The problem with acting in the theater, as opposed to film and television, is the live audience, Emily Mortimer said recently at the modest Amagansett farmhouse she and her husband, Alessandro Nivola, bought five years ago. “Everyone in the audience has paid for a ticket and suspended their disbelief; they’re counting on you and you’ve got only one shot. I’m always afraid I will break the illusion by shouting something like ‘Fuck the Queen.’ ”

    Lucky for her, then, that she’s been able to put the plays she did at school in London and at Oxford University largely behind her. Ms. Mortimer, a lead in Aaron Sorkin’s HBO drama “Newsroom,” about the inner workings of a cable TV news program, has appeared in at least 40 film and television productions. Joining her in the cast of “Newsroom,” now in its second season, are Sam Waterston, Jeff Daniels, Jane Fonda, and Marcia Gay Harden, among many others.

    Often asked how hard it is to learn the dialogue, which can only be called abundant, she said, “The challenges are similar to Shakespearean acting: How do I learn the lines and also learn the rhythm of the dialogue, and how do I honor it? Sorkinese — I didn’t coin the term — is a language in and of itself that’s inverse. You have to honor it, and it won’t serve you at all well to try and make it your own language. It’s very stylized and you have to honor the style and make it sound your own.”

    Recognizing this was one of the many “moments of illumination” she has had over the past two years. Another was realizing that she had to listen to the music of the scene “and if you listen hard enough, you can realize what your own little section is. It’s as near as I’ve ever come to making music.”

    In the Sorkin style of dialogue, actors have to learn to speak over one another in a kind of endless overlap. Thinking of it as music makes it seem as if learning the lines would not be so difficult if one had the rhythm down. Not so fast, however. As she said, “There’s no winging it. You have to go home and learn it every night. And if one person doesn’t have it totally under their belt, the whole thing kind of falls apart.”

    Even though this season, “actors flubbing their lines happened less,” when it does happen, “you feel so much love for them and so elated when it’s not you who’s fucking up,” she said.

    There are five days between the read-through and the filming. If big scenes are at the end of the episode one feels very lucky, she said. “When it works out and we’re all sort of on our game and the stars are aligned, it does feel magical and it feels like a great good luck to be a part of it.”

    Oh, and the technical part of all that button pushing on the set, which is what goes on behind the talking head the viewers are watching? “No one knows what the hell we’re doing when we’re pushing buttons on all the machines, but we do it very authoritatively,” Ms. Mortimer said.

    Ms. Mortimer spoke of a subliminal familiarity she has felt working with Mr. Sorkin. He is similar in character, she said, to her father, the late John Mortimer, an English barrister, author, playwright, and creator of Horace Rumpole, the disheveled, irreverent defender of the British criminal classes. “The way he educated me and all his kids is something I hold so dear. His whole thing was the paradoxical nature of people. You can be a good person and kill someone and you can be a perfectly awful person and never get a parking ticket . . . everybody’s more than one thing, which has helped me a lot, not just in life. There was something radically unjudgmental about him.”

    As an extremely left-wing barrister, her father was passionate about prison reform. In honor of him, Ms. Mortimer has continued to visit prisons. Since moving to Brooklyn with Mr. Nivola and their two young children, Ms. Mortimer has gone once a month to visit the women in a female detention center. Although her schedule doesn’t allow for it right now, she said “I’m hoping to get back into it. It’s incredibly rewarding. The main feeling you come away with is ‘There but for the grace. . . .’ ”

    Ms. Mortimer was an only child until she was 12. A shy child, she may have turned to theater for some solace, she said. “I’d write little plays for my parents and act them out.” She went on to read English and Russian at Oxford, where, in her last semester, she was spotted onstage by an agent who took her on and proceeded to get her parts in “sub-BBC historical costume dramas,” she recalled.

    Her father, who had often defended people’s right to produce pornography, went with her to films in which she had to get naked. He would take off his glasses so he could sort of see something, she said, but it was more of a rosy glow.

    One such occasion was the time Ms. Mortimer was filming “Lovely and Amazing” (2001). It was the first time she did something she was proud of and it was because she “loved the script and wanted to not let it down.” Part of the story was autobiographical for Nicole Holofcener, who wrote and directed it. Not only did Ms. Mortimer have to get naked in the film, but she had to do so while an attractive fellow actor gave her a head-to-toe evaluation.

