‘LUV’ Opens

    The play “LUV” by Murray Schisgal will open at Guild Hall on Saturday after previews tonight and tomorrow night. It now stars Kahan James, who has replaced Ricardo Chavira. The cast also includes Jennifer Regan and Robert Stanton.

    The play, a reprisal of the 1964 Broadway hit, is directed by Lonny Price. It will run Tuesdays through Sundays until July 1. Tickets, which range in price from $40 to $85 with discounts for members, are available at the box office or at guildhall.org.

Parrish Happenings

    The Parrish Art Museum’s Opera in Cinema series will present an encore screening of Benjamin Britten’s “Peter Grimes” on Sunday at 2 p.m. The production was recorded last month in Milan. Tickets to the three-hour program are $17, $14 for Parrish members.

    The story is set in an English fishing village around 1830 and centers on a character who villagers suspect had a hand in the deaths of two men. It was intended “to express my awareness of the perpetual struggle of men and women whose livelihood depends on the sea,” said the composer, as well as to examine the struggle of the individual against the crowd.

    Next Thursday the Parrish will partner with the Watermill Center to pre­sent a free information session for artists and organizations, featuring Fractured Atlas, at 5 p.m. It will describe the benefits and use of Fractured Atlas’s fiscal sponsorship program as a fund-raising tool for individuals, emerging organizations, the general public, currently sponsored projects, and potential applicants. Also to be discussed are the benefits of sites such as IndieGoGo, Kickstarter, and RocketHub, and how to make crowdfunding an effective fund-raising tool.

Solo Piano in Montauk

    The Montauk Library will present a concert by Quynh Nguyen, a classical pianist, on Saturday at 7:30 p.m.

    Ms. Nguyen will perform master works for solo piano by Beethoven, Chopin, and Ravel. 

    She was admitted at 6 to the Hanoi Conservatory of Music and made her orchestral debut at 11. Ms. Nguyen won a scholarship to study piano performance at the Gnessin Institute in Moscow at age 13.

    She has performed extensively in major concert halls throughout the United States and Europe.

    Ms. Nguyen is a winner of numerous awards and distinctions, and has won the United States Presidential Academic Award, the Los Angeles Maestro Foundation Award, and a Fulbright Fellowship to study music in Paris. 

    She is on the faculty of Hunter College and the International Keyboard Institute and Festival at the Mannes College of Music.

The Funny Side

    Joseph Vecsey, a comedian, will host “The All Star Comedy Showcase” at the Bay Street Theatre on Monday at 8 p.m. The showcase will feature the comedy of Yannis Pappas, Kenny Garcia, Sergio Chicon, Kareem Green, and Dawn B.

    Mr. Vecsey’s weekly podcast discusses the art and business of comedy and features interviews with well-known comics who discuss their career and how they develop their material. The podcast can be found at podomatic.com/profile/josephvecsey.

    On June 18, Bay Street will present “The Ivy League of Comedy,” with Shaun Eli as M.C. and the stand-up comedians Myq Kaplan, Joe DeVito, and Dan Naturman.

    Tickets for each evening are $25 and can be purchased through baystreet.org.

   The opening salvo of jangly guitar licks on “Ex Post Facto,” from Chris Campion’s new EP, is so arresting, practically spellbinding, it raises the question of the extent to which pure sound, at once propulsive, insistent, and melancholy, can be a character in a 4-minute- and-50-second rock ’n’ roll tale.  Instrumentals can of course call to mind all manner of emotions, but what about embodying, say, futility, or striving, or loss? Any one of those could be standing over your shoulder as the disc spins.

    That may be one for the musicologists and philosophers. This listener’s real-world experience of playing the tune some two dozen times in relatively short order reveals that it carries a voltage that no amount of repetition will diminish. Directed to a depressed or at least self-pitying friend “lapping up that soul-soothing salve,” it might be the happiest sad song you’ll hear.

    The disc, a remarkably full five-song solo effort, extends Mr. Campion’s creative successes of late: the run of his stage show of music and storytelling, “Escape From Bellevue,” at the Village Theater (now Le Poisson Rouge) in Manhattan, and his memoir of the same name, subtitled “A Dive Bar Odyssey,” published by Gotham in 2009.

    The new release is called “The Saloon Singer,” and it would be remiss not to point out that a sense of Mr. Campion’s showmanship can be had — where else? — online, at reverbnation.com/ chriscampion, where there’s a video of “Ex Post Facto” featuring the yoga poses of a bracingly limber woman of a certain age who appears to have no teeth. (An urban attention seeker, maybe, in the cartoonist Daniel Clowes’s phrase.) And there you can see our man grilled by Shemp Butler, a blunt workingman of a “radio personality” who seems . . . strangely familiar.

