I suppose all of its legions of fans have their own favorites at Breadzilla in Wainscott. For me it’s the oatmeal sunflower-seed bread, just about the best loaf I’ve ever had. Whether it is lunch, dessert, or a loaf of bread, the high quality shines through.

    The same can be said for the garden, narrow strips alongside two of its walls and other beds in the front enclosing a circular lawn where customers relax and enjoy their treats. It may be small, but the garden packs a big punch, with wave following wave of gorgeous, saturated color all season long.

    There is a lot to learn here.

    Just last week it was a riot of red, blue, and purple salvias, saturated orange, red, pink, and yellow zinnias, orange tithonias, multicolored dahlias, and a lusty mina lobata vine with spikes of scarlet, orange, yellow, and cream flowers (it’s also known as the exotic love vine). And let’s not forget the scarlet pentas, interspersed among purple and black flowers and foliage.

    It’s hard to believe Breadzilla has been here 17 years. Nancy Hollister, a co-owner with Brad Thompson, began creating gardens there from the beginning, but before long Ron Jawin of Botanic Nursery, a customer, friend, and gardener, took the reins and a fruitful collaboration was born.

    Ms. Hollister likes lots of color, wildness, and unpredictability.  She thinks gardens should be fun, but she also insists on having flowers to decorate cakes, especially wedding cakes.

    Mr. Jawin, for his part, is a formidable plantsman with years of experience working with, observing, and propagating a broad range of plants. I first met him about 15 years ago when he grew hydrangeas — long before the current craze began — and we offered them at the East Hampton Garden Club’s plant sales. He likes clear, strong colors, especially red, purple, and black combinations.

    The secret to riotous color throughout the season, according to Ron, is planting perennials and the backbone of annuals in the spring, removing some of the annuals when they appear at their peak in late June or early July, depending on the weather, and replacing them with the seed of plants that thrive in heat and plants of late-crop dahlias and salvias. Sounds easy, doesn’t it?

    I followed the Breadzilla garden fairly closely this summer and it seemed as though the zinnias must have been planted one week while my back was turned. Not at all: They came from a packet of seed. Other plants from seed, scratched in in situ, are annual Rudbeckia hirta hybrids, orange Cosmos sulphureus, sky-blue mealy cup sage Salvia Victoria, cleome, tithonia, and vines.

    Perhaps the signature plant is Crocosmia Lucifer with its extraordinary red flowers which bloom in late June and July. Mr. Jawin said it began as a single plant; today’s massive clumps result from transplanting new corms to other spots.  Crocosmia likes full sun, excellent drainage, and some moisture.

    In recent years a plethora of new hybrid cone flowers (echinacea) have hit the market. It’s hard to know which to buy and try. Among others, and along the road, two outstanding ones this summer were Harvest Moon, with golden flowers, and Sundown, with flowers that turned from pink to orange. All the echinacea varieties flowered for months, but Sundown was particularly spectacular.

    Two plants I’ve never tried to grow, but will after seeing them at Breadzilla, are the prairie gentians, also known as lisanthus or eustoma, and pentas. Surprising to me, the prairie gentians, often used as cut flowers, bloomed all summer and were still going strong last week. They were as tough and reliable as angelonias. Both types of plants in shades of blue and purple grew near one another. The bud-like blooms of the gentians and the spikes of small flowers of the angelonias add depth and texture to the planting.

    Mr. Jawin recommends using Pentas Mars, which he thinks is the best variety.  It is a strong, clear red that vibrates with purple and black. Plant it late for end-of-season impact.

    Two other plants we would do well to try are a new coleus, C. Black Patent Leather, and the elephant ear Colocacia Black Magic. Standing over the coleus, I commented that the foliage looks like patent leather and he laughed, saying that was its name. It’s slow to get started, he said. I will grow it by itself in a pot next summer. It will be stunning next to a container of Plectranthus Mona Lavender, which reaches a peak of flowering in September and October. There are quite a few black elephant ears, but Black Magic has a rich texture that seems to be missing in others.

    There are two kinds of garden visitors, those who take in the overall spectacle and those who are so busy scrutinizing the particular they often neglect the larger picture. I urge you to visit Breadzilla to be swept away by the spectacle of this very successful garden. When you begin putting together plans for next year’s garden, refer back here for the particulars. You will be very happy you did. 

So when this mysteriously titled art book, “Cappy,” written by Terry Wallace, an East Hampton gallerist, crossed my desk, I asked myself, who is Cappy? I was quickly reminded of an old adage regarding artists’ monographs — beware the dust jacket of an art book that doesn’t illustrate art. The cover’s photograph is of a craggy middle-aged Scandinavian fisherman type, squinting directly at me and the camera. And the illustration on the back is a haunting photograph of the same person as an ancient mariner.

    But the book’s subtitle is “The Life and Art of C. Hjalmar Amundsen,” clearly putting the word “life” in front of “art.” So I thumbed through the text and illustrations to find some beautiful and carefully painted scenes of whalemen on the hunt, the Cedar Point lighthouse, World War II Navy ships, a brig passing Culloden Point, and Rockport’s famous Motif No. 1 and Gloucester Harbor in Massachusetts. Well-delineated and dramatically composed works representing realist regional 20th-century American painting.

    Then there are the photographs of a 1950s art show at Tuma’s tackle shop in Montauk, the artist in costume for a 1930s Beachcombers Ball in Provincetown, Mass., and posing with a harpoon at the Sag Harbor Whaling Museum. So I flipped through again and saw some very schematic paintings that are so generic as to be clearly decorative. Are these different periods? No, here is an artist who did over-the-sofa work for commercial sales and careful and handsome work that he could be proud of, for art-loving clients. This was going to be an unusual art book.