    “I had this paranoia about not really being an actor — I was sort of an impostor — and didn’t really understand what ‘being in the moment’ really was. So I can remember getting out of the bed naked, stepping on the floor and walking into the studio the scene was being filmed in, and thinking ‘Oh God, this film better be fucking good or this is so mortifying.’ ”

    The result was that she felt no gap between who she was pretending to be at that moment and who she really was. “It was a defining moment for me . . . really a cool feeling. So I wondered if it would be possible to have that feeling without taking my clothes off.”

    She added, “You might as well be the person you’re pretending to be. It’s a strange and seductive kind of feeling.”

    With “Lars and the Real Girl” (2007), a story about a disturbed young man played by Ryan Gosling whose mother died in childbirth and who has been unable to connect with people, he orders a life-size doll and treats her as if she were a real person. “I got sort of jealous of this doll,” Ms. Mortimer said. “She got all of Ryan’s attention and I wanted to tell her to get lost, to stick my finger up her nose,” but it also made her realize how powerful silence can be.

    Until she met her husband, also an actor, on the set of Kenneth Brannagh’s adaptation of “Love’s Labour Lost” in 2000, the theater terrified her, Ms. Mortimer said.

    “Being married to an actor helps with every aspect of getting ready for a part — well the particular actor I’m married to is very helpful and very kind and very bright,” she said. “But I only know what it’s like to be married to him so who knows if a doctor or a farmer or a plumber would be any more or less helpful. It depends on the dude I guess.”

    Life here is centered on their children (Sam, 9, and May, 31/2), the water (bay or beach), and family, which includes visiting Alessandro’s father, Pietro Niv­ola, and his stepmother, Katherine Stahl, in the old Springs farmhouse Costantino and Ruth Nivola bought in the 1940s.

    As for future roles she might want to try, fear seems like a must. “You’re drawn to the things that frighten you. As an actor one is accustomed to ceding control in almost every area.” She speaks nostalgically of making movies. “I look back at movies as being like the halcyon days of my infancy . . . so much less responsibility. You get looked after. It’s so lovely compared to television.”

    The words, in film, are less important than in television. “Writers in TV are gods because of the words. The writer is everything. On a movie set, the writer has to sit on the other side of the room with the animal wranglers and the director is king. It’s more visual and more about the moments between the words,” she said.

    But, being in “The Newsroom,” she added, is “thrilling. This job, constantly challenging and wonderfully so, it’s a high-octane thrill.”

On View at Horowitz

    Glenn Horowitz Bookseller is showing work by Almond Zigmund upstairs through Sept. 22 and will open a show of Adam Stennett’s work on Saturday with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m.

    Ms. Zigmund is presenting “Interruptions Repeated (Again and Again),” works on paper and sculpture. A sculpture installation by the artist can also be seen at the Sag Harbor Whaling Museum through Tuesday as part of the Parrish Art Museum’s Road Show. Her work is concerned with perception as she attempts to “challenge and destabilize” traditional norms to bring new focus on viewers’ daily navigation of space.

    The show at Glenn Horowitz contains conceptions of works she typically constructs on a much larger scale, in vivid colors and intricate patterns. The artist’s recent works on paper, in acrylic, enamel, and flocking, will also be on view.

    Mr. Stennett, who has just completed a month-long survivalist installation and performance on the South Fork in an undisclosed location, will show the fruits of his experiment, stretching the limits of what constitutes an artist’s residency. His self-developed shack in the wilds of the Hamptons is both serious and absurd in its intent.

    The structure and its provisions will be relocated to the gallery, complete with army cot, solar panels, rain barrel, and compact garden. The works created while he lived in the shack will be on display as individual works and part of the installation, using his surroundings as inspiration for their subject matter. The show will be on view through October.

Modern Architecture Talk

    Those visionaries and personalities that have shaped the modern city for the past few decades will be examined in a talk at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor on Saturday at 5 p.m. Martin Filler will discuss his new book “Makers of Modern Architecture, Vol. II: From Le Corbusier to Rem Koolhaus.”

    His first volume was published in 2007. His is a concise history, but covers architects and their creative output from the late-19th to early-20th centuries. He spends a good deal of time examining their personalities and characters and their bearings on how and what they designed.

Budnik at Kramoris

    Sheryl Budnik’s self-described visceral and “vigorous dance of oil and pigment” landscape paintings will be on view at Romany Kramoris Gallery in Sag Harbor beginning today with a reception Saturday from 5 to 7 p.m.

    The large-scale works are “more about human emotion than specifically about scenes of the sea, or any particular place” composed of paint thickly applied with a palette knife.

