The Scottish play known to nonsuperstitious Shakespeareans as “Macbeth” will be performed beginning tomorrow at LTV Studios by the Round Table Theatre Company.

    This will be the first full production of the new theater ensemble, which had its inaugural event in October with a reading of “Double Falsehood,” a play with portions attributed to Shakespeare.

    Morgan Vaughan, who is the producing artistic director for the company and originally from East Hampton, said in the fall that choosing the more daring material from the Bard’s oeuvre is one of the ways the company seeks to be both relevant and challenging to audiences here in the off-season, to give them something to think about. “It’s risky but really fun.”

    “Macbeth” resonated with her because its classic themes of “unbridled ambition, self-promotion, and doing whatever it takes to get ahead and the consequences are so relevant today.”

    Ms. Vaughan, who plays Lady Macbeth, and her husband, the company’s artistic director, Tristan Vaughan, who plays Malcolm, will be joined in this production by Jeff Keogh as Macbeth and Dan Stearns as Macduff. Both are from the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Academy for Classical Acting at George Washington University, where all four of the actors received graduate degrees. The Vaughans also studied Shakespearean acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London.

    The rest of the cast is made up of familiar names from the community, among them Dianne Benson, Anita Sorel, and Bonnie Grice as the three witches, Andrew Botsford as Duncan, Kenny Kilfara as Banquo, Josh Gladstone as Ross, Joe Brondo as Lennox, John Tramantona as Angus, Vinny Cinque as Donalbain, Brian Schwartz as Fleance, Gina Rivera as Lady Macduff, and Irene Thompson as the gentlewoman. Brian Leaver has contributed the scenic design, and the costumes are by Yuka Silvera. Jennifer Brondo is the stage manager.

    The play will remain in the time it was originally set, with traditional Scottish attire and swords. And, according to the producers, it will be bloody.

    Ms. Vaughan is relishing her chance to do “one of the great female roles.” She said in a release, “You don’t want to admit it at parties, but we all have some Lady Macbeth in us — to greater and lesser degrees at different times. . . . It’s my job to let my inner Lady Macbeth out.”

    The play will serve as a benefit for LTV and for the Round Table’s season and its acting classes and reading workshops at Guild Hall. The company’s mission is to provide entertainment and education for all ages and allow people to engage with Shakespeare and other playwrights throughout history.

    “Macbeth” will run for two weekends,­ tomorrow and Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m., and the same times beginning Friday, Jan. 18. The cost at the door is $25, $15 for students and those over 65.

    The company is awaiting official nonprofit status but can accept contributions to the production through LTV. Checks should have “Macbeth” on the memo line.

Saunders’s “Long Now”

    “Christopher Saunders: The Long Now” will open at Glenn Horowitz Bookseller in East Hampton on Saturday with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m. “The Long Now” refers to a term used by Brian Eno: “The precise moment you’re in grows out of the past and is a seed for the future. The longer your sense of Now, the more past and future it includes.” In the painting “The Long Now,” from 2011, three horizontal planes, implying different states of place or time, are merged.

    Mr. Saunders, who lives and works in Brooklyn, has shown previously at the Silas Marder Gallery in Bridgehampton and with Hiroyuki Hamada in Rhode Island. According to the artist, his current work employs clouds in an aggregate symbolic manner, representing a sense of place and the sublime and using multiple sources to gather references to “sky, pollution, smoke, explosions, plumes, swarms, and overexposed film” in a collaged composition.

    He received an M.F.A. from Rutgers University and was a 2010 fellow in painting at the New York Foundation for the Arts. The exhibition will be on view through Feb. 23.

Harms and Antonakos

    The Drawing Room gallery in East Hampton will present two solo shows of work by Robert Harms and Stephen Antonakos, beginning Saturday and running through March 3. Mr. Antonakos will show work from the 1960s to 1970s in which light, space, and color are brought to geometric forms. Mr. Harms is showing new paintings that also incorporate light, as well as derived from the natural world.

    In addition to his drawings, Mr. Antonakos is known for his neon installations, panels, and site-specific public works. Included in the show will be two neon wall sculptures and two groups of drawings that examine the relationships among geometry, architecture, and the white field of the page.

    Mr. Harms also uses the whiteness of the page or canvas as a compositional element in his delicate and balletic but richly colored abstractions of the world outside his studio on Little Fresh Pond in Southampton.

Tripoli in N.Y.C.