    Come the fall, Mr. Campion as the Saloon Singer is to be back onstage in New York. And though it’s been a while since his Knockout Drops have played the Stephen Talkhouse, on July 21 he’ll perform in Amagansett at Rock the Farm with the reggae ensemble Steel Pulse to benefit the Wounded Warrior Project.

    In the meantime, the EP alone is welcome news — even if you haven’t been despairing of the state of popular music on the Island. Mr. Campion’s songwriting can be enjoyed by adults, for one thing. “Stolen Winter” offers an apocalyptic vision — “I walk a mile on one drunk foot, as I drag the other with me, like a mad nag loose in the city, unbridled, unhitched, and unsung” — before this slow processional of a song becomes something of a hymn, with all the slightly hair-raising power that implies.

    Mr. Campion, who grew up in Huntington and lives in Woodside, Queens, is nothing if not likable — for his empathy for losers and weirdos, for instance. In “Esteban,” he tells of a dreamer helpless against the distraction of the breeze in the trees. In the face of his terminally misguided focus, his wife has been his savior: “Every time I get close, she cuts me down and hides the rope,” Mr. Campion sings with rising emphasis. “I love her more than she’ll ever know, and one day soon, I’ll tell her so.”

    But he isn’t going to, is he. Just as I’m going to fail to get across what’s so moving about those lines.

   It is a sad fact that as an actress matures and ages, the parts available for her decrease. She may be getting wiser and better as a performer, but the characters to show it simply aren’t there. Theater, while an art form in which women can thrive, has historically been male-dominated, hence the dearth of mature female roles.

    So it is wonderfully refreshing to see a play like the comedy “My Brilliant Divorce,” a one-woman show starring Polly Draper as Angela, that made its debut on Saturday at the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor. This is an Americanized version of the Irish writer Geraldine Aron’s play, which has run for years in Dublin and London — Americanized in that Angela is written here as an American living in England.

    Angela is facing a true midlife crisis. Her English husband has left her for a younger, large-breasted woman and her daughter has left home with a drummer, leaving behind an empty house and a dog named Dexter. Alone, Angela wrestles with her demons: her sense of inadequacy and self-loathing, her love-hate relationship with her ex-husband, and her own repressed sexuality and desire.

    The talented Ms. Draper, best known for her work in the TV series  “thirtysomething,” is now fifty-something, and is well placed, temperament-wise, in the part. She has the sense of fun and at the same time the vulnerability to play Angela.

    There are, however, challenges for her in this production. For one, on opening night, she suffered a bit of vocal distress, with a scratchy throat and a slight cough. Ms. Draper is not one to get thrown off onstage, and she battled through, but her performance seemed sometimes tentative, particularly in the first act. More of that later.

    Ms. Draper is a wonderfully playful, inventive performer, and when she did bite into her role Saturday, the results were special.

    One of the highlights of the show comes quite early, as she wrestles with the reality that her husband has left her. “I made up my mind to see his departure as a reprieve,” she says, and begins listing all the things about him that she hates. The loathing that oozes out of Ms. Draper’s Angela — the kind that can only come from being in a long, sustained relationship — is truly side-splitting.    

    Her trip to a sex shop to buy a vibrator, on the advice of her doctor, is another highlight of the hour-long first act. Ms. Draper’s recounting of her conversation with the clerk, whom she imitates, speaking in a thick Cockney accent, is hilarious, as is her trip back home with her shopping bag containing the new toy. It is rare in a review to mention the prop designer, but Kathy Fabian’s sex-shop shopping bag was brilliant.

    Ms. Draper plays all the characters in Angela’s life with a couple of exceptions, her mother and her ex, who are heard in offstage recordings. During the shorter but succinct second act on opening night, her voice seemed to come around, and she appeared to be on somewhat firmer ground.

    One of Angela’s second-act highlights involves a bit of role-playing  with  two Ken and Barbie dolls, which ends with her whacking Ken with Barbie, sending him flying offstage. Her glee as she does this spreads throughout the entire house. “Think of life as a pleasant meal, and a man as a condiment,” she says, and she sits Barbie down next to a bottle of ketchup. Very, very funny.

    Robin Vest’s set design, using the black-box feel of the space by employing shades of dark brown, gray, and black, is superb, as is the projection design by Aaron Rhyme, the music and sound design by Fitz Patton, and the overall use of the space by the director, Matt McGrath. Mr. McGrath has a strong visual sense, as evidenced by an imaginative use of the revolve, on which he has Ms. Draper slowly step through a dream sequence, to excellent effect.

