Qi Xu, a 19-year-old pianist from China, will present a program of works by Chopin and Liszt on Saturday at 7 p.m. at the Levitas Center for the Arts at the Southampton Cultural Center. Qi Xu, a Pianofest alumnus who performed at the Levitas Center in 2011, is enrolled in the Columbia-Juilliard exchange program. He has performed in Poland, Ukraine, Germany, France, and Morocco, where he won first prize in the Morocco Philharmonic International Piano Competition.

    The concert is the concluding program of the 10th anniversary celebration of the Rising Stars piano series. Tickets are $15, free for students under 21.

    Bookmarks have not always been made of heavy paper stock. Selections from one of the world’s largest collections of antique silver bookmarks are on view at the Pelletreau Silversmith Shop in Southampton through Dec. 23. Approximately 330 examples made by European and American silversmiths between 1800 and 1920 have been selected from the collection of Myra Weiser. These bookmarks, many of which were used not only to hold a place but also to detach pages from each other, reflect the fine craftsmanship of the silversmith.

    Scott Schwartz’s choice for the first production of his first main stage season as Bay Street Theatre’s artistic director augurs well for the goal of returning Bay Street to the cutting edge of America’s regional theater scene.

    “Conviction” by Carey Crim will make its world premiere at Bay Street in 2014 with Mr. Schwartz directing. It is the story of a trusted and honored teacher accused of sexual misconduct with a student.

    The idea behind the play “came to me from many different sources,” Ms. Crim said two weeks ago. “It was something I knew I wanted to write, but I had to let the story percolate for a while.”

    “Carey is a wonderful up-and-coming writer,” Mr. Schwartz said two weeks ago. “She has a very distinctive voice. She writes characters like you and me.” And the play, he said, “digs into an impossible moment in their lives.”

    “What does that sort of not knowing the truth do to the people who love the accused?” Ms. Crim asked. She paraphrased a line from the play: “I’m not saying that he’s not a wonderful teacher of the year, all these wonderful things, but what I am saying is, what if he’s both?”

    For the artistic director of a regional theater, selecting a play that will premier there is not a casual choice. The rewards, both financial and artistic, can be great for the theater involved. Any revival afterwards lists the theater as the original producer. Bay Street will produce this world premiere in association with the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre in Winnipeg, the Rubicon Theatre Company of Ventura, Calif., and Dead Posh Productions of London, which recently staged another play of Ms. Crim’s, “23.5 Hours.”

    Ms. Crim caught the playwriting bug during another world premiere, appearing in Lanford Wilson’s “Book of Days” at the Purple Rose Theatre in Chelsea, Mich., in 1998.

    Though born in Kentucky, she considers herself a Michigan native, having grown up outside Detroit in Grosse Point. A graduate of Northwestern University, where she received a bachelor’s degree in performance studies, she went on to study acting at the Royal Court Theatre in London.

    While pursuing an acting career, making the prerequisite career sojourn to Los Angeles, then New York, she found an artistic home with the Purple Rose Theatre Company. Founded by Jeff Daniels and named after the Woody Allen film, “The Purple Rose of Cairo,” in which Mr. Daniels starred, the regional theater was a nurturing environment that allowed Ms. Crim to find her legs, first as an actor then as a playwright.

    During the premiere production of “The Book of Days,” Ms. Crim was inspired by Mr. Wilson’s almost ruthless ability to cut his own work in order to make the play better.

    “If he can be ruthless and he’s Lanford Wilson, than who am I not to follow suit?” she asked last month.

    Bay Street will announce its choices for the 2014 season’s revival and the always-much-anticipated musical in the coming weeks. Lillian Hellman’s 1939 play, “The Little Foxes,” has been under consideration for revival but negotiations are still ongoing.

    There was history on the screen at Bay Street Theatre Saturday night, and history in the room.

    The Hamptons Take 2 Documentary Film Festival’s gala honored D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus with a screening of “The War Room,” their Academy Award-nominated documentary on Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign, followed by a free-ranging discussion with the filmmakers and Susan Lacy, creator and longtime producer of the WNET/PBS “American Masters” series. The conversation was in part a master class in cinema verité, or direct cinema, a style of filmmaking pioneered by Mr. Pennebaker, Richard Leacock, and Robert Drew that relies on hand-held cameras, available light, and following the subjects of the film rather than directing them.