    The artist graduated from the University of Michigan with a B.F.A. and received her M.F.A. from the University of Wisconsin.

    The works will be on view through Sept. 26.

“Loopers”
John Dunn
Crown, $25

    Sometimes it takes an outsider to really appreciate a place. Remember Maycroft? That immense hulk of a mansion that for years loomed over North Haven in glorious Miss Havisham decrepitude? Though it was bought, entirely renovated, and hidden away behind gates, it may linger in the popular consciousness here as the former home of a private school for girls and then the Rainbow Preschool. But who knew one wing once housed a bunch of itinerant caddies?

   John Dunn recalls it fondly in his new book, “Loopers: A Caddie’s Twenty-Year Golf Odyssey.” He does more than recall it. He brings it back to life with an account of evenings of play on a wedge course he fashioned on the property’s 40 acres, run at the time by an order of Episcopal nuns: “. . . down past the dilapidated teahouse, all overgrown with honeysuckle and ivy, to the weathered, warped, clamshell-littered dock, and finally back up the hill past the huge elm to the row of gravestones beside the house where the sisters were all buried, including the mother superior, whose headstone became the eighteenth hole.”

    At one point he and a personable caddie from Ireland motor a borrowed boat into Sag Harbor, pick up a couple of girls at a bar, go skinny-dipping with the cove’s phosphorescent jellyfish, and take the two back to Maycroft for sex beneath the religious relics. It’s nice to know the place knew such joy.

    These were the years 1999 to 2001, and Mr. Dunn was working at the Atlantic in Bridgehampton, standing out as a white guy in a caddie yard full of Jamaicans and Antiguans known on occasion to leave a burning spliff on the fairway. And in case you’re thinking caddying is mere menial schlepping or kid stuff for losers and lost souls, at the height of the season, from mid-August to Labor Day, they each pulled in $500 a day, easy — to say nothing of the requisite expertise in yardages adjusted for wind and elevation, how to read a green, club and shot selection, and the psychology of sports.

    You might say a looper is a veteran caddie, but Mr. Dunn puts a finer point on it: “A looper isn’t a caddie who’s seen it all; a looper is a caddie who’s seen enough to know he never will.”

    But that doesn’t stop them from trying. In Mr. Dunn’s case, his career takes him from his home in Connecticut to crisp Aspen, Colo., to the gators of South Carolina’s Lowcountry to the California high desert and on to the whispering pines of Georgia’s storied Augusta National. One particularly memorable trip traces 3,500 miles from the Baja Peninsula up the West Coast to British Columbia. He hitchhikes across Utah, Arizona, and Nevada on his way to San Francisco with a sand wedge strapped to his pack to play some backcountry golf en route.

    At a marina and restaurant on the Intracoastal Waterway in Beaufort, S.C., he befriends a couple in the midst of a round-the-world sail and comes to see his adventures as akin to theirs: “I liked that romantic vision of caddying as a vehicle that carries you to beautiful far-flung places, the golf courses like ports where you dock for a while, fix your sails, replenish your supplies, and then set sail again the following season for another destination.”

    Metaphor made manifest, he later meets one of his brethren who actually lives on a sailboat, albeit one that’s permanently trailered and towed around to campgrounds across the country.

    No amount of perambulation, however, can outdistance the disapproving gaze of his father, who, whatever the adventure recounted, responds with an inquiry as to his son’s real plans to settle down and start a life. He’s a strait-laced sort prone to exclamations like “Darn tootin’!”

    “I’m not quite sure what he’d visualized a caddie’s role to be,” Mr. Dunn writes, “perhaps something like a bellhop or a waiter.”

    That assessment joins wanderlust in dogging the author. It’s driven home to devastating effect when, in chatting up a woman in a Venice, Calif., bar, he relays what he does for a living and she answers, “You know, you really shouldn’t tell people that,” before moving on to talk to someone else.

    Here’s one answer to the ghosts that haunt him. Back on the South Fork, we find Mr. Dunn caddying at Shinnecock Hills, a “once-in-a-lifetime experience” at “arguably the finest course in the country.” One quiet Monday at the close of the season he and his friend Carlo tee off next door at the National Golf Links of America and after the first nine holes hit their balls from 10 over the trees onto Shinnecock’s third fairway, play on, and then when they again reach Shinnecock’s third they cross back over to finish out at National. They call the hybrid course the Double Helix — “quite possibly the greatest contiguous thirty-six holes in the world.”