    The costume design by Andrea Lauer made perfect sense, and the lighting design by Mike Billings meshed beautifully with the overall vision of the piece. A couple of light cues were a bit tentative on Saturday, but such is opening night. Tentative.

    The occasionally tentative nature of Ms. Draper’s performance may have had its root in her scratchy throat, but two other factors come to mind. The first is a very minor technical point. I was seated near where she makes her entrance, stepping onto the darkened stage from the house. Both times I noted she moved very cautiously as she entered, stepping warily in the dark.

    That first moment of a play or an act, when the stage lights burst on or the curtain comes up, is one of the most important of the night. It is the moment that establishes the relationship between the audience and the players. It might be wise to put down a few more strips of glow tape, or perhaps a stagehand with a flashlight, to enable the star to make a smooth transition from off-stage to on.

    The second factor is more central to the production.

    Driving home from the theater, I wrestled with a memory. Many years ago I saw Joanne Woodward doing a season at Kenyon Festival Theater in Ohio. I consider Ms. Woodward vastly underappreciated as one of the finest postwar American actresses. Ms. Draper, though quite different from Ms. Woodward, shares one thing in common with her: she is very American. She has a down-home American feel to her, an American sensibility and sensitivity. She is an American woman. When she imitates an Englishman, she does so through an American perspective and understanding.

    At Kenyon, Ms. Woodward was playing Judith Bliss in “Hay Fever,” Noel Coward’s joyful sendup of English country life. In a setting much like East Hampton, Judith Bliss, a grande dame of the theater, and her eccentric family entertain houseguests for the weekend. I watched Ms. Woodward’s performance several times, and each time there was something missing. As great an actress as she was, this was one part she could not nail.

    Her performance was tentative. Why?

    Anyone growing up in England has an inborn sense of class difference. Ms. Aron, who was born in Ireland and spent much time in England, clearly has a deep understanding of this thorny subject, an understanding she plays off of throughout the play. Americans, however, have no such divisions. When we speak of class difference, we are actually speaking of money. If you are poor in America, you are lower class; rich, you are upper class. The idea of actually being born into one class or the other is alien to our culture.

     “My Brilliant Divorce” is laced with subtle and not-so-subtle references to class differentiation, as is “Hay Fever.” The ability to “get” these differences is essential to play these works as originally written.

    This production is attempting, with the playwright on hand and sleeves rolled up, a workaround for that, with the talented Ms. Draper giving her all as an Americanized Angela. Can such a work, idiosyncratic as it is, be Americanized?

    I would love to see “My Brilliant Divorce” again, in a week or two, and see how it plays.

   Erudite and warm, droll but unaffected, Margery and Sheldon Harnick are like many successful couples who call the South Fork their second home. Their faces may not be immediately recognizable to hoi polloi, but they are secure in their accomplishments and here to relax, saving their socializing for theater events in the city.

    Mr. Harnick is a Pulitzer and Tony Award-winning lyricist for musicals such as “Fiddler on the Roof” and “She Loves Me.” Ms. Harnick is an actress and painter who recently added photography to her range of creative outlets.

    Spending a warm spring afternoon in their house full of air and light off Egypt Lane is like catching up with old friends or family members, but ones who have fascinating stories to tell.

    Some of their stories have been captured in a book: “The Outdoor Museum (Not Your Usual Images of New York),” published last month by Beaufort Books. It features Ms. Harnick’s photography with Mr. Harnick’s poetry. Excerpts from the book are on view at Guild Hall’s Boots Lamb Educational Center through July 29.

    The title says it all, but what it does not describe, Mike Nichols, the Broadway and film producer and director, elaborates on in the book’s foreword. A longtime friend of the Harnicks, he was struck by how the pairing of words and images reflected the balance of visions that imbues their marriage.

    “It is as though two poets were taking a walk through the city side by side, looking at different things and sometimes the same things through their different eyes and souls, humming different tunes in the same key, sometimes joining in complex harmonies,” Mr. Nichols wrote. “They see beauty in things that, once seen, will never again be seen in the same way.”

    It is surprising that the two — who have gone separately to Guild Hall’s clothesline art fair and arrived home with a work by the same artist, who finish each other’s sentences, and laugh appreciatively at each other’s jokes — have not collaborated professionally in the years since they first met on the production of “Tenderloin.”