    The distance between museum art and “Saturday Evening Post” covers was very clear when I started to camp out in my high school art room in the 1960s. Norman Rockwell was not an artist. Andrew Wyeth was not an artist either. They and the “designers” of record jackets, paperback book covers, and greeting cards were all not part of the pantheon of fine art. Fine art was above these popular narrative images. My teacher, Mrs. Webster, had a name for this other kind of non-art. It was called calendar art — and this was not a compliment. Be it the Currier & Ives reprints on my grandmother’s calendar, the hunters and their sleek bird dogs on my father’s calendar, or the hardly covered women on the greasy calendar at the Ford garage — this was not art. My small upstate New York town seemed very interested in compartmentalization. Things were so black and white. This was the olden times when men were men, women were women, and fine art was fine unless it wasn’t.

    By the time I hit college, all hell had broken loose in the visual and performing arts, and as Cole Porter so aptly penned, “anything goes,” and it is still going.

    After finishing the book, I can say that Cappy Amundsen’s life and works unfold into a tale that might be more common than most of us know, but has rarely been so carefully documented. In an art world that helps promote Jeff Koons-type hucksterism, this monograph reminds us all of that thin line between hokum and hosannas. What is captivating about Mr. Wallace’s entertaining and educational tome is that it introduces us to an astonishing person, C. Hjalmar Amundsen (known to his friends as Cappy), whose life is possibly more a work of art than some of his canvases.

“Cappy”

Terry Wallace

M.T. Fine Arts and

Sag Harbor Whaling Museum, $35

    It also chronicles a rich period (1930s to 1960s) of cultural change by following this engagingly picaresque character who wove himself into the fabric of his adopted village of Sag Harbor. The story starts with Mr. Wallace and his serendipitous discovery and purchase of a box of Amundsen’s scrapbooks, but first a digression.

    It should be stated that Mr. Wallace’s East Hampton Village gallery features 19th and 20th-century representational art that focuses on the land and seascapes of eastern Long Island. Childe Hassam and the Moran family of artists are his stock in trade. When a Sag Harbor resident stopped by the Wallace Gallery in 1996 to ask if Terry had any Cappy paintings for sale, Mr. Wallace didn’t know what the gentleman was talking about. Within an hour the story of Sag Harbor’s beloved, eccentric artist was shared and Mr. Wallace’s curiosity was stoked. He wondered how this artist’s work had eluded him and began searching out works by Cappy in private collections in Sag Harbor as well as in that village’s library and whaling museum.

    In 2007, Mr. Wallace started a popular series of short interviews involving local citizens on WLNG Radio. He asked his audience to share their Cappy stories, and soon after that the box of Amundsen’s memorabilia arrived at his gallery door. What was contained in this hoard is the tale of a talented boy and his fascinating life in and out of (and around) the world of fine and commercial art as it existed a century ago. The scrapbooks proved to be an autobiographical collage. They are filled with newspaper clippings, faded and discolored Polaroid snapshots, gallery guides, and programs. This array of life’s highlights was just waiting to be cataloged, scrutinized, and strung together into an impressionistic portrait.

    As Mr. Wallace started his research project, he jotted down adjectives that he found associated with Cappy Amundsen, such as “bohemian, intelligent, complicated, athletic, obstinate, individualistic, opinionated, innovative, dedicated, assertive, committed, strong, visionary, cantankerous, adventurous, even-tempered, alcoholic, talented, competitive, trusting, headstrong, realist, naturalist, ecologist, versatile, independent, disorganized, passionate, generous,” and more. These combined character traits would have challenged the best of the writers of black-and-white-era TV soap operas.

    What comes out of this material is a childhood surrounded by creative people. Cappy’s grandfather born in Norway was a stone carver who worked on Henry Hobson Richardson’s grand New York State Capitol building, and his son (Cappy’s father) was an illustrator. Though the family had first settled in Williamsport, Pa., Cappy’s life started in Brooklyn in 1911. When he was 4, his family moved to Hackensack, N.J. His father was well employed and enjoyed fishing on Long Island’s East End. Cappy remembered seeing a photograph of the two of them posed beside the Sag Harbor bridge when he was but 2.

    Amundsen attended good schools (Fairmount Academy and Blair Academy) and enjoyed the Pine Bluff Camp in Port Jefferson during his early summers. It was there that he fell in love with sailing. But for years a scandal hung over the head of Cappy’s father — his first wife left him and ran off with the violinist Janos Rigo, who was also married. It was a popular story with the newspapers, and though today the whole matter seems tame, it remained a topic from 1907 until 1934. And even after Cappy’s father divorced his wife in 1910 and soon remarried, his embarrassment didn’t subside.

    When his father’s second wife, Cappy’s mother, died in early 1929, the family fell apart. The crash of the stock market didn’t help either.

    Interestingly, Cappy was born Casper Hjalmar Emerson III. It was after his mother died that he adopted the last name of Norway’s most famous polar explorer, Roald Amundsen. This became legal years later, and it was just one of Cappy’s aliases. Cappy said that he had not been encouraged by his father to become an artist. But his father remained employed during the Depression, and this might have been inspiration enough for a kid with a high school diploma seeking a job.

    He found part-time work with a gallery on New York’s lower Fifth Avenue as a designer, and he studied at the Grand Central School of Art. It was a time when a number of artists influenced by the Ashcan School began to search for American subjects. Unlike the 19th-century Hudson River School that inspired the public with its deep nationalistic feelings for the American wilderness, this later generation of realist painters didn’t look for sublimity, but rather used a painterly gutsiness when applying their fluid brushwork to images of Gloucester Harbor and Rockport wharves.

    These colorful paintings are filled with dock crews and commercial fishing fleets. Artists like Emile Gruppe and Anthony Thieme dashed through New England scenes that seem comforting today, but were American post-impressionism then, and (because of their vacation locations) quickly became pleasing and profitable for their practitioners.