    Mr. Pennebaker, Mr. Leacock, and Mr. Drew made “Primary,” which documented John F. Kennedy’s and Hubert Humphrey’s respective campaigns in the 1960 Wisconsin Democratic primary election. Mr. Leacock and Mr. Pennebaker left Drew Associates in 1963 to form Leacock-Pennebaker Inc. and four years later released “Dont Look Back,” a documentary of Bob Dylan’s 1965 concert tour of England directed by Mr. Pennebaker. This was followed a year later by “Monterey Pop,” the groundbreaking concert film that included performances by the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Janis Joplin, Otis Redding, the Who, and Jefferson Airplane, among some 30 acts.

    Ms. Hegedus graduated from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1973 with a degree in photography and experimental filmmaking and moved to New York two years later. Recalling those days, Ms. Hegedus said, “It was very difficult to be an independent filmmaker then because the equipment was very expensive, especially sound equipment. It’s not like today when you can make a film with your phone. I decided to look for work someplace where I could get my hands on some equipment.” She approached Mr. Drew for a job, and he in turn referred her to Mr. Pennebaker.

    Ms. Hegedus and Mr. Pennebaker’s first collaboration was “Town Bloody Hall,” which she edited from footage shot at a legendary 1971 panel discussion on the subject of women’s liberation that pitted Norman Mailer against the feminists Germaine Greer, Jill Johnston, Diana Trilling, and Jacqueline Ceballos. Since then, the filmmakers have collaborated on nearly 20 films, including “The War Room.” They were married in 1982.

    Ms. Lacy opened the discussion by asking how they got the Clinton campaign team to agree to being filmed. “We actually wanted to do a film about a presidential campaign in 1988,” said Ms. Hegedus, “but couldn’t raise the money. We were in the same situation in 1992 when Wendy Ettinger and R.J. Cutler approached us. They had never made a film, but they had seen ‘Primary’ and thought we should do something on the election.”

    The filmmakers approached then-President Bush, Ross Perot, and Paul Tsongas, among others, but were turned down. When they contacted the Clinton campaign they were told they couldn’t trail the candidate but could follow his campaign staff. “We thought, okay, we’ll start with the staff and maybe Clinton will eventually let us follow him, but he never really did,” recalled Ms. Hegedus. “However, we stumbled on James Carville — he seemed like someone’s drunken uncle at a party — and he was by far the most colorful person in the campaign. George Stephanopoulos was his polar opposite, but they were buddies, and in a way it’s a ‘buddy film.’ ”

    When they queried Mr. Stephan­opoulos, then Mr. Clinton’s communications director, about access to the campaign, he referred them to Mr. Carville, the campaign’s manager, who at first didn’t understand why they would want to follow him around. Mr. Pennebaker recalled, “We showed him ‘Campaign Manager,’ a film I had made in 1964 following John Grenier, who was guiding Barry Goldwater’s primary campaign. As a campaign strategist himself, it appealed to James, and he let us in.”

    In all, Mr. Pennebaker and Ms. Hegedus shot some 35 hours of film, not a great deal by documentary standards. Asked if somewhat limited access bothered him, Mr. Pennebaker said, “When you’re making a film, you’re caught in a circle and it just goes around. You can’t think about the costs or difficulties. You’re just driving toward the end.”

    Ms. Hegedus added, “But access was a concern, because if Clinton lost we would have had a very ‘unvaluable’ film about the staff of a losing campaign. If we could have voted multiple times to ensure his election, we would have.”

    After the first few days, the campaign team barely noticed the filmmakers. “We don’t look very intimidating,” said Mr. Pennebaker. “It’s just Chris with a tape recorder that looks like a pocketbook, and I don’t work too close to people with the camera. Nobody really seemed concerned about why we were there or what we were doing.”

    After the film was completed, Mr. Pennebaker invited Mr. Stephanopoulos to a screening at the University of Virginia. “They offered us two chairs, and I thought they meant endowed film professorships. But in fact they sent us two chairs. After the screening, George said, ‘If I’d had any idea I would one day be watching this with 3,000 people in a movie theater, I never would have let you in.’ ”

    Ms. Lacy mentioned that the role of cinema verité filmmakers has been likened to that of someone at a zoo, because they don’t interact with their subjects, they just watch them. The phrase “fly on a wall” was invoked several times during the evening as well. “It’s a real privilege to be let into someone’s life and follow them during an important time,” said Ms. Hegedus. “It is a watching kind of thing. You can’t intrude or let yourself be more important than your subject. You just have to be in the background.”