    The play was the 1960 follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Fiorello!” in 1959. Both musicals employed the team of Mr. Harnick, his composing partner, Jerry Bock, and George Abbott, who co-wrote and directed both plays.

    Each remembers the moment the other caught his or her eye as if it were last year, not decades and two grown children ago. Mr. Harnick first noticed Ms. Harnick at her audition. “She had gorgeous blond hair down to her knees and sang wonderfully. Abbott got very excited and then found out she danced and acted. The principal roles were cast, but we put her in the ensemble and he kept finding things for her to do. He just fell in love with her.” Abbott ended up asking Ms. Harnick to replace the lead in “Fiorello!” at the end of its original run.

    Abbott was in his 70s, but Mr. Harnick was still in his 30s and eager to pursue the young actress. While Ms. Harnick had other suitors, Mr. Harnick caught her eye on the first day of rehearsals for “Tenderloin.” She walked in early. “I saw this cute guy with curly hair. I didn’t know who he was or what he did.” She found out he was the lyricist. “Then you and Jerry sang and went through the whole score for us and that was it.”

    In the course of performing the play, Ms. Harnick’s appreciation for Mr. Harnick’s gift grew. “To go out night after night and see your material was so inspirational when I was in ‘Fiorello!’ ” she said to her husband. “You get inside of the character so when I’m singing your songs it’s as if it were me. You become the character. I don’t know how to explain it better than that.”

    “See, that’s why we’ve been married as long as we have,” Mr. Harnick responded.

    “What I had to learn over the years,” he added, “was never to say I don’t like it,” when she showed him her paintings. “What I learned to say is ‘I don’t understand this yet.’ ” He recalled being at Mr. Bock’s house once, working in his studio. “Once we played his wife a song that she didn’t like and he said ‘Well, what do you know?’ ” That would probably be his response if Ms. Harnick said she didn’t like a song, he said.

    For almost as long as they have been married, the couple have been coming to East Hampton, starting in 1966 when Hal Holbrook took over for Alan Alda in one of Mr. Harnick’s projects, a production of three playlets called “The Apple Tree,” directed by Mr. Nichols. “Hal asked, ‘Would anyone like to rent my house in Amagansett for the time I’m in the show?’ We went to Meeting House Lane and fell in love with it.” They cleaned the house and added some warm touches and Mr. Holbrook asked if they wanted to rent it again.

    “He didn’t charge us a penny more,” Ms. Harnick recalled.

    With no sense of direction, Mr. Harnick said he was always lost in new places, “but I always knew where I was here. It just felt like home.”

    After a few false starts they found their current house. “We’ve been in here since 1968 when the house was finished. It was built by Bob Barnes. He made wonderful homes,” Ms. Harnick said.

    When their children, Matthew and Beth, were growing up, it was more difficult to come out every weekend, “but we never abandoned the house for more than a month or six weeks.” While others relax, they come to work. “We discovered that if we wanted to, we could become part of the party crowd or we could work, which is what we wanted to do. So we never got into the party scene,” said Mr. Harnick.

    Mr. Harnick is constantly writing — in a car, at home, or even in the subway if inspiration strikes. Ms. Harnick, who has studied with artists such as Jane Wilson, has been painting for decades. “I’ve always taken photographs as a start, but then I couldn’t stop taking photographs recently.”

    It is the abstract that attracts her to her photographic subjects, but also “structure and content and composition. I use it all the time. Whether abstract or not, those lessons stay with you.”

    The book is the culmination of four years of work and 300 photographs. Mr. Harnick’s poems were inspired by the images. A chapter on the city’s homeless population was particularly moving for them. Mr. Harnick, who recalled getting choked up the first time he read the poem inspired by those images, read the poem in his house and was moved once again.

    “Who are they?” it begins. He follows up with a list of questions, capturing what many people must think at some time. “Did they have skates? A bike? A pencil box? A best friend?” he asks of their childhoods. But he wants to know more. He questions their love and family lives and what their last home was like. “Did they have a job? A bank account? Dreams? What happened?” And the penultimate line, the one we have all asked at one time or another, “Could this happen to me?” It ends where it begins, “Who are they?”

    One of the more moving images is of a blind woman, whose drapery is reminiscent of the folds of a Renaissance Madonna, or a mourning St. John the Evangelist in Rosso Fiorentino’s “Deposition” from 1521. Ms. Harnick’s other images alternate from the poignant to the tragic, forcing us to recognize what is so easily passed by on the street and why we look away. She takes the pictures from far away and avoids including faces. Not sure how to approach her subjects or whether she is disturbing them, she goes to a nearby deli to buy a drink and a sandwich and quietly leaves the meal by them.