    Cappy went to Maine and would have had to make a point not to see this art. When Cappy arrived back from New England, he must have carried rolls of completed seascapes and dock scenes, because on May 28, 1932, he registered with the Artists Aid Committee to have his work in the first Washington Square Art Show. A photograph from 1936 shows the artist exhibiting oil and watercolor paintings of Rockport Harbor, three-masted ships, portraits, and sailboats, all hanging or leaning on the wrought-iron fence surrounding Washington Square. He continued to have work in the show for 30 years. He spent time in Provincetown painting, playing with its avant-garde summer folk, and picking up money working in the commercial fishing industry.

    He visited Sag Harbor again in 1945 and bought a house there soon after. He and his wife fell in love with what has been described as a scrappy village during those years. Mr. Wallace devotes much time to Cappy’s role in his new community and captures all the charms of a small town not yet discovered by the summer people. His paintings began to pay homage to the village’s 19th-century off-shore whaling industry and its winding streets, old houses, and beautiful harbor. He painted, he played, and he drank.

    It is all interesting, if not sad. But what is a most amazing revelation is Mr. Wallace’s discovery of Cappy and his painting industry. Yes, I said industry. There is no other way to see it. Cappy Amundsen signed hundreds of his paintings using a variety of pseudonyms. There are several theories espoused, but I think the jury is still out. He signed paintings as Hjalmar, A. Emerson, J.J. Enwright, W. Hughes, Wm. Ward Jr., F.H. McKay, H. Nansen, Sven Sagg, R.B. Cooper, J.C. Bennett, John Dunne, L.C. Bonac, and many others. Humor is certainly present in some, and others are most likely jokes on friends’ (or enemies’) names. I would like to own a canvas by either L.C. Bonac or Sven Sagg. The art may be in the name.

    It could be that his prolific output made galleries nervous. Rather like certain mystery writers who feel that one book a year is enough for loyal readers, so the second and third books have different detectives and “different” authors. Please don’t let the public know that the artist keeps six canvases going at a time and completes them all before dinnertime. Could be, but it seems that these generic works were geared for a clientele that really wouldn’t care. I think it’s the artist’s sense of humor — perverse in the best sense of the word.

    You will enjoy meeting Cappy and riding the wide swings in his life and art. He illustrated books, designed posters, painted the New England harbor scene on your Sag Harbor aunt’s wall, and made friends everywhere he went. He taught local artists, founded Sag Harbor’s first outboard racing regatta, organized the Sea Scouts and the Montauk Sailing Club, and created an extraordinary screen of wire fish for an exhibition at East Hampton’s Guild Hall.

    Thanks to Terry Wallace and that box of scrapbooks, we have all discovered Cappy, but certainly not all his secrets.

—–

    Richard Barons is the executive director of the East Hampton Historical Society. He lives in Springs.

    Earlier this year, “Cappy” won an Independent Publisher Regional Book Award, or Ippy, for best nonfiction title in the Northeast. Cappy Amundsen died in 2001.

His Gramercy Park apartment comes complete with a northern exposure to the Empire State Building, but it’s not a view Richard Rutkowski enjoys often.

    Whether in Los Angeles, Chicago, New Orleans, Paris, Scotland, Japan, or even the house he inherited from his father in Water Mill, he has racked up a lion’s share of frequent-flier miles. As a director and cinematographer, husband, and father, the East Hampton native has had a vagabond existence for the past several years.

    His recent directorial project “The Space in Back of You” will be screened on Tuesday at 7 p.m. at the Jerome Robbins Theater  at the Baryshnikov Arts Center in Manhattan. The film documents the creative life of Suzushi Hanayagi, who collaborated with Robert Wilson for more than two decades. The Japanese dancer and choreographer adapted and synthesized traditional dance from her country with modern performance art to bring new vision to the forms.

    The film traces their relationship, as well as her individual development, through her performances and the recollections of her colleagues. When Mr. Wilson discovered his friend suffered from Alzheimer’s disease, he traveled to Japan to see her in the facility that cares for her. While recreating her past through archival footage, Mr. Rutkowski also follows Mr. Wilson’s journey and his efforts afterward in putting together a tribute to her at a performance at the Guggenheim Museum in the city. The film had its Japanese premiere in September and was shown in Paris last winter.

    Mr. Rutkowski met Mr. Wilson at Harvard College in 1985 as a freshman when he was cast as an extra in the theater director and designer’s production of  “CIVIL warS.”

    “He cast 25 or 30 extras to do tasks and form tableaus. We moved furniture in and out of scenes,” Mr. Rutkowski recalled at his apartment recently. “At rehearsal one evening he asked if anyone knew how to do an architectural model. I had taken an architecture course and knew how to draft and cut the foam core, so I raised my hand.”

    The next night, Mr. Rutkowski went to where Mr. Wilson was staying in Boston. “We did about everything possible except make a model. He wanted to talk about how the show was going and future work. He wanted to listen to opera. There was a slide talk he needed to deliver and he needed someone to organize the slides.”

    It was obvious that the director required “somebody to stay up very late at night with him while he consumed vodka, and stay clear and present, take notes, and be ready for the next day.” He also needed someone to keep track of all of the projects he worked on simultaneously. Mr. Rutkowski became that person, at least in the summers and on holiday breaks from school. He even made the model, which was for an installation at a dance club in Manhattan, the Palladium, though it was never built.

    Eventually, he helped Mr. Wilson find the location that became the Watermill Center. “It was a good working relationship. It led to a lot of things.” Although Mr. Wilson’s ties and contacts were in the theater and Mr. Rutkowski ended up in film, he stayed in touch with Mr. Wilson and even made a film at the center, “Sunshine Superman,” about Christopher Knowles, an artist who was the librettist for “Einstein on the Beach.”

    Similarly, Mr. Rutkowski eschewed visual arts and more creative pursuits, which were the purview of his father, Casimir Rutkowski, a landscape painter, who could often be seen outdoors capturing the familiar scenes of the South Fork. “My father came to the area a little late compared to the famous painters of the Fairfield Porter or de Kooning generation. He got to know some of them and was drawn into the social circle of Paul Georges.”