    “This is why we can’t quit caddying!” Carlo says from a bluff above Peconic Bay as the setting sun turns the world a molten gold.

    Throughout, Mr. Dunn is an eminently likable, self-deprecating tour guide with a knack for descriptions of nature and setting, from a Los Angeles that’s “all hell and smog” to St. Andrews in Scotland, where he plays a nighttime round by himself in a fog as thick as a blizzard’s whiteout.

    His book is full of loops within loops. That round in the Scottish “haar” recalls his golfing in the dark when he was young. He hitchhikes around the country more than once. He starts his tale in Connecticut, glad to stay away for years from perhaps our least interesting state, and then returns at last, wisely avoiding any “knowing the place for the first time” cliché.

    Mr. Dunn does settle, in a way, becoming a writer, a career no more reputable than caddying, when you get right down to it. The point is moot with his father, as he had developed pancreatic cancer. Their decades’ distance is finally, forcibly broken when Mr. Dunn sits bedside and won’t leave even when his father clearly doesn’t want to talk. There’s a lesson in there somewhere.

    John Dunn has written for The Golfer and Travel + Leisure Golf magazines. He lives in Southern California.

    The National in Southampton will host the 2013 Walker Cup from Sept. 6 through Sept. 8.

   Scott Schwartz has been named artistic director of the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor. Mr. Schwartz is a graduate of Harvard University and a member of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society. He was the director of “Golda’s Balcony,” the longest running one-woman show in Broadway history, and directed the off-Broadway musical “Bat Boy: The Musical” at the Union Square Theatre.

    His work has received several awards and award nominations. Other productions have included “tick, tick . . . Boom,” “Kafka’s The Castle,” “Rooms: A Rock Romance,” and “Murder for Two.”

    His current project is a new musical, “Secondhand Lions,” in Seattle. He has been a longtime follower of Bay Street’s productions and plans to live in Sag Harbor.

    Tonight begins another packed weekend at Guild Hall. A stage reading of “The Whisper,” featuring Matthew Broderick, Jane Krakowski, Pamela Adlon, Jennifer Tilly, and Dayle Reyfel reading Eugene Pack’s new work about a girls’ night out weekend, will kick it off at 8. The evening benefits the Felix Organization, whose supporters were adopted as children and now work to enrich the lives of youngsters growing up in the foster care system. Tickets are $30; $28 for members, or, for prime orchestra seating and a V.I.P. reception, $75 and $70 for members.

    Tomorrow, a new popular tradition, “Celebrity Autobiography,” returns at 7 and 9:30 p.m. with Christie Brinkley, Dick Cavett, Ralph Macchio, Eugene Pack, Dayle Reyfel, Brooke Shields, Jennifer Tilly, and others reading “motherly wisdom” from Nancy Regan, Ivana Trump, Kathie Lee, Kris Jenner Kardashian, and Candy Spelling. Other themes include sports and food fascination, with words written by Sylvester Stallone, Tiger Woods, Joe Namath, Celine Dion, Barbra Streisand, Dolly Parton, and Cher. Tickets start at $40; $38 for members.

    On Sunday at 11 a.m., Florence Fabricant will interview Melissa Clark, the author of a New York Times food column called “A Good Appetite,” who has also written for Bon Apetit, Food & Wine, EveryDay with Rachael Ray, Martha Stewart Living, and no less than 32 cookbooks (some of them co-authored). Her collaboration with Peter Berley, “The Modern Vegetarian Kit­chen,” received both a James Beard award and a Julia Child Cookbook award in 2000. Ms. Clark will sign books after the interview. Admission is $15, $13 for members. A $75 V.I.P. ticket includes a 10 a.m. continental brunch with the speakers.

    Sunday evening at 8, Classic Albums Live Band will perform the Beatles’ “Abbey Road” on stage. The album will be performed “note for note, cut for cut.”  Tickets start at $40 with discounts for members.

    Wynton Marsalis’s concert Saturday night is sold out.

    The Bay Street Theatre has saved its best for last, as it completes its excellent three-show main stage 2013 season with a hilarious production of “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” playing through Sept. 2.

    This production of “Forum,” directed and choreographed by Marcia Milgrom Dodge, takes no prisoners. You will laugh until you beg for mercy, and then you will laugh some more.

    Technically a musical comedy, “Forum” is, in truth, a comedy with music. The book-heavy show written by Larry Gelbart and Burt Shevelove is a vehicle for comedians, and the company put together by Ms. Dodge delivers perfect timing, with the resulting laughs exploding through the theater.