    One publisher did not want the chapter in the book. He found it too distressing, “but that’s New York,” Mr. Harnick said. They held out for another publisher.

    People have asked, “ ‘Where do you find all these homeless people?’ And I say, ‘Everywhere.’ So many people are so busy on their phones or whatever they don’t really see.”

    Other chapters focus on reflections, construction, cars, swans, and other frequently seen and ignored sights of the city, captured from Ms. Harnick’s unique perspective. She hits the streets with no agenda, with a camera in her pocket, waiting for inspiration. “Exciting things happen that I don’t know about until I get upon them.”

    While she is still taking pictures in the city, she has plans for a book of nature photographs in collaboration with their son, taken in and around East Hampton.

    Mr. Harnick, who is now working on a musical based on a play by Moliere called “The Doctor in Spite of Himself,” said he loved the freedom of working on verse not tied to the strict rhythmic meter of a song. Though he studied music at Northwestern University in Chicago, he has spent years independently reading the works of the great poets, classic to contemporary. When he realized his poem “Puddles” was shorter than the others in the book he asked himself “ ‘Do I dare do that?’ And then I thought, yeah, I dare.”

Click for poem

   Christopher Garetano, the producer and director of “Montauk Chronicles,” which will have its premiere at Gurney’s Inn tomorrow, admits that as a teenager he was “obsessed with the paranormal.”

    “If I had known that there were nefarious goings-on at the Air Force base where I swam each summer, I would have been thrilled,” he said. “Montauk Chronicles” is a docudrama that features three men who claim they were subjected to secret experiments featuring aliens, mind control, and time travel in the 1970s in a secret bunker deep beneath the ground at the Camp Hero Air Force Base in Montauk.

    For his film, Mr. Garetano tracked down and interviewed Alfred Bielek, Stewart Swerdlow, and Preston Nichols, who have written books about their experiences, most notably “The Montauk Project.”

    “I wanted to meet them in person, in their homes, in their own environments. The book seemed to be extremely far-fetched,” Mr. Garetano said. “But I considered the possibility. It was hard at first to hear these men, grown men, talking about monsters and aliens with a straight face. But I wanted to capture their stories on film.”

The director acknowledged that he didn’t believe the men at first. “But they weren’t gaining anything from their stories; there was no financial reward for them. They are just consistently setting themselves up to be ridiculed, and this has been going on for decades.”

However, a funny thing happened while filming. “It really affected me,” Mr. Garetano said. “The subject matter is about how all this stuff is going on beneath the surface, it became a broader scope than just concentrating on these guys and their stories. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but I found I was becoming really paranoid while making the film.”

    “The power of suggestion is really strong sometimes.”

    In addition to the interviews, “ ‘Montauk Chronicles’ illustrates all the stories, explaining where Montauk is, a little history,” he said. Much of the film was shot in and around Montauk.

    Mr. Garetano, who grew up in the Huntington-Northport area but summered in Montauk every year, spent over five years making “Montauk Chronicles.” He shot the initial interviews in 2006 and 2007, and was still editing the finished version in December. “It was just me and a camera and no money,” he said. “I’m the one guy who did it all.”The School of Visual Arts film graduate has put in his time on large Hollywood movies, but feels that independent films, and their directors, have considerably more freedom. “There’s a rigid sensibility in today’s big films,” he said. He added that the audience for small films is growing all the time.

    Camp Hero, the former base, was opened as a state park in 2002, but Mr. Garetano said that it has rules unlike other state parks, which go toward validating the stories told by the trio. “That huge radar tower is still there,” he said. “Along with all those big doors, and cement bunkers.” Camp Hero also has aboveground manhole covers that lead into the deep recesses buried beneath the cliffs and a supposed underground tunnel system. Mr. Garetano recalled the eerie feeling that he, and many acquaintances, have had when visiting the spot.

    “And the park brochure says not to use a cellphone because of the unexploded ordnances, but really,” he said with a laugh, “if you were the U.S. government, would you allow tourists to walk around where there were unexploded land mines? And count on them to not use their cellphones?” Mr. Garetano has heard claims that “there’s still stuff going on in that base underneath the base.”

    The world premiere of “Montauk Chronicles” will be held tomorrow at Gurney’s Inn, at 7:30 p.m. The screening will be followed by a question-and-answer session and panel discussion featuring Mr. Garetano and several of the film’s subjects, including Mr. Swerdlow and Mr. Nichols.

Manhattan puddles, I suspect, are vain.

    If so, then this must be the reason why:

Manhattan puddles know that they reflect

    Manhattan buildings, trees and sky.