    The Tripoli Gallery in Southampton will open a pop-up New York City space at 980 Madison Avenue on Wednesday with an exhibition of work by Lola Montes Schnabel. An opening reception will be held from 6 to 8 p.m.

    “Within Reach,” the title of the show, refers to a series of oil paintings and watercolors that “evoke oceanic realms whose landscapes and figures remain ceaselessly ephemeral yet always connected, bound by a kindred condition.” The paintings have a narrative element that reflects Ms. Schnabel’s background in filmmaking.

    According to the artist, “Looking at a painting presents a chance to stop thinking . . . you enter an unknown space that eventually belongs to you. Without taking a step forward you are transported to a plateau or an arena, an invented place where the artist lives.”

    Ms. Schnabel, a part-time resident of Bridgehampton, graduated with a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from Cooper Union in 2008. Her work spans various mediums, including film, photography, printmaking, and painting. She has exhibited her work locally and internationally.

    The show will remain on view through Feb. 11.

Morley Speaks

    Starting tomorrow, Malcolm Morley will lead a new series of monthly Friday evening talks at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill called “The Artist’s View.” He will discuss his current Parrish exhibition in the galleries beginning at 6 p.m. “Malcolm Morley: Painting, Paper, Process,” which is on view through Sunday, explores the role of paper in his art-making process and includes more than 50 works from 1983 to the present.

    Mr. Morley was born in London in 1931 and attended the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts and the Royal College of Art before moving to New York in 1958. He has lived in Brook­haven since the 1980s. The talk costs $10, free for members. Reservations in advance are a must because space is limited to 45 people.

   “Non-matriculated” is the operative mouthful of a word as relates to a trio of graduate-level workshops in writing and literature at Stony Brook Southampton this spring. Some quick details: The courses run weekly from Jan. 28 to May 22 and cost about $1,800. The deadline to apply is Saturday.

   The courses: Ursula Hegi is offering Contemporary Literature by Immigrant Writers. Ms. Hegi, the author of 12 books, is now editing an anthology of just this type of fiction, “Second Voices.”

   Lou Ann Walker will lead a memoir-writing workshop. A former editor at Esquire and New York magazine, she is the author of “A Loss for Words.”

   And Andrew Botsford, former associate editor at The Southampton Press, will head up Writing the Feature, in which, a release said, “students will first learn the anatomy of a successful feature — brains, heart, skeletal structure, and musculature — and then write pieces on subjects of local interest, to be considered for possible publication in area newspapers.”

   Applicants have been asked to e-mail Julie Sheehan, the director of the college’s M.F.A. program in creative writing and literature, at [email protected]. Each message should include “a short paragraph explaining what you hope to get out of” the course. Up to 10 pages of creative writing in the particular genre should be attached.

Neoteric Symposium

    From 7 to 11 p.m. tomorrow, Neoteric Fine Art in Amagansett will present two events. First up is the “Neoteric Symposium,” a show-and-tell of multiple presentations by local people on a variety of topics. Based on the popular PechaKucha format (lately at the Parrish Art Museum), the symposium aims to provide a forum for ideas and introduce the people behind them. A listing of presenters is available on the gallery’s Web site.

    From 9 to 10:30 that night, San Joaquin (a k a Dan Asselin), a local singer and songwriter, will perform from his new album, “Zeroisms.” The combined event is a fund-raiser for Hurricane Sandy charities, with a suggested donation of $10. More information can be had by calling Scott Bluedorn at 838-7518 or by e-mailing [email protected].

When Smokey Sings

    The Bridgehampton Museum, formerly known as the Bridgehampton Historical Society, is presenting “Everyone Loves Motown!” as the third concert in its Parlor Jazz series on Saturday at 7:30 p.m.

    Jane Hastay and Peter Martin Weiss, a pianist-bassist duo, will co-host as usual and will be joined by Lilly-Anne Merat, who will sing, and Richie Scollo, a saxophonist. Ms. Merat, who was raised on the South Fork and is the daughter of Alfredo Merat, a Sag Harbor singer and guitarist, will perform songs by Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Al Green, and the Supremes.

    The concert will take place at the museum’s archives building on Montauk Highway just east of the Founders Monument. Admission is $25, $10 for members. Children under 12 are admitted free.

Winter Film Fest

    The East Hampton Library’s free Winter Film Festival will return to Guild Hall on Sunday with “Amador” at 4:30 p.m. In Spanish with English subtitles, it tells the story of a young immigrant who is saved by a job caring for an old man. When he dies, it presents a dilemma for the woman, who still needs the job.