    The show made its Broadway debut in 1962. We should all look so good at 51. Mr. Gelbart had developed his comedic chops writing for television in the frenetic days of the early 1950s. He was part of the team on Sid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows,” arguably the most influential weekly comedy in television history.

    He went on to write the pilot for the 1970s hit television series “M*A*S*H,” writing and directing many of its episodes, and later wrote the screenplay for “Tootsie.”

    Mr. Shevelove, though not as well known, had a similar background.

    “Forum” is Borscht Belt comedy at its finest. You can imagine opening night in 1962, with the New York audiences eating it up.

    This slightly modernized, East-End-ized version works almost as well.

    It is set in ancient Rome, where the slave Pseudolus (Peter Scolari) yearns for freedom, while his master’s son, Hero (Nick Verina), yearns for Philia (Lora Lee Gayer), the virgin just brought into the brothel next door. Pseudolus makes a deal with Hero to be set free in exchange for delivering Philia, who has already been sold to a conquering general, Miles Gloriosus (Nathaniel Hackmann).

    The rest is not history, but rather, hysterical comedy.

    At a quick glance, the show might be viewed, in contemporary eyes, as misogynistic. After all, the female characters are either prostitutes, a beautiful but dim-witted virgin, or a nagging wife. But the male characters are such dolts, such absolute idiots, panting after anyone in a blonde wig, that the whole thing collapses into wonderful farce.

    While Mr. Scolari might seem to lack the gravitas one normally expects from the role (it was created on Broadway by Zero Mostel), he more than makes up for it with his wonderful sense of humor, taking great delight as he guides us through the farcical landscape of ancient Rome.

    Ms. Dodge did a superb job of casting the character actors that surround Mr. Scolari, starting with the oddball love interest created by Mr. Vernia and Ms. Gayer. Their duet, “Lovely,” very well staged by Ms. Dodge, is perfectly done, bringing laughter throughout and setting up an even more hilarious reprise in the second act between Pseudolus and Hysterium (Tom Deckman). Mr. Deckman is, indeed, hysterical, milking every laugh, without ever forcing the issue.

    Mr. Vernia has a beautiful tenor voice.

    This show is as well cast, musically, as it is acting-wise.

    The same can be said for the other character actors who grace the stage. Conrad John Schuck is too funny for words as the hen-pecked, leering Senex, with Jackie Hoffman as Domina, Senex’s wife, doing the pecking.

    Ms. Hoffman does so much with so little that she, at a couple of moments, comes close to stealing the show. She knows what she is doing, and she does it damn well.

    Ditto and likewise for Stewart Lane’s Erronius. As with the rest of the cast, he is very patient, knowing where the laughs are, and allowing them to roll out of the audience.

    And I can’t leave out Laurent Giroux’s wonderfully slimy Marcus Lycus, the buyer and seller of courtesans.

    All this sets up the arrival onstage toward the end of the first act of the vainglorious Miles Gloriosus, played by Mr. Hackmann — again, another piece of perfect casting. Mr. Hackmann plays the part like a Charlton Heston who can act.

    The courtesans are sexy, which is the whole idea. Shiloh Goodin, who is also listed as associate choreographer, and Phoebe Pearl are wonderful as the Geminae twins, and lead the entire group of courtesans in an uproarious sendup of Martha Graham in a funeral scene to die for.

     Terry Lavell gives us a long-legged Gymnasia, which is amazing, since, if truth be known, Ms. Lavell is . . . well, you’ll have to buy a ticket to find out.

    Glen Giron, Grant Haralson, and J. Morgan White, as the Proteans, really are the glue that holds the show together, stumbling, tumbling, and changing character at the drop of a dime, and the trio does all this and more, very well.

    The musical direction by Ethel Will, who leads a top-notch five-piece band, is pitch-perfect.

    Though the show is more of a comedy with music, it is, in the end, still a musical, and a very important one, historically.

    Stephen Sondheim, who had earlier written the lyrics for “West Side Story,” chafed when he wrote the lyrics for “Gypsy,” wanting, instead, to compose the music, as well. That job, however, went to Jule Styne.

    “Forum” marked Sondheim’s first time composing the score for the Broadway stage. We hear many influences: the “oompah” Jewish-Germanic backbone to so many American musicals in the show’s opening number, the brassy bump-and-grind sound of Jule Styne during the show-stopping “Everybody’s Got to Have a Maid,” and Leonard Bernstein in the song “Free.” Lyrically, “Free” is an homage to Mr. Sondheim’s mentor, Oscar Hammerstein II.