But other puddles, too, may be as proud,

    Content to dwell in town and countryside.

Reflecting the locales that gave them birth,

    They glow with chauvinistic pride.

I wonder if beneath their calm facades,

    They tremble when they contemplate their fate.

They know reflected glory’s a mirage

    And will, in time, evaporate.

Aware that their existence may be brief,

    They take the onward rush of time to heart

And choose to spend their dwindling span of days

    Becoming works of art.

Thomas Moran Celebrated

    A Victorian garden party hosted by the East Hampton Historical Society will kick off the society’s exhibition “Moran: A Family Celebration of Home and Place,” on Sunday from 2 to 4 p.m. 

    Chilled tea, lavender lemonade, pound cake with rose petals, sugared violets, and even Victorian children’s games will be part of the festivities, which will be in the garden behind Clinton Academy. All are welcome and there is no charge for the exhibition or the garden party.

    The exhibition was co-sponsored and co-curated by Charles Keller and Glenn Purcell of East Hampton and will be open on weekends from Sunday to July 8. It is presented in partnership with the Thomas Moran Trust.

Visual Vernacular

In Southampton

    The Southampton Cultural Center will present “Visual Vernacular,” an exhibition of painting and sculpture organized by Arlene Bujese, beginning Monday. It will feature the art of Stephanie Brody-Lederman, John Haubrich, Gerson Leiber, and Elizabeth Strong-Cuevas. An opening reception will take place next Thursday from 5 to 7 p.m.

    The show examines what is unique in each of the individual artists and how it has developed into a visual language that repeats throughout their careers. According to the curator, this language may make “various intentional and sometimes unintentional statements.”

    Ms. Brody-Lederman and Mr. Leiber are painters. Ms. Strong-Cuevas is a sculptor in bronze, and Mr. Haubrich contributes collages to the show, which remains on view through July 1.

Markel Opens Season

In Bridgehampton

    Kathryn Markel Fine Arts in Bridgehampton will open its summer season with “Water Color” by Kim Uchiyama, beginning tomorrow with a reception on Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m.

    This will be the New York artist’s first show in the Hamptons and will consist of watercolor paintings completed between 2007 and 2012. Her watercolors consist of “horizontal waves of pure color that create a wonderful tension between a free, sensual movement of the brush on paper and her practiced control of the medium,” according to the gallery. Many were painted in the city of Otranto, on the tip of Italy’s boot.

    The show will be on view through June 24.

New at Crazy Monkey

    A new show opens today at the Crazy Monkey Artist Cooperative Gallery in Amagansett. It will feature Bob Tucker’s color drawings on paper and his wife, Ellyn Tucker’s, mixed-media collages.

    The gallery will also show collaborative objects in clay and mixed media by Andrea McCafferty and Clare Schoenheimer, and photographs by Daniel Schoenheimer, along with pieces by Cynthia Sobel, Sheila Rotner, Mark E. Zimmerman, Catherine Silver, Barbara Bilotta, and Anna Franklin.

    A reception will be held on Saturday from 5 to 7 p.m. and the show will be up through June 25.

Lelle at Pierre’s

    Pierre’s Restaurant in Bridgehampton is showing collages by Bob Lelle through June 26. A reception will be held on Saturday from 3 to 6 p.m.

    The show is called “L’Alphabet de la Mode II,” and consists of “witty and clever collages” from the artist, who lived in Southampton for many years and died in Paris over the winter after a brief illness.

    In addition to the show at Pierre’s, a celebratory Mass will be said at Queen of the Most Holy Rosary Catholic Church in Bridgehampton on Saturday at 10:30 a.m.

New Gallery in Sag Harbor

    Main Street welcomed another gallery this season with the opening of the Monika Olka Gallery on May 26.

    The inaugural exhibition is “Lilith,” photographs by Rose Kouzoujian. The current show of works by Shen Wei opened yesterday and will have a reception on June 9 from 6 to 9 p.m.

New Space at Boltax

    Boltax Gallery’s Summer Project exhibition space in Shelter Island opened last weekend with Jason Willaford’s show “Signs of Life.”

    The show incorporates his “Reclamation” series made from quilting discarded billboards — “a response to things that disappear so quickly, that we don’t see them vanish,” according to the gallery.

    The artist approaches both billboards and quilting as things that are quickly on their way to being outmoded. His response is to make large, vinyl, billowing quilts and pillows that turn a two-dimensional medium into a form of three dimensions.

    The new gallery is in a smaller space in the same complex as the previous gallery. The exhibition runs through June 24.