    Jan. 20 brings “The Day I Saw Your Heart,” in French with English subtitles. Eli, a father of two adult daughters, is about to turn 60 and is expecting a baby with his new wife. The news shocks the daughters, and Eli tries to get closer to them, with disastrous results.

    “Hospitalite,” a Japanese film, will be shown on Jan. 27. It features a man whose quiet, monotonous life is interrupted by a stranger who claims to have helped his company. The stranger’s arrival leads to a variety of odd houseguests and a good deal of drama.

    Other titles will be announced soon.

Music at St. Luke’s

    Matthew Graybil, a young American pianist, will perform on Saturday at 4 p.m. at Hoie Hall at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in East Hampton.

    A recitalist, concerto soloist, and chamber musician, Mr. Graybil made his orchestral debut at 14 and has since performed in more than 100 recitals here and abroad, including for Pianofest and at Lincoln Center. The pianist is a prizewinner in numerous national and international competitions, among them the Missouri Southern International, where he was the only American reaching the finals.

    He will perform an inventive Schubert piece, Twelve Landler, referring to a country folk genre that evolved into the Viennese waltz. He will also perform a romantic four-part piece written for the early piano by Brahms. Rounding out a classical program are selected Etudes by Chopin and two works by Liszt.

    Tickets cost $20, but the performance is free for students 18 and under. Refreshments will be served. More information is under Current Events at stlukeseasthampton.org.

Lone Sharks Return

    Gene Casey and the Lone Sharks will perform at the Stephen Talkhouse in Amagansett on Saturday at 10 p.m. The band will take the stage following a solo performance by Shelby Lynne. Admission is $10.

    Now in its 25th year, the band returns to the Talkhouse with a new release, “Untrained.” Mr. Casey wrote, arranged, and co-produced the album, singing and sometimes playing all the instruments. Paul Scher (saxophone), Chris Ripley (drums), and Tony Palumbo (bass) are also in the mix.

    The 12 original songs on “Unchained” celebrate rootsy American music. “I Think About Elvis Every Day,” Mr. Casey announces on the lead track, then channels the King and Roy Orbison on “Don’t Leave Her Lonely.” A reverence for 1960s-era pop is evident on tracks like “We Don’t Mind if It Rains,” while “Christmas Lights” recalls the Everly Brothers — complete with spoken-word interlude — and ’60s holiday pop recordings by the likes of Darlene Love and Ronnie Spector.   

   There are certain images that are indelibly set in the popular culture. No matter how you feel about Bruce Springsteen and his musical legacy, it is hard to deny that the image of him — guitar slung over his shoulder, leaning on Clarence Clemons, who is blowing his saxophone, both looking young and very rock ’n’ roll, circa 1975 — from the cover of “Born to Run” is a certifiable icon.

    The man behind that image, Eric Meola, still talks about that photo shoot and what led up to it with the zeal of a true fan. A few decades later, seated in the warmth of his Sag Harbor house on a rainy day before Christmas, he recalled the time he first heard Mr. Springsteen perform.

    “It was 1973. I was walking by Max’s Kansas City on Park Avenue near Union Square, where I lived at the time, and I noticed a sign that Bruce Springsteen was playing that night. I had heard a couple of his records and really liked them, so I went to the show. I was completely knocked out, to the point where I said to myself, ‘I want to photograph this person. He’s going to be important.’ ”

    Mr. Meola was already an established photographer, a protégé of Pete Turner (now of Wainscott, who is known for his intense and often abstract-looking color photography), and he then had several images on the editorial pages and cover of Time and Life magazines. He had also received his first commercial assignment from Porsche. Yet, he was already chafing from the demands of the corporate clients and looking for outlets where he could enjoy more artistic freedom.

     It wasn’t until the following summer, however, that Mr. Meola found himself face to face with the musician. It was raining and they both sought shelter under the awning at the Plaza Hotel before Mr. Springsteen was scheduled to perform in Central Park. “I made an awkward introduction and told him how much I liked his music.”

    Mr. Meola continued going to shows in New York and in small venues in New Jersey where there might be just a few people in the audience. “Little by little, he started to realize I was a photographer. I started taking pictures at the shows.” Eventually, he went to Asbury Park to take some portraits and decided he really wanted to shoot Mr. Springsteen’s next album cover.

    It took a while to set up. This was a well-documented time of great turmoil for the musician, as he tried to break free of his management and spent most of his days in the studio struggling to make the perfect record he felt he needed to break through as a recording artist.