    The lyrics of the opening number are prescient for the career of Sondheim. When he wrote the words “Tragedy tomorrow, comedy tonight,” he could have been talking about his own brilliant future, a musical exploration into some of the darker corners of humanity, often driving the point home in a telling minor key.

    But all that is down the road from “Forum.” Here, his lyrics are a perfect match to the book, frequently being the comic straw that breaks the camel’s back, with laugh after laugh the result.

    Technically, “Forum” meets the high standard that the Bay Street Theatre has maintained in recent productions. Speaking of sets, the design here by Michael Schweikardt, paired with the lighting design by Mike Billings, allows Ms. Dodge and her players to maximize the space. Kathy Fabian never ceases to spring delightful surprises with her props, and the sound design by Tony Melfa is crisp and clean.

    And of course, as already mentioned, the musical direction by Ethel Will is superb. There is nothing better than to hear an overture begin, as it lays out promises of things to come, and then to have the orchestra deliver.

    You can have your tragedy tomorrow, but here is comedy, tonight.

    “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” is playing through Sept. 1, with performances Tuesday through Saturday at 8 p.m., Sunday at 7 p.m., and matinees Wednesdays at 2 and Saturdays at 4.

   Stuart Sutcliffe was at once a bit player and an integral component in the crucial formative years of popular music’s biggest act to date. A close confidant to John Lennon, the art student/bohemian/reluctant musician seemed destined for greatness in the realm of visual art, perhaps to track the Beatles’ unprecedented triumphs in the aural and performance arts in the explosion of creativity and exploration of the 1960s.

    Yet, on April 10, 1962, on the eve of the Beatles’ third extended appearance in Hamburg, Germany, Sutcliffe, who had joined the Beatles, traveled with them to Hamburg, fallen in love, quit the band, and remained in Hamburg to resume his art studies at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste, died, possibly of a brain aneurism. He was just 21.

    Legend has it that Sutcliffe had been beaten and repeatedly kicked in the head in an attack by toughs in Liverpool, England. Whatever lay behind his early death, a roommate at the Liverpool College of Art, according to Bob Spitz’s biography, “The Beatles,” recalled how Sutcliffe experienced severe headaches. “Stuart fell over from time to time,” the roommate said. From Hamburg, letters to his family described “migraines and flashes of extreme pain.” In the end, “convulsed with pain” and “curled up into a ball,” according to Mr. Spitz, he died in an ambulance as it sped toward a hospital.

    This knowledge provides context in which “Stuart Sutcliffe: Yea Yea Yea,” an exhibition at Harper’s Books in East Hampton through Oct. 15, can be viewed. Created in the last months and years of his short life, the 19 untitled works featured suggest an artist at once confident and purposeful in the conveyance of his vision and harboring a darkness and almost schizophrenic jumble of visual statements.

    Near the entrance, the “Hamburg Series,” from 1961 or ’62, consists of three dark and extremely dense oil on canvas paintings. A jumble of interlocking geometric shapes fill some or most of each, with the application of paint so thick that brush strokes and perhaps manipulation by other tools — palette knife, fingers, palm? — are obvious, lending them a dynamic, three-dimensional aspect.

    Many other works are mixed media on paper, often newspaper. On copies of Die Zeit, in particular, the messages are striking and loud, if ambiguous: bold strokes forming patterns in black, red, and, sometimes, a soft blue seem to scream in competition with newspaper headlines like Frauen schlecht verheiratet?” “Was mache ich it den Ersparnissen?” and “Es fehlt etwas Wohnung” — stories seemingly debating the merits and downsides of marriage and family life — along with help wanted ads for salesmen.

    The images bring to life Mr. Spitz’s depiction of the young Sutcliffe and Lennon learning their craft at the Liverpool College of Art: “Long after the other students had gone home, they worked furiously on technique, experimenting with free expression and a nebula of colors to generate a flow of ideas. In what was essentially a painting tutorial, Start introduced John to the basics of image and composition, doling out tips on how to control the brush or direct the flow of paint.”