New Sculpture Garden

    Dodds and Eder’s garden design store has opened a sculpture garden in its retail space on Bridge Street in Sag Harbor.

    The garden is currently featuring work by Dennis Leri, Steven Zaluski, and Jerelyn Hanrahan and was organized by Dominic Antignano from the East End Arts Council and Peconic Landing. Mr. Leri lives in Springs and the other artists are from eastern Long Island. A reception with the artists will be held on Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m.

Watermill Center Installation

    The Watermill Center will host an evening viewing tomorrow from 6 to 8 of the work of two Icelandic artists, David Brynjar Franzson and Halldór Úlfarsson, in collaboration with Davyde Wachell of New York. A reception will follow from 8 to 9.

    The installation consists of elements of cinema and robotics with scenes shot in Iceland, Germany, and Water Mill. The visuals are part of a modular opera the artists are developing about a Danish rogue who seized the governorship of Iceland from the sitting governor, who was his countryman. His failed revolution lasted 40 days.

    Reservations are required and can be made at davidbrynjarfranzson.event brite.com.

East End Photography

    The East End Photographers Group will present its spring exhibition at Ashawagh Hall beginning Saturday and running through June 10.

    The work will include traditional, digital, and alternative photographic processes by photographers such as Virgina Aschmoneit, Ann Brandeis, Dennis Bontempo, Paul Dempsey, Rich Faron, Ray Germann, Janet Glazer, Gerry Giliberti, Pamela Greinke, Kathryn Odell-Hamilton, Greg Hollmann, Joel Lefkowitz, Sam Maggio, George Mallis, Andrea McCafferty, Ron Nicoletta, Harriet Rugg, Guy Pierno, Nina Schafer, Daniel Schoenheimer, Rosa Hanna Scott, Marilyn Stevenson, Clarence Simpson, Christina Stow, Jarret Stretch, Nick Tarr, and Alan Weinschel.

    An opening reception will be held from 5 to 9 p.m. on Saturday and a closing reception will be held on June 10 from 3 to 5 p.m. The Blue Collar Band will play at the opening at 5:30. The gallery will be open on weekdays and weekends through the exhibition run.

New Shows at Halsey Mckay

    Lauren Luloff and Ben Blatt will be the next artists presented at Halsey Mckay Gallery in East Hampton beginning tomorrow. A reception will be held Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m.

    Ms. Luloff’s exhibition of large-scale paintings, “Dark Interiors & Bright Landscapes,” will take over the ground floor. The artist layers bleach-stained bed sheets, muslin, transparent fabric and varying viscosities of oil paint in these constructed and torn works. Her use of Abstract Expressionist means are both personal and feminine.

    In “Temporal Fever” Ben Blatt will exhibit graphite drawings and watercolor paintings. Both examine the contrast between ideologies of Western and Eastern gardening practices: the Western desire to subjugate the natural world against the Eastern ideal of harmonious coexistence with nature, according to the gallery. His themes include mortality, regeneration, and technological artifice.

    The shows are on view through June 19.

Afro-Samba Music

    The Montauk Library will present “Black Orphe and Eurydice,” with the  Women of Color Productions Ensemble, on Saturday at 7:30 p.m.

    The play, with Afro-Samba music and dance, was written, directed, and choreographed by Jacqueline Wade, who has written more than 20 plays and performance art pieces, performed at such venues as La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, New York University, and the Harlem School of the Arts. It was inspired by ancient Greek legends and classical literature and art about the love story of Orpheus and Eurydice, as well as the 1959 film “Black Orpheus.”

    The cast includes Abraham Amkpa, Courtney Shaday, Robert Shryock,  Michael Velez, and Jaqueline Revere.

‘Li’l Abner’ at LTV

    The Studio Playhouse community theater at LTV will present “Li’l Ab­ner” next Thursday through Saturday at 7 p.m. in LTV’s studio 3. In its original run on Broadway the musical comedy, based on the cartoon characters created by Al Capp,  ran for almost 700 performances.

    Li’l Abner and Daisy Mae will be played by Bryant Yunker and Stephanie Grady, with musical accompaniment by Mark York. Some 15 of the area’s amateur actors will take the stage as well. Tickets are $15 and $10 for students and those over 65, and can be purchased at ltveh.org.

Giovanni     

    “Giovanni the Fearless,” a folk opera with music by Mira J. Spektor and Carolyn Balducci of Montauk, will be presented at Symphony Space in Manhattan next Thursday at 7:30 p.m.