    After a few false starts, Mr. Springsteen showed up with Mr. Clemons at Mr. Meola’s studio, resulting in some 700 photos, amounting to 20 rolls of film, taken in two hours with no assistants. “It was very intense. I had planned out certain things and Bruce had planned out certain things and no sooner were they there, than they were gone.” Mr. Meola said his mantra during the session was to “shoot a lot, not wildly or randomly, but with a lot of variety in the images.” There were several clothing changes and stylized poses.

    John Berg, who was the art director of Columbia Records at the time, and who is the subject of a retrospective of the album covers he oversaw at the label at Guild Hall, knew right away that the image that was ultimately used should be the cover.

    It took a while to convince Mr. Springsteen. Mr. Meola said it was only recently that he found out from Mr. Berg that “Bruce rejected the cover. His previous album [“The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle”] had a very tight close-up, ‘serious artist’ look, which is what he wanted this time.” If he had rejected the cover outright, “that would have been it, but John convinced him otherwise.”

    He said he had never spoken to Mr. Springsteen about it. “We’ve never sat down and gone over the pictures. When I published ‘Born to Run: The Unseen Photos,’ in 2005, I asked if I could use his lyrics, which was a big thing to be asking for, but he let me use them.”

    Mr. Meola said, “to this day I can’t believe I shot the cover. It was that powerful of a desire to do it, that I am still pinching myself 35 years later.” He did a follow-up shoot with Mr. Springsteen for “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” but his images were not chosen.

    Although it might be expected that there would be some severe rivalry between those who photograph the Boss, as Mr. Springsteen is known, Mr. Meola said they are a friendly group and have become even friendlier since Mr. Meola started an event to raise money for the Community Food Bank of New Jersey, a charity Mr. Springsteen also supports.

    Mr. Meola already donates profits from his Springsteen photo books to the food bank, and after the economy crashed a few years ago, he convinced some of those photographers to contribute prints of Mr. Springsteen and his band for a benefit raffle. They included Frank Stefanko, who beat Mr. Meola out for the “Darkness” cover, Annie Leibovitz, and Pam Springsteen, the musician’s sister. At $25 a ticket, the raffle raised $136,000 for the cause. A similar effort this year after Hurricane Sandy raised $118,000 for the same organization. “We get a lot of support from the Springsteen camp and his fan magazines. We sold thousands of tickets,” Mr. Meola said.

    After “Born to Run,” he did album photographs for Chaka Khan, Carly Simon, Foreigner, Blue Oyster Cult, and Tony Williams, a jazz drummer and Miles Davis protégé. By this time, however, he already had a thriving commercial photography career with accounts such as American Express, General Motors, Johnny Walker Scotch, and Timberland shoes. It was a nice change from the late hours and excessive lifestyles of the musicians he photographed.

    “It takes a lot of energy. You have to hang out with them and need to build up a relationship with them to do it right. You have to go to their houses, keep their hours. Even with Bruce, his hours were night hours. I would have an appointment with him and he wouldn’t be around.”

    Mr. Meola balanced his commercial assignments with more personal pursuits. When he was sent to Kenya to shoot a plantation for a Swiss coffee company, for example, he took time to go south to photograph the Masai tribe. “It was these two parallel realities for the next 15 years.”

    Then a particularly difficult assignment for Johnny Walker in California, during which several severe winter storms stretched the shoot from 12 to 32 days, caused him to re-examine his career. He had been reading about Burma and decided to go. He said it led to a spiritual and religious metamorphosis.

    When he returned, a friend who worked at Kodak asked him what assignments he wanted to do. He told her about an idea he had to photograph the last great places on earth, and was invited to Rochester and offered the chance to shoot pictures all over the world with a new kind of film the company was introducing.

    He spent the next three years traveling to places such as the Sahara Desert, India, China, Cuba, and Antarctica. “They didn’t ask for a list, they said you just go where you want to go. So several times a year I would go to these places, deciding to concentrate on a few of importance and interest to me.”

    He has been working this way ever since, not quite retired, but making his own assignments and producing books when it seemed appropriate. A couple of days before the interview last month, he had flown back from the Atacama Desert in Chile where he took pictures for a new “Great Places” series in formation and will soon be returning to Antarctica.