    Still other works in the exhibition depict more tangible imagery — a man gazes at a woman, his hand resting on her shoulder — but each form and feature drips with blue, red, green, yellow, and black. Also displayed are sketches, letters sent back to his family in Liverpool, and photographs of the Beatles in this critically important period in their development. A rare photograph has been restored to depict Sutcliffe, enigmatic behind sunglasses, alongside Lennon, George Harrison, Pete Best, and Paul McCartney. The eldest just 20 years old at most, the instruments in their hands, and equipment at their feet look laughably cheap and poor in quality, save for the painter’s Hofner President bass, purchased, at Lennon’s insistence, with the proceeds from the sale of a painting he had submitted to a prestigious exhibition in Liverpool.

    In another photo, Sutcliffe and Lennon, onstage in Hamburg, gaze at one another intently, barely two feet apart. Two young men destined for greatness, growing into their respective medium as they drift inexorably apart. 

    “In whatever class Stuart sat down in — painting, drawing, lifework — a tremendous energy and intensity filled the room,” Spitz wrote. “He painted with power and conviction, and John knew it.” In the 1960s, that “tremendous energy and intensity” manifested and stormed the world in the form of the Beatles’ performance on stage and in the recording studio. More than 50 years on, a “fifth Beatle,” one never able to experience or even witness his collaborators’ unimaginable success, remains a fascination for fans of the aural and visual arts alike. In “Stuart Sutcliffe: Yea Yea Yea,” the world gets a hint, a tantalizing glimpse, of what else might have been.

   There is a cat-like air about Lemon Andersen. Quiet, reflective, yet always aware. It is an air he developed growing up in the street and one he will take to the John Drew Theater at Guild Hall next Thursday, as he performs his one-man show, “County of Kings,” at 8 p.m.

    “County of Kings” is a story of recognition and redemption. Poetry. Truth. It begins and ends with Millie, Mr. Anderson’s mother, Puerto Rican, a junkie, sometimes recovering, sometimes not, but always loving her son to the day she died of AIDS.

    Mr. Andersen’s main male influence growing up was his stepdad, Chado. “Living with Chado, me and Peter were taught the finer things in life,” Mr. Andersen wrote in the book version of “County of Kings,” “like how to make a pen gun. When defending yourself, always go for the throat. And, of course, my favorite game of all, how-to-strip-a-car-in-broad-daylight.”

    Mr. Andersen’s words are written to be spoken. Yet, on paper, they read like a dream, and not always a pleasant one.

    They offered me a year

    or five years probation

    I take the year with no hesitation

    I’m not built for checking in

    Pissing in a cup, curfews

    Telling me what I do’s

    And what I does

    And where I’m supposed to be

    And where I was.

    “County of Kings” is about finding redemption in art — the Feld Ballet, poetry, and, finally, theater. The book itself is dedicated to the legendary acting teacher and longtime head of the American Place Theater, Wynn Handman.

    “Wynn taught me Clifford Odets,” Mr. Andersen said. “He taught me that you can write your story, about your people, and they will come.”

    It was Mr. Handman’s idea to pair the emerging artist with the director and dramaturge Elise Thoron. She was working with Mr. Handman in 2007 on a program called Literature to Life, in which works are adapted verbatim for the stage, to introduce to young people the joy and love of reading.

    “He has an ear for voices that are worth hearing,” Ms. Thoron said Saturday of Mr. Handman. “Lemon wanted to write a prose memoir. I looked at his poetry and said, ‘Wow wouldn’t it be great if he could do it as spoken word poetry?’ ”

    The two did just that, crafting the performance piece “County of Kings.”

    Mr. Andersen wears two hats for the production — the author’s hat and the actor’s — and Mr. Andersen and Ms. Thoron make sure that the two are never confused.

    Ms. Thoron holds Mr. Andersen to the task at hand. “All the time,” Mr. Andersen said last week. Mr. Andersen had rehearsed the piece with Ms. Thoron two days earlier. “ ‘You have to land that, because the writer wrote it,’ ” he said she told him. “She will never say, ‘You wrote it.’ She’ll always say, ‘The writer wrote it this way for a reason.’ ”

    “Truth. That is the search onstage,” Mr. Andersen said. “The search is to be in it. The words are in your heart, not your head anymore. Live. Exist. The writer is somebody else. That’s a long time ago. He wrote that play a long time ago,” he said.

    Asked if the actor ever sends the author a note, Mr. Andersen laughed. “Yeah,” he answered. “I’m sorry. I apologize for missing this word.”

    Ms. Thoron has worked extensively overseas. “I wanted to study directing in Russia,” she said. “The function of theater in that society is quite different.” The repertory model of doing theater is strong in Russia, as opposed to the U.S., where actors go from job to job. The idea and ideal of a repertory company, she said, “allows you to have a richer, longer relationship with the material.”