    As a child during the 1970s, he found that living in East Hampton and its environs offered the opportunity “to see living legends by accident: Lauren Bacall getting ice cream, Paul McCartney at Gristede’s, or Paul Simon out front of Stephen Talkhouse. So you did not have to imagine having a connection to the arts, it was right there on the sidewalk.” 

    Still, “I wanted to do things that skewed more technical, like being an architect or an engineer. Then in college I made a short film during my sophomore year and I really took to it.” The decision to become a cinematographer initially came from necessity — he needed the work — but also appealed to his techie side. “I had what I felt was a natural penchant for making an image and operating the gear that made that image.”

    Mr. Rutkowski’s credits as a cinematographer and camera operator include work on Neil Burger’s “Interview With the Assassin” and “Limitless,” Darren Aronofsky’s “Requiem for a Dream,” Adrian Lyne’s “Unfaithful,” Joel Schumacher’s “The Number 23,” Wes Craven’s “My Soul to Take,” Roman Polanski’s “The Ghost Writer,” Larry Clark’s “Kids,” and David O. Russell’s “Flirting with Disaster.”

    For Mr. Aronofsky, who is known as a demanding director, he spent days in a tent shooting drug paraphernalia and powder going through straws over and over again, until he got the images that were finally used in the movie. While the camerawork on a film is terribly important, he said, “It’s not everything. What is important is point of view.”

    If the cinematographer, director, producer, writer, and production designer “can look at the material for what it is, source out the clearest and most interesting way to tell that story, and stick to that point of view and not back away from it when times are tough, then you will make something memorable and even something beautiful.”

    Recently, he has crossed over into television production and is the cinematographer for “Boss,” a show set in Chicago starring Kelsey Grammer, for the Starz Network. It was both a practical and aesthetic choice. “Independent film has backed up a bit in the past few years. It was hard to get scripts on good or even mediocre films. At the same time, television was having a massive renaissance fueled by ‘The Sopranos.’ Nontraditional networks like AMC were making shows that looked and felt like films. It was a new way to work and you could get away with mature, adult themes if you packaged it in the right context that was likely to bring the viewer back every week.”

    He is currently looking at new projects in New York City and Los Angeles, where his wife, Betsy, who teaches art and photography, and his eight-year-old stepdaughter, Daisy, are based.

    Mr. Rutkowski was exposed to theater and television production early on in East Hampton. In middle school he was chosen to be a Toy Soldier in a version of “The Nutcracker” at Guild Hall staged by Gwen Verdon with her dance troupe. She taught him how to waltz for a scene at the start of the show. Then in high school, “I hosted the local cable-access show ‘Town Hall Report,’ a simple and fun production emanating right from East Hampton High School under the guidance of a wonderful teacher there, Sal Tocci.”

    Although he was not at first interested in movies, “In about 1980 they shot the film ‘Deathtrap,’ directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Michael Caine and Christopher Reeve, right off of Main Street. From a teacher at the high school I learned that a local guy named Bran Ferren, son of the artists John and Rae Ferren, was the effects technician responsible for the awesome lighting effects sparking from atop a crane in the chilly East Hampton night.”

    He later learned that “Bran was an indifferent and nearly failing student until his English teacher let him write his essay on the then-new technology of lasers. I liked that story then and still do.”

   Along with a new building, the Parrish Art Museum is about to have a new board chairman and a new president. The appointments of Frederic M. Seegal as chairman and H. Peter Haveles Jr. as president will take effect on Jan. 1. Mr. Seegal joined the Parrish board in 2011, serving on its executive and strategic planning committees. He is a current trustee of the New York City Center, the San Francisco Symphony, and the James Beard Foundation, and a former trustee of the San Francisco Opera, the Neuberger Museum, and Southampton Hospital. The vice chairman of the Peter J. Solomon Company, an independent investment banking advisory firm, he joined the company in 2009 after spending most of his 35-year career at Wasserstein Perella, rising to become its president.

   Mr. Haveles has been a Parrish trustee since 2009. He has served on the executive committee and is co-chairman of the annual fund and development committee. He is a partner in the complex commercial litigation department at Kaye Scholer in Manhattan. He is a past president of the Boston University School of Law Alumni Association and is president of the board of the Irish Georgian Society.

   Douglas Polley and Carlo Bronzini Vender, who are the current co-chairmen, will continue to serve on the board.

   In addition to the new officers, Chad A. Leat, vice chairman of global banking at Citigroup, was elected a director. He is a graduate of the University of Kansas, a member of the Economics Club of New York, and a member of the board of directors of the Hampton Classic Horse Show and Global Indemnity P.L.C. A collector of contemporary art and an equestrian, Mr. Leat is single and lives in Manhattan and Bridgehampton.

   The remaining officers will continue their roles. They are David Granville-Smith and Alexandra Stanton, vice presidents; Norman Peck, treasurer; Jay Goldberg, assistant treasurer; and Dorothy Lichtenstein, secretary.

   The museum at Guild Hall is offering a bit of something for everyone this season with the opening of four shows in its various galleries.

    In the Moran Gallery will be “Fritz Leddy, Part 2,” a collection of photographic images by a former chief of the East Hampton Village Police Department taken from 1937 to 1968 (a related article appears in Section A). In the Spiga Gallery, Frank Wimberley, who won best in show at the 2010 Artist Members Exhibition, will show his abstract paintings. The Wasserstein Gallery will show John Berg’s Grammy Award-winning album cover designs from his career with Columbia Records. And in the Woodhouse Gallery, abstract work from the permanent collection will be on view.

    Mr. Leddy’s negatives were found in the basement of the Police Department in 1999. According to the museum, he was a serious hobbyist who used a large-format camera to take more than 2,000 images of the people and places around East Hampton Village. Part one was shown in 2006. Doug Kuntz, a former photo editor for The Star, is the guest curator and will lead a gallery talk on Saturday at 4:30 p.m.