    “I learned very early that it’s better to let your subject do what they want than to try to direct them,” said Mr. Pennebaker. “ ‘Monterey Pop’ was my first film with a lot of camera operators, including James Desmond, Barry Feinstein, Ricky Leacock, Albert Maysles, Roger Murphy, and Nick Proferes. I just gave them cameras and turned them loose to do whatever they wanted. ‘Monterey Pop’ was my lesson in directing-which is, ‘Don’t!’ ”

    Mr. Pennebaker never went to film school. He graduated from Yale with a degree in engineering, which later played a role in his development, with Mr. Leacock, of one of the first fully portable 16-millimeter synchronized camera and sound recording systems.

    One filmmaker who had an impact on his development was Robert Flaherty, whose “Nanook of the North,” made in 1922, was the first commercially successful documentary feature. “Watching it, I thought, ‘He’s just making this for himself, not to entertain anybody.’ It had such a direct quality, and I thought, ‘I can do that. I don’t have to write a script or hire actors.’ ”

    Ms. Lacy asked the filmmakers how they choose their subject. “Most of the subjects choose us,” said Ms. Hegedus. “You just have to go by your instincts. We tend not to make films about people we don’t like. We’re not trying to play ‘Gotcha!’ You tend to want to make your subject a hero, but what you really find out most of the time is that they’re human.”

      Cynthia Hopkins, a performance artist, will present a work-in-progress showing of her newest piece Saturday at 4:30 p.m. at the Watermill Center, where she is currently in residence. Titled “A Living Documentary,” the work combines elements of musical comedy, autobiography, documentary, and fiction to create a portrait of the difficulties of earning a living as a theater artist in the 21st century. The piece will have its world premiere at New York Live Arts on March 5.

       Ms. Hopkins writes and sings songs, records albums, and fashions multimedia performance works that intertwine truth and fiction, blurring the lines between edification and entertainment. Her work as a writer, composer, performer, multi-instrumentalist, and theater artist has been honored with many awards, including a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship and the 2007 Alpert Award in Theater. Saturday’s program is free, but reservations are required and can be made at watermillcenter.org.

       The Horticultural Alliance of the Hamptons continues to offer intellectual sustenance for garden enthusiasts during the winter months with two programs this weekend. Saturday morning at 11, Carolyn Gemake will moderate a discussion of two books, Edward Hyams’s “Capability Brown and Humphrey Repton” and Doug Tallamy’s “Bringing Nature Home.” The talk, which is free and open to the public, will take place in the horticultural library on the ground floor of the Bridgehampton Community House.

       Lois Sheinfeld, an environmentalist and educator specializing in organic gardening, will deliver an illustrated lecture, “The Fragrant Garden: Resplendent Flowering Plants,” on Sunday at 2 p.m. The alliance’s annual holiday party will follow. Tickets to the lecture and party, which will be held in the main auditorium of the Community House, cost $10 for nonmembers. Members are admitted free but have been asked to contribute finger food for the refreshment table.

      Our Fabulous Variety Show, a troupe of performers dedicated to polishing their craft while raising money for nonprofit organizations, will perform at 7:30 p.m. tomorrow and Saturday in a benefit for WPPB 88.3 at Guild Hall’s John Drew Theater. The shows, which will be hosted by John Mingione of WBLI radio, include performers from Sag Harbor, Southampton, Bridgehampton, Hampton Bays, Westhampton Beach, and points west, in what the group calls a “holiday-themed vaudeville variety show.” As a bonus for families, Santa will be in the Guild Hall lobby from 6:45 to 7:30 to pose for photographs with kids.

       Tickets range in price from $15 for students with ID and groups of 10 or more, to $50 for V.I.P. box seats, and can be purchased at ourfabulousvarietyshow.org.

Meola’s “Born to Run” Photos

       Eric Meola, a photographer and Sagaponack resident who captured the iconic image of Bruce Springsteen and Clarence Clemons for the cover of the 1975 album “Born to Run,” is exhibiting a selection of photographs at the Tulla Booth Gallery in Sag Harbor from among the 700 taken during the two-hour photo shoot. While images from that session have been widely published in magazines, they have seldom been exhibited as large, archival prints, according to Ms. Booth.