    He has also recently taken his art into a more abstract realm. “We grow up with the notion of photography as a description of the real world. I feel very strongly that it doesn’t have to be that way. It can just be about abstract color and abstract light,” he said, adding that “a lot of my work is becoming abstract and the subject is color.” It can be as random as opening the camera shutter and waving the lens in the air or taking a picture of a real thing in a way that highlights its abstract qualities.

    Home base is Sag Harbor, where he and his wife, Joanna McCarthy, also a photographer, have lived full time for the past decade.

    Despite this region’s reputation as a creative draw for artists, for Mr. Meola, being home is his down time, a quiet period for relaxing and planning. He can sometimes be found shooting in his garden if he likes the light on a leaf or sees something budding, “but it’s not my main interest.” The South Fork is “a harder place to photograph in one sense,” he said, “because it’s quieter, a much softer environment. . . . I’ve always been interested in more remote places and more exotic places.”

Art in the Sky

    Tomorrow, the Parrish Art Museum will offer a guided telescope viewing and slide lecture on extraterrestrial life. The telescope viewing begins at 4 p.m. and continues through 8, weather permitting, and is offered through the Montauk Observatory, Suffolk Community College, and the Dark Sky Society.

    Matthew Pappas, an associate professor of astronomy at Suffolk Community College, will address “Inevitable Discovery: The Scientific Search for Life Beyond Earth” at 6 p.m. His talk will illuminate how such a discovery may be well within our grasp. Mr. Pappas received his undergraduate degree in physics from the University of Massachusetts and his master’s degree in astronomy at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. He is an adjunct professor at Stony Brook University and has worked on projects at Brookhaven National Lab and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

    The programs are part of the museum’s (Sky)gaze program and Hope Sandrow’s project Genius Loci, her series of site-specific events and projects that address the Parrish’s new home in Water Mill. The lecture and guided telescope viewing are free with museum admission.

Art at Ashawagh

    This weekend, “Art in the New Year” will take over Ashawagh Hall in Springs, with several artists bringing the light of the seasons in to warm up the space. Cynthia Loewen, Lynn Martell, Mary Milne, Alyce Peifer, Jerry Schwabe, John Todaro, and Pam Vossen will participate.

    Ms. Loewen, a realist painter (and stipple artist) from Springs, will show recent oils and drawings. Ms. Martell studied at the Art Students League in Manhattan and paints in oil and watercolor. She has new pieces in the show. Ms. Peifer will show new landscapes and seascapes inspired by the South Fork and its light.

    Mr. Todaro is a photographer from East Hampton who will be showing color and black-and-white landscapes and new abstract works. Mr. Schwabe works in sculpture, oils, acrylics, and watercolors and studied at the National Academy of Fine Arts and at the Art Students League. Ms. Vossen studied at the Art League of Long Island and will show oil landscapes, still lifes, and pastel portraits. Ms. Milne, a glass artist, studied at Pratt in Brooklyn.

    The show will open on Saturday, and a reception for the artists will be held from 5 to 8 that evening. The work will remain on view through Monday.

‘Maria Stuarda’ in HD

    Guild Hall will present The Met: Live in HD’s screening of Donizetti’s “Maria Stuarda” on Saturday at 1 p.m. Joyce DiDonato stars as Mary, Queen of Scots, in the first-ever Met production of Donizetti’s dramatic historical opera. Elza van den Heever, a South African soprano, makes her Met debut as Mary’s rival, Queen Elizabeth I, and Matthew Polenzani sings Leicester, the nobleman caught between the dueling monarchs.

    Maurizio Benini conducts a cast that also includes Matthew Rose as Talbot, Mary’s jailer, and Joshua Hopkins as Cecil, Elizabeth’s adviser. The production is by David McVicar, who also staged last season’s production of Donizetti’s Tudor drama “Anna Bolena.” Deborah Voigt, a soprano, hosts the transmission and conducts backstage interviews with the stars. Running time is approximately 166 minutes, and there is one intermission.

    General admission tickets cost $22, $20 for members, and $15 for students. Those supporting the screening with a gift in addition to a ticket purchase have been invited to attend Guild Hall’s Operatif series of talks by Victoria Bond, an accomplished composer and speaker. The 30-minute talk begins at noon on Saturday.

Auditions at Bridge

    The Hamptons Independent Theatre Fest will hold auditions for “In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play),” directed by Joshua Perl, on Feb. 2 from 1 to 3 p.m. and 5 to 7 p.m. at the Bridge, at 2357 Montauk Highway in Bridgehampton.