    The result of the collaboration between Mr. Andersen and Ms. Thoron is a lyrical yet story-driven piece of theater.

    But Mr. Andersen is more than a performer. He is a student, and, at the same time, a teacher. He goes to schools, and even prisons, to teach poetry and performance art. One place he teaches is at the Stella Adler Studio of Acting in New York.

    “There are students that are already there, and there are students that we bring in,” Mr. Andersen said of the studio’s outreach effort. “We mix them up. There is a level of execution that we adhere to. Some kids come in because they are fans,” he said. Mr. Andersen first came into national prominence when he appeared in Russell Simmons’s “Def Poetry Jam” on HBO in 2002. “They follow my work and they [his students] want to do the same thing,” he said. “They are young artists. They want to take it to the next level. They don’t want to be a young voice anymore, they want to be a professional voice.”

    “What I get to do at Stella Adler that is really amazing is, I get to help these young people find out if they are writers, or performers, or both.”

    His trips to prisons or jails to teach can be problematic for him. It is a world he knows too well, having served time in both Rikers Island and Franklin County Jail in Ohio.

    “I was in Rikers Island a month ago,” Mr. Andersen said. “Teaching. I know these dudes. It is about gauging what the day is like for these men in prison. Every day is a new day for these men. You’re not going to be a miracle maker. That day, the tension is high. They don’t want to hear it. They just want to get out of the dorm, so they go to the auditorium, where you happen to be.”

    Choosing to stage “County of Kings,” even for one night, is a daring move for Guild Hall. Perhaps it is a harbinger of an attempt to reach a broader audience in the Town of East Hampton. Mr. Andersen was surprised to learn that nearly 50 percent of the students in some schools in the town are Latino.

    “Wow. They have a story to tell,” he said.

    “The American Latino is a demographic in itself, not just the Latino community, but the American Latino, the second, third, fourth generation of Latino in America.” It is a potential audience that is seldom seen in the John Drew Theater.

    Mr. Andersen sees an evolving world. “There is an essayist in Mexico who is hip-hop, or there is a Latino Chicano who doesn’t really know Spanish at all. They don’t even have an accent. That’s us. That is where we are going to now.”

    Mr. Andersen is excited to perform at the John Drew Theater, no matter who is in the house. “Theater audiences are so smart,” he said. He is, himself, the product of a biracial family (his father was Norwegian-American), and he doesn’t want his work to be pigeonholed.

    “I have a hard time with other playwrights who feel like it is always about ‘developing our own audience,’ where I kind of like the audience that is there,” he said. “When it comes to the theater, this audience is so important to us. If we can tell our stories, they have a better understanding of us, of that kid on the train.”

    Mr. Andersen and Ms. Thoron are working on a new play, “Toast.” It is backed by the Sundance Film Festival, where it received its first reading. Set in Attica State Prison in 1971, “Toast” is an eight-character play.

    For Ms. Thoron, next Thursday will close a circle in her life. When she was a child, she was raised, in part, in East Hampton.

    “I saw my first magic show at Guild Hall,” she said. Next Thursday, she will get to give back, as Lemon Andersen brings his own theatrical magic to the John Drew.

   Guild Hall’s Labor Day weekend schedule is full again this year, with a number of performances, screenings, and concerts.

    Tonight, “County of Kings: A Stage Memoir by Lemon Andersen” will be presented by the author, who is also a poet and performance artist. It is directed by Elise Thoron. The 8 p.m. performance costs $30, $28 for museum members. Free rush tickets are available for students.

    Tomorrow night, Guild Hall and the Hamptons International Film Festival will show “The Short Game,” the last in the SummerDocs series, which is written about above on this page.

    Saturday night is set for the Taj Mahal Trio, with a special guest, Bettye LaVette. Tickets start at $50 for balcony seating up to $125 for prime orchestra. The show begins at 8.

    A Sunday night performance of “Patti Smith: Words and Music” is sold out.

    Discounted student rush tickets are available for most performances. Tickets can be purchased at the box office or through guildhall.org.

   An anonymous donor has promised a gift of $300,000 to the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor if it can raise matching funds.

    The gift was in response to the theater’s announcement that Scott Schwartz will be the new artistic director for the 2014 season.

    The gift will launch the theater’s fall matching funds campaign. Tax-deductible donations can be made by clicking the “Donate Now” icon on the baystreet.org Web site or through the box office.