    Mr. Wimberley was selected by Ben Genocchio, a former art critic for The New York Times and current editor in chief of Art and Auction magazine. In an essay for the show, Eric Ernst said his paintings evoke both John Coltrane’s “surging sheets of music and Miles Davis’s delicately woven tapestries of sound” and “create labyrinths of melodies that effortlessly float to the surface and then are submerged in planes of movement, texture, and color.” Mr. Wimberley works in Sag Harbor and New York City.

    Mr. Berg, who was an art director and vice president for Columbia Records for 25 years, won 4 of the 29 Grammys he was nominated for. In all, he designed more than 5,000 record covers, many of which won multiple awards. Original covers and three of the Grammy Awards will be displayed. Among his designs were Bruce Springsteen’s iconic “Born to Run” album, Bob Dylan’s first album, Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” and all of the albums by the band Chicago. He also designed record covers for Thelonious Monk, Barbra Streisand, and Bessie Smith.

    Mr. Berg described his job as similar to that of a film director. “Hear the music (which would be akin to reading the movie script), pick the talent (the illustrators and/or photographers, models, locations), choose the best take, the best type, and make something nobody has ever seen before but something they really want.” Mr. Berg is married to Durell Godfrey, a contributing photographer at The Star.

    The permanent collection show will include many Abstract Expressionist artists from the first generation with studios in East Hampton Town, such as Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Willem de Kooning, and Ibram Lassaw.

    The museum will hold a public reception for all four shows on Saturday from 5 to 7 p.m. They will remain on view through Jan. 13.

‘Kook’ Surf Film Wins

    Danny DiMauro and Tin Ojeda have won best short film and viewers choice for short film for their movie “Kook Paradise,” about the insane popularity of Montauk’s Ditch Plain as a surfing destination despite its inconsistent surf conditions.

    The film and its makers were featured in The Star in August.

Return of the Met

    Guild Hall will begin its fall program of simulcasts of the Metropolitan Opera on Saturday at 1 p.m. with a screening of a new production of Donizetti’s “L’Elisir d’Amore.”

    Anna Netrebko and Matthew Polenzani star as Adina and Nemorino in Bartlett Sher’s new production of this comic opera. Mariusz Kwiecien and Ambrogio Maestri play Belcore and Dulcamara and Maurizio Benini conducts. Tickets are $22 and $20 for members, $15 for students.

    On Tuesday, the Naked Stage will present “Porter’s Will” by Monica Bauer, with Josh Perl as lead artist in a stage reading. In the play, Porter Keller is dying and must decide where to leave his vast wealth, either for good or bad. Two young actors help him decide. The reading begins at 7:30 p.m. and is free.

Music for Montauk

    Music for Montauk, now in its 21st year, will present “Alumni of the Academy” at the Montauk School at 7 p.m. on Saturday. The Academy is a program at Carnegie Hall, the Juilliard School, and the Weill Music Institute.

    The Ensemble ACJW, as it is known, is made up of exceptional young professional musicians from the Academy. The group offers its own series at Carnegie Hall and Juilliard. A New York Times critic called one of their performances “one of the most liberating programs I have heard in years.”

    Four members of the group will perform piano quartets by Mozart, Part, Ravel, Schumann, and Hindemith.

    Music for Montauk, which is supported by residents of the community, presents an ongoing series of free music programs at the school. 

‘Inherit the Wind’

    The Southampton Cultural Center will present “Inherit the Wind,” a classic play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, beginning today at 7 p.m.

    Loosely based on the Scopes “monkey trial” of the 1920s, the play was written in the McCarthy era to remind audiences of the threat to intellectual freedom that can occur at times of intolerance. According to Mr. Lawrence, “we used the teaching of evolution as a parable, a metaphor for any kind of mind control. It’s not about science versus religion. It’s about the right to think.”

    “Inherit the Wind” will be presented Thursdays through Sundays through Oct. 28 and is directed by Michael Disher, the center’s artistic director. There are also two morning performances for students on Monday and Tuesday with a discussion to follow.

    The cast includes Daniel Becker, Vincent Carbone, Terrance Fiore, Richard Gardini, Barbara Jo Howard, Deborah Marshall, Matthew Peraza, Tony Peraza, Philip Reichert, Jack Seabury, Stephan Scheck, Amanda Stein, Alan Stewart, and Douglas Walter.

    Thursday performances are at 7 p.m. Curtain time on Friday and Saturday is 8 p.m. A Sunday matinee will be given at 2:30 p.m. Tickets are $22 and $12 for students with ID and those over 65. There are group discounts available. Tickets can be purchased online at scc-arts.org or at the door up to 40 minutes before the performance.

Murphy Honored

    Elliott Murphy, a singer-songwriter and author who has lived in East Hampton and Paris for the past 22 years, has been awarded the Medaille de Vermeil de la Ville de Paris in recognition of his career as a musician and author. The medal was presented in a ceremony on Oct. 1 at Paris’s City Hall by the city’s mayor, Bertrand Delanoë. Jane Fonda, Gianni Versace, Kevin Liles, and Johnny Depp are all former recipients.

    Mr. Murphy is responsible for more than 30 albums and two novels as well as short-story collections. He is the brother of Michelle Murphy of East Hampton. Mr. Murphy will perform locally on Dec. 8 at the Stephen Talkhouse.

Space in Back of You

    Richard Rutkowski’s film “The Space in Back of You” will be screened in New York on Tuesday at the Judson Dance Theater at 6:45 p.m. and on Oct. 23 at 7 p.m. at the Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York City.

    Mr. Rutkowski, who grew up in East Hampton and Water Mill and still has a house in Water Mill, is a director and cinematographer who has worked closely with Robert Wilson since he attended Harvard University. The film is a portrait of Suzushi Hanayagi, a dancer and choreographer who blended traditional Japanese dance with modern performance. She was also a close collaborator with Mr. Wilson, whose journey to reconnect with her in her declining years with Alzheimer’s both personally and in tribute is followed in the film.