    “In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play)” marked the playwright Sarah Ruhl’s Broadway debut. The play, a Pulitzer finalist and Tony nominee for best play in 2010, is an exploration of how we connect with those we love, emotionally as well as physically. Inspired by 19th-century medical science, “In the Next Room” includes medical discussions of the human body and the administration of “the vibrating treatment” to fully clothed patients.

    Performances will run May 10 to May 26.

HIFF’s Oscar Nods

    Films screened at the 20th Hamptons International Film Festival in October have received 32 Oscar nominations. The total represents the most in the festival’s history.

    “Silver Linings Playbook,” the South­ampton opening film and Audience Award recipient, received eight nominations — for best picture, directing, actor in a leading role, actress in a leading role, actor in a supporting role, actress in a supporting role, editing, and writing.

    “Argo” was nominated for seven awards: best picture, actor in a supporting role, film editing, music, sound editing, sound mixing, and writing. “Amour” received nominations for best picture, foreign language film, actress in a leading role, directing, and writing.

    Four of the five nominees for best foreign language film were screened at the festival last year: “Kon-Tiki,” “War Witch,” “A Royal Affair,” and “Amour.” “How to Survive a Plague” and “Searching for Sugar Man,” both nominated for best documentary feature, were part of the festival’s SummerDocs series in 2012, and six of the shorts presented during the festival have also received nominations.

Neoteric Symposium

    “Neoteric Symposium,” a show-and-tell of multiple presentations by local people on a variety of topics, has been rescheduled. Originally planned for last Friday, it will now be held on Friday, Jan. 25, from 7 to 11 p.m. at Neoteric Fine Art in Amagansett.

    Based on the popular PechaKucha format (as presented by the Parrish Art Museum), the symposium aims to provide a forum for ideas and introduce the people behind them. A listing of presenters is available on the gallery’s Web site, neotericfineart.com.

    From 9 to 10:30 that night, San Joaquin (a k a Dan Asselin), a singer and songwriter, will perform from his new album, “Zeroisms.” The combined event is a fund-raiser for Hurricane Sandy charities, with a suggested donation of $10. More information can be had by calling Scott Bluedorn at 838-7518 or e-mailing [email protected].

Moran Gift

    At the beginning of the year, the Thomas Moran Trust announced that it had received a $477,000 grant from New York State to further along its restoration efforts for The Studio, the Moran house and work space overlooking Town Pond.

The money will also meet the matching gift requirement for a $250,000 grant from the Sylvia and Joseph Slifka Foundation.

    Peter M. Wolf, the founder of the trust, said Arthur Graham took over his duties as chairman in mid-December.

   Robert Richenburg’s paintings and works on paper from the 1950s and 1960s, during the height of Abstract Expressionism, are the subject of a new show on view in New York at the David Findlay Jr. Gallery on Fifth Avenue. The exhibition includes work that is gestural and full of color and linear movement.

    Richenburg, who died in 2006, was part of the New York School and a member of the Club, the group of artists who became known as Abstract Expressionists who met regularly on Eighth Street in Greenwich Village in the 1940s and 1950s. He was also a student of Hans Hofmann. He eventually became a resident of Springs, where many of his fellow Club members summered or relocated on a permanent basis. He taught for many years at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.

    In an essay for a 2006 retrospective exhibition catalog, The Star’s longtime art critic Robert Long said, “While some artists settle into signature styles and stop growing, whether out of financial worry, loss of heart, or lack of vision, Richenburg never forgot that to be an artist is to be an explorer. His relentless curiosity led him to try out completely different ways of painting, and to use many different mediums; he has consistently challenged our notions — and his own — of what constitutes art.”

    The artist himself noted that the work he made that seemed avant-garde at the time was already familiar to him so he kept pressing on and intensifying his images. “To stay with one way of painting for the rest of your life seems insane to me. Maybe it translates into success and you can put money in the bank, but you’re no longer an artist; you’re a merchant.”

    He was known during this period for his black-grounded works, which were built up with forms or gashes of white or colored paint with a brooding or explosive intensity. The dark ground made even his gestural mark-making seem ponderous, without the manic intensity and rhythm of some of Jackson Pollock’s drip works. But they are no less beautiful and in some ways easier to digest.

    By 1960, when he painted “The City,” one of the works in the current show, he was using a grid as an organizing principle, presaging the Minimalists’ fascination with hard lines and geometry that would eventually make Abstract Expressionism look fussy and self-involved in comparison.

    The exhibition will be on view through Jan. 26.