       Mr. Meola is donating 100 percent of his share of any sales during the holidays to the East Hampton Food Pantry. The photographs will be on view through the end of the month.

Silver’s Nature Song

       Joyce Silver will be the featured artist in an exhibition at the Crazy Monkey Gallery in Amagansett. On view tomorrow through Dec. 29, the show, titled “Nature’s Song,” includes a “forest” of abstract, freestanding “trees” made from painted cardboard tubes, as well as a selection of plein-air pastels.

       A second show, “Small Works,” will include all members of the art cooperative. An opening reception will take place Saturday from 5 to 7 p.m.

Art Flying South

       This is the week lucky artists and dealers fly or drive south to attend the fairs and events of what has become Miami’s official art week. The centerpiece is the Art Basel Miami Beach fair in the cavernous convention center, which always features the top artists who live or work here, such as Barbara Kruger, Richard Prince, Eric Fischl, and Cindy Sherman.

       Yet most of the action featuring South Fork galleries and artists happens elsewhere in the satellite fairs and associated events that also take over Miami, turning the city into a one-week, nonstop art factory. Here is a brief rundown of who was listed at press time:

       Art Miami hosts the largest concentration of South Fork galleries, with booths by Birnham Wood of East Hampton and New York City, Mark Borghi of Bridgehampton, Keszler of Southampton, and Peter Marcelle of Bridgehampton. Beth McNeill, a private dealer in Southampton, is showing at Art Miami’s recently acquired Aqua 13 art fair, which takes place in motel rooms at the Aqua Hotel in South Beach.

       East Hampton’s Eric Firestone Gallery is at the Miami Project, the southern rendition of ArtMRKT Hamptons and other sister shows developed by the same organizers in the United States. At UNTITLED, a fair in a tent on the beach established last year, the Halsey Mckay Gallery of East Hampton has a booth. Finally, Harper’s Books of Newtown Lane is hosting a salon in the Sagamore Hotel, where rare and previously unexhibited books and artworks will be featured.

      The Hamptons Take 2 Documentary Film Festival returns to Bay Street Theatre this weekend with a slate of 11 features and 11 shorts, including special programs devoted to D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus, pioneers of cinema verité, and Lana Jokel, this year’s Filmmaker’s Choice Award winner.

       Friday’s screenings include “The Only Real Game,” Mirra Bank’s study of how baseball provides release from the daily struggles of the residents of Manipur, India. “Hot Water” is Kevin Flint’s examination of the consequences of uranium mining, atomic testing, and nuclear energy. Two films by Neil Leifer, “Portraits of a Lady,” in which Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor sits for 25 portrait painters, and “The ConVENTion,” shot at a gathering of more than 500 ventriloquists complete the program.

       Saturday’s program begins with Kenny Mann’s “Beautiful Tree, Severed Roots,” which tells the story of her parents’ affinity for Africa and her own search for identity, while illuminating Kenya’s colonial history. “Mr. Conservative: Goldwater on Goldwater,” a portrait of the five-term Arizona senator who ran for president in 1964 against Lyndon B. Johnson, was produced and narrated by his granddaughter.

       Vivian Ducat’s “All Me: The Life & Times of Winfred Rembert” tells the story of an African-American artist’s journey from a Georgia chain gang to a gallery on Madison Avenue. “Treasures from the Rabble” is Alexandra Branyon’s film about Lois Wilson, a Louisiana folk artist who gave her entire body of work to her hometown, where it became the foundation of the Fayette Art Museum. “Treasures from the Rabble” will be preceded by a panel at the American Hotel on “The Unstoppable Creative Impulse,” led by the NPR talk-show host Faith Middleton.

       The HT2FF Gala, a tribute to Mr. Pennebaker and Ms. Hegedus, begins with a reception Saturday at 7 p.m., followed by a screening of “The War Room,” their  behind-the-scenes look at the 1992 New Hampshire Democratic primary and the Clinton campaign headquarters in Little Rock. A conversation with the filmmakers will follow.

       “Shut Up and Look,” Maryte Kavaliauskas’s intimate portrait of the artist Richard Artschwager, will open Sunday’s schedule, followed by Amy Nicholson’s “Zipper: Coney Island’s Last Wild Ride,” which focuses on the carnival ride’s rented lot that became the object of a power struggle between a real estate developer and New York City.