    Anyone who followed the story of the grisly murder of Ted Ammon and its aftermath had to wonder at one point: “What happened to the children?”

    Mr. Ammon was bludgeoned to death in his East Hampton house at 59 Middle Lane in October 2001. Generosa Ammon, his estranged wife at the time, married Daniel Pelosi, the man who was ultimately convicted of his murder. They eventually split up and a month later, in 2003, she died of breast cancer.

    In happier times, the Ammons had adopted twins from Ukraine named Greg and Alexa. In the documentary “59 Middle Lane,” Greg Ammon, who is now a filmmaker, set out to tell their story of reconnecting with the past, both with their adopted parents, whom they remember from their childhood in the United States, and with the life they left behind as toddlers in Ukraine. The film was shown on Friday and Monday as part of the Hamptons International Film Festival.

    The children were 10 when their father was killed and 12 when their mother died. Their adoptive paternal aunt, Sandra Williams, gained custody of them in 2005. They appear to have had a very warm and loving relationship with her and her husband.

    They are now in their early 20s, and the documentary follows them as they travel first to their aunt’s house in Alabama and then back to the house in East Hampton, which appears to have been unoccupied since their mother died. As they readjust and let the memories come back, they plan for a journey back to Ukraine to find their relatives and reconnect with them.

    The journey is full of awkward and tender moments and the siblings, who at first seem a bit lost and self-conscious, fully open themselves up to the camera and allow viewers into their wayward, uneasy, and ultimately affirming walkabout.

    A trailer for the film can be seen at 59middlelane.com.   

   The Round Table Theatre Company and Academy, a new classical theater ensemble, will hold its first staged reading on Saturday at 7:30 p.m. at LTV Studios in Wainscott. A full production of “Macbeth” is planned for January.

    With outdoor summer productions of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” by the Hamptons Independent Theater Festival and Naked Stage, and the Green Theater Collective doing its own pared down Shakespeare performances, there is an embarrassment of riches after a very dry period for the Bard on the East End.

    Morgan Vaughan, producing artistic director of the company, said that the formation of the ensemble was the realization of a vision she and her husband, Tristan Vaughan, had when they moved back here a few years ago. He is artistic director of the group. The fact that so many new theater groups are attacking Shakespeare just seems part of the “collective subconscious. People are starving for something cultural that is a work of genius as a remedy to all of the fluff and sparkle sparkle that rules the culture right now.”

   “Double Falsehood” is a classical English play believed by some to be at least partially penned by William Shakespeare himself. Arden, the British Shakespeare publisher, included the play in its 2010 edition of the works of Shakespeare, attributing it to the Bard and John Flet­cher. It is considered to be a version of “The History of Cardenio” the so-called “lost” play performed by the King’s Men in 1613.

    Ms. Vaughan said, “We wanted our first reading to be something old and new.” She is with the scholars who have questioned the attribution of the play, but said it was chosen to be a point of departure for “a lively discussion and an entertaining evening.” A talk will follow the reading.

   “It was sort of a strange decision, but it was something nobody’s done. We’re not doing just another reading of ‘Measure for Measure.’ It’s questionable if any of it is by Shakespeare, but glimp­ses of him can be sensed, then it gets clunky and not that. It brings up the question, What is genius? You recognize it when you see it, but yet it’s hard to define.”

   Stephen Hamilton, who directed “Uncle Vanya” at Guild Hall last May, will serve as stage director for this piece. The cast of professional actors includes Tom Gustin, Michael Bartoli, Kenny Kilfara, Gerard Doyle, Mr. Vaughan, Hal Fickett, and Gina Rivera, with a few more to be announced.

    “Macbeth” could be considered another odd choice given the superstitions around the play’s bad luck. Ms. Vaughan said the play appealed to her because it is such an apt reflection of the unbridled ambition and self-promotion so prevalent in our current culture. “We want to do a great ‘Macbeth.’ ”

    The reading on Saturday will benefit LTV and the group’s Shakespeare acting class and reading workshop to be presented at Guild Hall this fall. “Speaking Shakespeare: A Classical Acting Class” will be taught by Ms. Vaughan and her husband on Mondays Oct. 22 through Dec. 10 from 6 to 9 p.m. Final presentations will be held on Dec. 13 at the John Drew Theater. Actors of all levels from age 16 up are invited. The course will cover sonnets, monologues, mask work, scene work, and other facets of performing Shakespeare. The cost is $300 and $275 for members.

    A reading and discussion workshop, to be taught on Wednesdays beginning Oct. 24, is designed for non-actors and actors who want to broaden their knowledge of Shakespeare. One or two plays will be chosen to examine deeply through their prose or verse, history, contemporary culture, and other aspects intrinsic to understanding them.

    The Vaughans both hold M.F.A.s in classical acting from the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Academy for Classical Acting at George Washington University and have studied at the Circle in the Square Theatre School in New York City and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London.

    The reading, which will have a $5 suggested donation at the door, will be the first of a regular series of up to five events during the off-season. In addition to “Macbeth,” another full-production Shakespeare play is planned for the spring and a contemporary play for next winter. The company’s Web site is roundtabletheatrecompany.org.

   It was a short red carpet that led into Guild Hall on Saturday night in East Hampton. Our Home, Sweet Home squatted next door to the 300-year-old buildings of the Mulford Farm just down the street in the gloaming. This was not Hollywood, not the “fishbowl” Richard Gere would tell the audience he disliked about the left coast.

    This was a smaller kettle of fish, but the press pressed up to the edge of the carpet just the same, well-armed with cameras ready to capture Mr. Gere, one of this year’s Hamptons International Film Festival’s “Conversations With” guests, his interviewer, Alec Baldwin, or any other celeb who came within range.