   There are some unique and thought-provoking offerings this winter at the Amagansett and John Jermain Libraries and we have a native son to thank for it. Christian Scheider has just made the dead of winter here a bit more interesting.

    When he settled down in Brooklyn after graduating from Bard College in June, Mr. Scheider didn’t think he would find his way back to the South Fork so quickly. He was acting at the Stella Adler School and collaborating with friends on various plays and projects. But his mother, Brenda Siemer, had decided to move to Vermont and his sister, Molly, wanted to stay here, so he agreed to come back to Sag Harbor and keep an eye on her while she finished her senior year in high school.

    Casting about for a way to stay busy, he came upon the idea for a series of events. At Amagansett, he proposed and is now doing two weekly programs, a film series on Sundays at 1 p.m. and a set of discussions based on the book “Stella Adler on America’s Master Playwrights” on Thursdays at 1 p.m., through next week. At John Jermain in Sag Harbor, he will begin a series on jazz and the biographies of four artists: Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, Art Tatum, and Duke Ellington, on Jan. 28 for four Mondays at 5:30 p.m.

    “I was coming out of the New York City theater headspace . . . and wanted to keep myself engaged like I was in New York. This is basically what I would be doing anyway,” he said on Friday.

    The film series, “The Claustrophobia of Wealth,” has already screened “Grey Gardens” and “Bernie” and will continue with “Margin Call” this week and “Being There” next week. Each film is followed by a discussion led by Mr. Scheider, who was a philosophy major at Bard. His senior project focused on the function of art in society from a philosophical standpoint.

    “I am completely obsessed with art-making and the communal experience that is art,” he said. “What moves us and what is the function of art in the world.” With millions being spent on plays, music, and films, “anything that has that much power must be connected with a function.”

    Mr. Scheider credits his years at Hayground, a school his theatrical parents (Ms. Siemer and Roy Scheider, who died in 2008) helped found, with his openness to the artistic pursuit and “the faith to have an interesting idea.” The idea led him to a thesis about the social and biological function of art, how it can help people address things they find inhospitable or difficult.

    For the film series, he wanted to approach the role of “the individual in film the way I approach Nietzsche.” Although film has gained more respect in academia, “Many, many people in the humanities department still write off film as a tangential art form.” But film, whether adapted from literature or through an original screenplay such as Charlie Kaufman’s “Synecdoche, N.Y.,” can be deeply philosophical, according to Mr. Scheider. “There are great artists writing films, and they should be celebrated the way we celebrate Edward Albee and Arthur Miller. . . . I like to treat them as texts,” he said.

    He also likes to “treat great texts as great texts” and the result is the Stella Adler series. The book grew out of transcripts of her classes. “We read Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, and Thornton Wilder through Stella’s performative lens, we read as an actor would.” For example, in his own attempts to perform works by Williams, Mr. Scheider noted that the playwright demands “empathy and historical awareness of the time” as well as “the imagination to see the character’s movements through that time.”

    With some in his audience holding advanced degrees and at least one who’d seen Marlon Brando on Broadway in “A Streetcar Named Desire,” on opening night, he said his role is more as a facilitator in the discussions.

    For both the plays and films, he tries to address “a hypocrisy, a paradox. a frustration,  a social ill that I believe is still being discussed.” Wilder’s “Skin of Our Teeth” in the Adler book, which was “ahead of its time in how it satirized human attempts to be here forever,” is a good launching point for a discussion of global warming, Mr. Scheider said, adding that the parallels between Chauncey Gardiner in “Being There” and Sarah Palin are also instructive. Recent films like “Bernie,” about small-town Texas rural life, “remind us that our notions of justice dissolve the minute we know the person and he seems like a nice guy.”

    The jazz series comes from his own elective coursework in composing and a father who was passionate about the genre. “At home, my father would scream down the staircase: ‘Christian, get up here!’ I would sprint up the staircase thinking he’d split open his knee, but it was ‘West End Blues’ on the radio. He treated it like it was the only time I was ever going to hear it.” The same passion could be had for a great film on a Saturday. Hayground, too, fostered the same devotion and energy to art during his formative years, he said.

    Although he acted as a child in Shakespeare plays put on by Hayground, “I never in a million years thought I would  have gone on a stage. That was what Dad did. But when he died, I found myself suddenly very curious about why he felt so strongly about what he made and why he felt it was so important.”

