viagra, and vaginas. “Once you go with the toy, you never go back to the boy,” says one woman.

    Amy Rowland, in a sex-kitten outfit, skips on and off the stage as a between-scenes palate-cleanser, with a series of sexed-up nursery rhymes and playground poems: “Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater, had a wife and didn’t appreciate her.” “Jack and Jill went up the hill, each with a buck and a quarter. Jill came back down with two-and-a-half. Go, Jill!” (Didn’t Andrew Dice Clay make that joke circa 1985?)

    In between the scenes of men wanting to watch porn and have threesomes, and women who don’t want to have sex anymore, there are a few moments of poignancy, mostly about how women view themselves. Spoiler alert: It’s never favorably.

    But mostly, men complain about having to stay faithful to their wives, and women complain about how their husbands can’t get it up anymore. Basically, nobody is happy.

    Bonnie Grice and Matthew O’Connor are particularly notable in their many roles, although the entire ensemble performs admirably. The actors move five bright red chairs around throughout the fast-paced show; the TVs on the sides of the stage feature Ms. Beckerman’s famous doodles and the name of each skit. Mr. Disher directs with grace and style.

    This is a recent collaboration between Ms. Beckerman (best known for her book “Love, Loss, and What I Wore”) and Mr. Disher, who is the artistic director of the center. Hopefully, the two will continue to bounce ideas off each other, communicate openly, get rid of what doesn’t work, keep what does work, remember to have fun with it, and venture forth to nurture their work together — all of the ingredients for a happy and healthy marriage of the minds.

    The show runs for one more weekend. Catch it while you can.bright red chairs around throughout the fast-paced show; the TVs on the sides of the stage feature Ms. Beckerman’s famous doodles and the name of each skit. Mr. Disher directs with grace and style.

    This is a recent collaboration between Ms. Beckerman (best known for her book “Love, Loss, and What I Wore”) and Mr. Disher, who is the artistic director of the center. Hopefully, the two will continue to bounce ideas off each other, communicate openly, get rid of what doesn’t work, keep what does work, remember to have fun with it, and venture forth to nurture their work together — all of the ingredients for a happy and healthy marriage of the minds.

    The show runs for one more weekend. Catch it while you can.

    There were some disappointed patrons at Sunday evening’s screening of “Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present” at the Watermill Center who mistakenly thought the artist herself was going to be there. Instead the center, which had clearly announced this in its listings, hosted a panel discussion after the screening with three of the performers who participated in the 2010 exhibition of the same title at the Museum of Modern Art.

    This was actually a much better choice, whatever the limitations of Ms. Abramovic’s schedule may have been. The documentary, produced by HBO and directed by Matthew Akers and Jeff Dupre, provides such a thorough and intimate glimpse into the artist’s life, process, and preparation for the MoMA show that there is little room left for question or discussion. The insider experience of the exhibition performers Brittany Bailey, Abigail Levine, and Elke Luyten, offered an instructive alternate viewpoint in the context of the film.

    While often described as charismatic, Ms. Abramovic can seem guarded and sphinx-like in performance. Her various projects have been physically and psychologically harrowing. Her endurance and willingness to accept pain and chance in her encounters with her audience have been recorded on film showing the stoicism that no doubt comes from the military discipline she grew up with in Tito’s Yugoslavia.

    In the film, she is warm and emotionally available and vulnerable. Part of the key to the popular success of her exhibition was re-envisioning an old work she did with her longtime partner and collaborator Uwe Layseipen, known more commonly as Ulay, whom she worked with from 1976 to 1988. The piece, “Nightsea Crossing,” consisted of the couple sitting opposite one another for hours, not eating or speaking. On film, Ulay said that after 14 days he could feel his ribs pressing on his spleen and the pain of sitting became too much for him. Although he got up, she continued to sit. “I’m lazy,” he said in the film. “She works much harder than I do.”

    In the 2010 show, she recreated that singular experience in allowing museum patrons to participate by sitting across from her. It became a performance endurance trial, with the artist at the seat for every hour that the museum was open — no breaks — for the entire three-month span of the show. The film demonstrates how the piece became a kind of pilgrimage for fans, curiosity seekers, and those eager for the chance to participate in art. People often sat outside the museum doors overnight, particularly as the show came closer to its conclusion.

    One of the more intimate parts of the film involves Ms. Abramovic’s reconnection with Ulay after two decades of silence. The viewer learns the back story of some of their pieces. The old van that the couple spent five years driving across Europe in while presenting their collaboration was included in the show and prompted emotional reactions from each of them. In their climatic work, “The Lovers,” a three-month trek along the Great Wall of China from opposite points that was supposed to conclude in marriage when they met at the middle, the couple instead broke up after mutual infidelities. After hearing both sides of their story, the film shows the two communicating in a friendly and supportive manner, which ends in a surprisingly touching moment at the MoMA opening.

    The exhibition (often considered a failure by critics) was conceived as a way of preserving performance not only with filmed documents but also with other artists taking the positions that Ms. Abramovic did in her earlier works. As she sat for hours on end on the second-floor atrium, up on the sixth floor, 30 young performers, hand-selected by her, reenacted works such as “Imponderabilia,” in which she and Ulay stood naked in a museum doorway and forced patrons to walk between them.

    This piece attracted much tabloid attention during the show’s run, but just as challenging were recreations of the artist lying naked underneath a human skeleton, attempting to make it appear to breathe, and one where she sat on a bicycle seat naked with arms and legs spread. These were physically demanding works as well, and those engaged to perform them attended a boot camp of sorts several months before the show at Ms. Abramovic’s country house in Hudson, N.Y. There, they fasted, meditated, communed with nature, and did not speak for three days. The effort was to have them “slow down,” in the words of the artist, in order to withstand the hours of stillness they would need to endure for the show.

    The three artists present on Sunday each said their “auditions” with Ms. Abramovic were unusual, quick interactions with selections based on mutual chemistry and trust. According to Ms. Bailey, “it felt right to trust her from the very first moment.” Aside from a few perfunctory questions about prescription medications, very little was asked of them.

    Ms. Levine noted that the training she offered them differed from dance preparation, where one repeats a piece over and over in rehearsal. Instead “we were set up to take her method of performing, the slowness and direct contact with the audience, and use it to interpret her work.” For “Imponderabilia” the instructions were thus: “stand opposite your partner, when someone passes through you can look at them, and then look back at your partner.” She said that during the run of the show she did the piece 40 to 50 times, “each time discovering what it meant.” She agreed that the physical demands were challenging and that she has lingering back, neck, and feet issues from standing still on the hard cement floors for so long. Despite the rigors, only two people from the original 30 left the show during its run. One for personal reasons, the other was asked to leave because he couldn’t stand still.

    Ms. Abramovic has yet to ask the performers back for a promised reunion at her country house, they said with some regret. The film can be seen on HBO Go for HBO subscribers, but has no upcoming scheduled airings on the network’s various channels.

    The Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival has a new executive director. Michael Lawrence, who has served for the past six and a half years as director of artistic planning and initiatives of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, will begin his tenure on Monday.

    Previously, Mr. Lawrence was manager of artists and programs for the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra and director of artistic programs at the League of American Orchestras, where he directed conductor and composer programs. Mr. Lawrence is a summa cum laude graduate of the University of Michigan, where he studied cello performance and English.

    Marya Martin, festival founder and artistic director, praised Mr. Lawrence’s  “knowledge and love of music, and his enthusiasm for the festival’s future is invigorating and energizing.”

    Long Island’s longest-running classical music festival, the Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival features a mix of established and emerging artists performing both classical and new music for four weeks every summer at the Bridgehampton Presbyterian Church.