    A car pulled up. Heads turned. The star of 45 films over a career of as many years stepped out in blue jeans and a sport coat, ran his fingers through familiar silver hair, embraced a few people, and walked slowly to the carpet where he was consumed by a slow-motion explosion of flashes, which he seemed to accept like a farmer might a rain shower.

    The conversation inside began with a reel of clips from Mr. Gere’s filmography, after which Mr. Baldwin introduced the festival’s guest as a “pure movie star,” an actor with “another quality that actors have or don’t have, but he has in abundance.”

    Mr. Gere, who has a house on North Haven, received the festival’s Golden Starfish Award for Lifetime Achievement in Acting.

    Mr. Baldwin asked the audience to recall all the beautiful women the actor got to kiss. “And you did it well,” he said turning to the man whose lips refused to tell which actress they liked the most. The banter warmed a wide-ranging and serious conversation about the art of acting and, perhaps most enlightening, about Mr. Gere’s relationship with and opinion of the directors he had worked with.

    He started on the stage, Mr. Gere said, doing summer stock in Provincetown, Mass. “Theater was what I knew as a working person, but it was not a career. The last play I did was 32 years ago. I was 30.”

    Mr. Baldwin led the actor through his filmography. Mr. Gere described Richard Brooks, director of “Looking for Mr. Goodbar,” as a “dynamo, a great teacher of movie actors, how to structure a part, think how to lay it out, step back, give nuance, not 100 percent, don’t give it all away. He was an old Hollywood guy. Brooks was crazy, a tough guy. In ‘Looking for Mr. Goodbar,’ I was looking for Brooks,” Mr. Gere said, remembering how he went to the director’s house to read the script and was met at the door by the beautiful actress Jean Simmons, the director’s wife, in a bathrobe. “Brooks came in, gave me the script, and said he’d be back in a half hour. Everything was blacked out except my part,” he said. “I had no context.”

    The two actors swapped stories about the idiosyncrasies of directors. Mr. Gere asked about Terrence Malick, director of “Days of Heaven,” which was shown at the festival, the 1978 film that Mr. Gere did after “Looking for Mr. Goodbar.”

    “I saw his ‘Badlands.’ I said, ‘Wow.’ I told my agent, ‘If this guy makes another movie. . . .’ Terry is very literate, bright, journalistic. He doesn’t always know what he wants. He’s waiting for you to get to it. We were on take 30, I said, ‘Tell me something.’ We were in a house on a prairie. The wind was blowing a linen curtain. He says, ‘Like that, like the linen moving.’ We did it in one take.” Mr. Gere credited the director for going beyond the dramaturgical in editing “Days of Heaven” by featuring “wheat moving, animals sniffing the air, water unfreezing, a natural flow.”

    On to John Schlesinger and “American Gigolo,” the 1980 movie Mr. Gere starred in. Mr. Baldwin asked if the actor thought the sexy character Paul Schrader had “stuck to you? Was there a residue leftover from that character?”

   “Paul Shrader was a pretty rich meal,” Mr. Gere admitted. He described Mr. Schlesinger as “an intense guy, a Calvinist” with a repressed libido that perhaps explained the sexiness of the film. “You could not ask for a better structuralist, extremely adventurous, cutting edge, able to articulate what he wants into film history.”

    “Has your sexual iconography gotten in the way?” Mr. Baldwin asked. “Shoot the gun, kiss the girl?”

    “Frankly, to me it has not been a big deal,” Mr. Gere said. He asked his agent, sitting in the audience, what he thought. The agent said his predecessor had not liked a Rolling Stone cover of Mr. Gere with his shirt off. “He said you were a better actor than a hunk.”

    “After ‘Gigolo’ you moved far away from the sexual icon with ‘An Officer and a Gentleman,’ ” Mr. Baldwin said. His sarcasm got an appreciative rise from the audience. The director Taylor Hackford was “a first rate guy” with an instinct for the film’s final shot. “I knew it was the wrong ending, too romantic. Taylor said, ‘Let’s just shoot it.’ It made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up when I saw it in the rushes.”

    In 1984, Mr. Gere starred in “The Cotton Club,” a project directed by Francis Ford Coppola that “was not a great experience” because of “other business interests outside the system” that were involved. Mr. Gere left them unnamed. “I watched it recently. It’s really terrific.”

    “Pretty Woman” followed. “The most fun was ‘Chicago,’ ” the actor said, because it allowed him to sing. “I had a career as a musician. The play did not knock me out. I didn’t see the story.” Mr. Baldwin reminded the actor that he’d won a Golden Globe for the movie.

    “I did a diaper dance into Jerusalem,” he said of Bruce Beresford’s “King David.” “I’d have been happier if it was more like ‘The Gospel According to St. Matthew,’ ” he said, referring to the hard-edged film by Pier Paolo Pasolini.

    Mr. Gere said he was never interested in directing, a sentiment shared by Mr. Baldwin. He said he had acted as producer in recent years because of the collaborative nature of the business nowadays. “At a certain point you become part of the financing.”

    An audience member asked what his favorite role was. Mr. Gere said that of being a parent to his son.

    As for his most challenging movie role, he said, “I never played a part that was easy. It’s hard to be simple, smooth. The bigger characters are easier, it’s harder to play normal. ”

    “Which director gave you the best advice, and what was it?” someone asked.

    “Richard Brooks. He said, ‘Bring something new to each scene.’ The best directors lay back, too. Subtle. Just a look or a hand signal, being in touch with what’s happening. We’re software. They may be looking where the moon is, what’s going on in the actor’s life.”

    An audience member told Mr. Gere he had watched his latest film, “Arbitrage” with Susan Sarandon and Tim Roth, several times. “You deserve an Academy Award,” he told the star.

    “It was a magical experience,” Mr. Gere said, asking the film’s writer and director, Nicholas Jarecki, to stand.

    “You have been a leading man for five decades,” Mr. Baldwin said, to which the actor replied: “I’m continually amazed.” He thanked the audience for their allegiance.