    Mr. Scheider was always interested in acting as an observer, he said, but it took this “investigative interest” to push him to sign up for a speaking-Shakespeare class and to go to auditions. “It gave me courage to try, that feeling that at some point, in all likelihood, it was a choice my father made and he had no support for it.”

    The elder Scheider, who worked at his family’s service station in New Jersey every weekend as a child, grew up in a world where “talking about Shakespeare was considered a waste of time. I realized I have a duty to just run with that gift that he gave me, to not be embarrassed to be involved in the arts and to advocate for them.”

    He is currently working on two plays. “William Shakespeare’s Mom” by Milo Cramer and directed by Morgan Green, is at the Brick Theater in Brooklyn, where he is “acting via Skype,” as a venture capitalist, through Jan. 26. He describes it as a “comedy about a young artist recently graduated from college feeling like he doesn’t know if he’ll make anything valuable, and his name happens to be William Shakespeare.” In August, he is participating in an adaptation of the Ray Bradbury story “The Murderer,” by Tucker Marder, at the Sag Harbor Cinema. “Expect to see the destruction of technology on stage in real time,” he said, with no small degree of the dramatic in his description.

    Here and now, there is still plenty of time to take in the two libraries’ programs, where one can share Mr. Scheider’s passions for acting, filmmaking, and music during the South Fork’s bleakest days of winter.

‘Les Troyens’

    Guild Hall will screen the Met: Live in HD’s presentation of “Les Troyens,” an opera by Berlioz based on Virgil’s “Aeneid,” on Saturday at noon. Fabio Luisi will conduct. The production stars Marcello Giordani as Aeneas, Deborah Voigt as Cassandra, and Susan Graham as Dido.

    The five-act epic has a running time of 300 minutes, with two intermissions. It is based on Francesca Zambello’s 2003 production, receiving its first Met revival this season. Joyce DiDonato will host the transmission and conduct backstage interviews with the stars.

    Tickets cost $22, with reduced admission for museum members and students. They can be purchased in advance at theatermania.com or at the box office three hours prior to curtain.

    On Tuesday at 7:30 p.m., the Naked Stage and Guild Hall will give a free reading of the play “Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train” by Stephen Adly Guirgis, with Joshua Perl as the lead artist.

‘Other People’s Money’

    The Hampton Theatre Company will stage Jerry Sterner’s play “Other People’s Money” at the Quogue Community Hall beginning next Thursday and running for three weeks. Although the play is now decades from its premiere in 1989, the story of capitalism run amok, Wall Street-style, is as relevant as ever.

    The cast includes Edward Kassar as Lawrence Garfinkle, a corporate raider; Terrence Fiore as Andrew Jorgenson, the chairman of a company about to be the subject of a raid (a role he played previously at the Southampton Cultural Center); Adrianne Hick as Kate Sullivan, a sexy and smart lawyer, and Diana Marbury as Bea Sullivan, Jorgenson’s assistant and Kate’s mother.

    “Other People’s Money” will run for three weekends, through Jan. 27. Showtimes are Thursdays at 7 p.m., Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m., and Sundays at 2:30 p.m. Tickets, which cost $25, $23 for those over 65, and $10 for students under 21, can be purchased in advance at hamptontheatre.org.

Dressing for Success

    The Southampton Cultural Center will present Nora and Delia Ephron’s “Love, Loss, and What I Wore” beginning next Thursday and running through Jan. 27 at the Pond Lane theater.

    Ilene Beckerman wrote the original book, but the Ephrons adapted it for the stage as a series of monologues based on the memoirs of several women about using their wardrobes to address the good and bad times in their lives. Ms. Beckerman will join some of the rotating casts, which will also include Brooke Alexander, Barbara Jo Howard, Katie Lee, Gretta Monahan, Bethany Dellapolla, Susan Cincotta, Paula Brannon, Deborah Marshall, Susan Wojcik, Catherine Maloney, and Edna Perez Winston. Michael Disher will direct.

    In a release, Mr. Disher said that the rotating casts have been vital to the show’s success. “The mass appeal of the piece deserves to be voiced by as many women as possible, so we have gathered a group of talented and diverse women to present this piece. How each actor interprets each piece brings something new and unique to the production.”

    The show had its premiere at Guild Hall in 2008. It has since toured internationally and won awards such as the Drama Desk Award for Unique Theatrical Experience. Performances will be on Thursdays at 7:30 p.m., Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m., and Sundays at 2:30 p.m. Tickets cost $22, $12 for students, and are available through the cultural center’s Web site.