       “Two: The Story of Roman & Nyro” documents, with home movies and narration by their twin 9-year-olds, the journey of Desmond Child, a noted songwriter-producer, and Curtis Shaw, his lifelong partner, as they create a family.

       Two programs of short films include “Ross Goes West,” in which Ross School students discover small-town America, and Rebecca Cammisa’s “God is the Bigger Elvis,” the story of the actress Dolores Hart, who left Hollywood to become a nun.

       The festival concludes with the 7 p.m. screening of Ms. Jokel’s award-winning “Larry Rivers Public and Private,” covered separately in this issue. Tickets for individual programs are $15 ($13 for senior citizens), $30 for the Saturday night party, and $100 for a pass to the entire festival, including the party. They may be purchased from HT2FF.org, baystreet.org or at the Bay Street Theatre box office.

      The “Willem de Kooning: Ten Paintings, 1983-1985” exhibition at the Gagosian gallery on Madison Avenue is grand in scale and vision. An expertly chosen sampling of the best works of the artist’s late period, the paintings sing together in a room that, while full of white space, seems barely able to contain them.

       As John Elderfield notes in his essay for the show’s accompanying catalogue, it has been almost two decades since de Kooning’s late work has been explored in depth. The artist died in 1997. A group of paintings were in his Museum of Modern Art retrospective in 2011, but rather lost in the volume of other and earlier works. Despite Mr. Elderfield’s endorsement of them at the time, those paintings never really benefited by the comparison to the rest of the oeuvre.

       Add in talk about dementia and questionable authorship and there is a reason viewers tend to rush through those late galleries, their attention and interest spent on decades prior.

       Yet refocused in the hands of a gifted curator, such as Mr. Elderfield, who joined the gallery after his retirement from MoMA, where he organized the retrospective, what seemed spent and tawdry looks fresh and magnificent — a departure of the mind, perhaps, but not of the senses.

       The 10 works on view were put on sale by the artist’s foundation to raise money for an endowment. Mr. Elderfield narrowed the years of focus to give cohesion to the show and to assert that these two years comprise, as he writes, “the classic period” of that style. He then looked at each of the 10 paintings in depth, all untitled save for one, called “The Privileged,” and assigned themes to each, to help classify them in the greater scheme of the period as well as unite them to overarching motifs throughout the artist’s career.

       It can be overwhelming to see all of the paintings together. One, a late untitled work assigned the theme of “slippage,” is hung away from the rest. The separate vantage point helps makes sense of its individual merits and the subtleties of the painter’s brushstroke up close.

       In the essay, this work’s inclusion and theme lead to a discussion of the artist’s working methods during this decade. Rather than a free-flowing gesture, de Kooning relied on tracings or projections of elements of other paintings in these late works and drew outlines on the canvas that were then filled in with color and surrounded by white paint. The slippage Mr. Elderfield discusses involves a glitch in the process where the original image slips, at first accidentally and then deliberately, to create new compositions, a process confirmed by one of de Kooning’s studio assistants.

       There is a lot to be learned from the catalog, but like Matisse’s cutouts or Piet Mondrian’s Neoplasticist style, one may get the most from the paintings just by taking them in. The gallery is a room to be lingered in, to revisit, to focus on one and then another exclusive image at different times. The first visit must be devoted to the room as a whole. The dialogue between the paintings is so strong that it can be like following a dance. Despite this reductive style, the lines still seem molded by references to the figure in the most elemental way.           

       In addition to its name, “The Privileged,” from 1985, is singular in this show. It does not quite belong, but it is a work of power and beauty. One can see hints of Henri Matisse’s own late work in cutouts in it and some hints of Arshile Gorky, which Mr. Elderfield attributes more precisely back to Pablo Picasso.

       The curator discusses the cutouts in his entry for this painting, with the theme of “metamorphosis.” The palette of yellow, red, and shades of purplish blue differs from the more red, white, and blue emphasis in the other paintings. The more static accumulations of shapes also differs from the fluidity of the earlier works.

       In an essay devoted to the theme of ambiguity, Mr. Elderfield writes that the artist was likely attempting to have these paintings “stop making sense.” They can look like waves, ripples, or body contours, but they are most arresting just by contributing to the ebb and flow of the other paintings. Their asymmetry helps lead one through the gallery, implying a definitive climax before circling back onto themselves. It is a lovely ride.

       The exhibition remains on view through Dec. 21.