    Asked about how tight money was affecting the movie trade, Mr. Gere said he saw a return to “people versus hardware” films, lower-budget “Sidney Lumet movies” that used language and storytelling rather than special effects. Speaking of “Arbitrage,” he said, “This movie was independently produced and went with video on demand. It was cheaper production and an ancillary [income] stream for a smaller movie.”

    Mr. Gere was born in Philadelphia and grew up in Syracuse. “What would you have done if you didn’t do what you’re doing?” Mr. Baldwin asked.

    “Music. I’d like to see a reel with everything I’ve played. I wanted a creative life, poetry, philosophy. I didn’t care, creativity and the mind.”

   Stevie Nicks charmed a capacity audience at the Bay Street Theatre on Sunday, where she discussed “In Your Dreams — Stevie Nicks,” documenting the making of her 2011 album. The film premiered at the Sag Harbor Cinema following the talk as part of the Hamptons International Film Festival.

    Ms. Nicks is best known for the stratospheric success of Fleetwood Mac and subsequent hits as a solo artist including “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around,” “Edge of Seventeen (Just Like the White Winged Dove),” and “Stand Back.”

    She recorded “In Your Dreams” at her Los Angeles house, rather than in a studio. “When you make a record in your house, you are able to really be yourself because you’re in your place,” Ms. Nicks told the audience in describing how she, her co-producer Dave Stewart, and the other musicians, engineers, and assistants spent the 11 months that she calls the best year of her life.

    Despite nearly four decades of collaboration with bandmates and other artists including Tom Petty, Don Henley, and Sheryl Crow, she had never composed music with another artist until Mr. Stewart agreed to co-produce “In Your Dreams.”

    “When we started this record, Dave said, ‘I hope we can write some songs together,’ ” Ms. Nicks told the audience, quickly confessing that she had no such intention. Even with Lindsey Buckingham — with whom she had a long romantic relationship, released an album in 1973, and joined Fleetwood Mac in 1974 — she had never co-written music, fearful of the inevitable hurt feelings that would follow an unsuccessful collaboration. “The writing of a song was selfishly mine,” she said.

    Mr. Stewart had traveled a similar path, as musical and romantic partner with Annie Lennox in their band, Eurythmics. Ms. Nicks chronicled that shared experience as “went together, lived together for five years, broke up, formed a band that got hugely famous. That’s the underlying thing that Dave and I had, that we both came from these strange and crazy duos where you’re in love, you’re living together, you’re doing music together, and you try not to let one get in the way of the other. That’s hard sometimes, because when you love somebody, you don’t really want to tell them that what they’re doing is stupid.”

    Ms. Nicks’s resistance finally gave way, she said, after she gave Mr. Stewart a book of her poetry, which, to her surprise, he read in full. “I’m going to go with this, I’m going to give him a chance,” she recalled thinking. “I would never give Lindsey a chance, because Lindsey and I had way too much baggage. I didn’t have that kind of baggage with Dave Stewart, so I didn’t have all the reasons to hate him,” she said, to laughter and applause. “I was an open book with Dave.”

    Mr. Stewart, she said, “never puts you in that place where you feel like you’ve hurt him. He has daughters, so he’s really good with women. He understands that we’re sensitive, and that sometimes we’re going to go along with stuff that we don’t really love because we don’t want to hurt your feelings, but he can read you. We would never get to that place where there would be a harsh word or argument.”

    Ms. Nicks also discussed how a vastly changed popular music landscape, in which recordings are freely downloaded and shared online, discouraged her from releasing more music. The physical formats that reigned in the 1960s and ’70s — the LP, 8-track, and cassette — were more conducive to a closer relationship between artist and audience, she said, in part due to the formats’ limitations. Unlike the present-day prevalence of personal MP3 players and computer-based storage of music, in which anything from a vast collection of songs can be chosen on demand, or songs can simply be played in a random sequence, music fans tended to listen to an entire album. “The world used to give you more of a chance,” she lamented.

    In a conversation on Friday at c/o the Maidstone, which served as festival headquarters, Ms. Nicks recalled that she met Mr. Stewart nearly 30 years ago at a Eurythmics concert in Los Angeles. A few years later, he wrote a song for her called “Don’t Come Around Here No More,” which was ultimately completed and recorded, to great acclaim, by Tom Petty. “We ended up writing seven songs together on this record,” Ms. Nicks said of her collaboration with Mr. Stewart.

    On tour with Fleetwood Mac in 2009, Ms. Nicks wrote the song that became “Moonlight (A Vampire’s Dream),” featured on “In Your Dreams.” She had not recorded a solo album since 2001’s critically acclaimed but commercially disappointing “Trouble in Shangri-La,” but a voice within told her to call Mr. Stewart. “I was never going to make another record because I was so disappointed in what happened to ‘Trouble in Shangri-La,’ ” she said. “If it doesn’t sell a single copy,” she told Mr. Stewart, “I don’t care. Would you produce it?”

    After one day together, Mr. Stewart suggested they film the proceedings. Again, Ms. Nicks was reluctant. “ ‘Oh Dave, do you know what filming this means? Look at me, I’m in my cozy, grubby clothes. Are you kidding?’ And he said, ‘If you don’t like it, we don’t use it. We’ll pay for it, you and me. It’s ours. If you don’t like it, we’ll put it in the Dumpster.’ ”

    Having secured Mr. Stewart’s assurances, they began to record and film. The next 11 months, she said, were magical. “As the days went by, we all just so got into it. When we’d hit a snag, we’d run upstairs, I’d bring down hats and scarves and bracelets and rhinestones. We’d dress all the boys up. We looked like a circus! It was just hours and hours of fun every day.”

    When the sessions concluded and everyone left, Ms. Nicks was disconsolate. “Me and my little dog were sitting on the stairs, and I put my head in my hands and cried. I thought, I never wanted this to end. I really would have been happy if we had kept recording for the rest of our lives.”