    The opera was presented as readings at the Montauk Library last year. It will be part of a bill including “I Wish, I Wish, I Wish,” another folk opera, and a musical piece called “As I Walked Out One Evening.”

    Tickets are $30, or $20 for children and groups, and can be purchased through symphonyspace.org.

Parrish Films

    The Parrish Museum has two film presentations coming up. The first, on Sunday, is a recorded broadcast of the Verdi opera “I Vespri Siciliani” (“The Sicilian Vespers”), to be shown at 2 p.m.

The opera takes its name from the Easter rebellion of the Sicilians in 1282 against the French-Capetian king Charles I, who had ruled the island since 1266. It weaves military intrigue with a tale of doomed love between a French duchess and a Sicilian rebel. The cast includes Maria Agresti, Gregory Kunde, and Franco Vassallo, with Gianandrea Noseda at the podium.

    Next Thursday, “Chris & Don: A Love Story,” a documentary about the relationship between the British author Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, an American portrait painter, will be screened at 7:30 p.m. Mr. Isherwood, best known for “The Berlin Stories” (which became the basis for the musical “Cabaret”), met Mr. Bachardy in Malibu in the 1950s, and they remained together until the author’s death in 1986.

    The 90-minute film is presented in conjunction with the museum’s current exhibition, “EST-3: Southern California in New York.”

    Tickets to the opera screening, a four-hour program that includes two intermissions, are $17, or $14 for members. The documentary is $7, $5 for members.

   To ask Lonny Price, director of Guild Hall’s current revival of Murray Schisgal’s 1964 hit show “LUV,” what jobs he’s done in theater would be to miss the point. The more salient question would be “What jobs haven’t you done?”

    “I’m a moving target. I try not to get hit,” he joked during a break from a casting session on Sunday. He’d always wanted to conduct an orchestra, he said, and three years ago, for his 50th birthday, he did just that, putting together a 27-piece band in a show for friends and family.

    The highest compliment that can be paid to an actor in theater is to call him a triple threat, meaning he can sing, dance, and act equally well. Mr. Price does all that and much more.

    Born in Fresh Meadows, Queens, his annual birthday gift from his parents while he was growing up was an evening at a Broadway play. The family collected and listened to the cast recordings of each musical of the era, and what a rich era it was, with composers and lyricists like John Kander and Fred Ebb, Jerry Herman, James Rado and Gerome Ragni, and Marvin Hamlisch, and shows like “Hair,” “Chicago,” “Man of La Mancha,” and “A Chorus Line.”

    Mr. Price wanted a life on and around the stage since he can remember, and on his 11th birthday, that annual trip to the theater proved cathartic in more ways than one.

    “I saw “Company.” I fell in love with the sound of [Stephen Sondheim’s] music. It was thrilling to me then, and it is thrilling to me now.”

    “Company” was a very adult musical look at contemporary morality and sexuality in relationships, and is considered one of Mr. Sondheim’s masterpieces.

    “Craig Lucas once said, ‘If I could have dated “Company,” “Follies,” and “A Little Night Music,” I would have.’ That’s how I felt about ‘Company.’ ”

    Mr. Price became obsessed with Mr. Sondheim’s work. “I was kind of a groupie for him,” he said. Mary Rodgers, the daughter of Richard Rodgers, Mr. Sondheim’s mentor when he was young, was a close friend of Mr. Price’s parents. “She passed my letter onto Steve,” Mr. Price said, and much to his surprise, Mr. Sondheim responded. The two began a regular correspondence that continues to this day.

    At that point, Mr. Sondheim was already legendary. He was the lyricist for “West Side Story” and “Gypsy,” and the composer and lyricist for “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” but it was “Company” that first teamed him with the director Hal Prince, a team that revolutionized musical theater during the 1970s.

    Mr. Price eventually became part of that revolution, with both Mr. Sondheim and Mr. Prince mentoring his career. Hired as an assistant on the 1975 production of “Pacific Overtures,” he reported to the theater every day after school.

    When he was 21, the team cast him as one of the leads in “Merrily We Roll Along.” Though considered at the time a flop, closing after only 16 performances, the show launched Mr. Price’s career, leading to his being cast in the original Broadway production of Athol Fugard’s seminal “Master Harold . . . and the Boys” the following year.

    Despite his success as a stage and screen actor, Mr. Price said his greatest joy in contemporary theater is as a director. In 2011 he directed, in collaboration with the Philharmonic Orchestra of Lincoln Center and working closely with Mr. Sondheim, an orchestral version of “Sweeney Todd,” in which Mr. Price staged the actors amid the symphony. He had collaborated similarly with the orchestra on Leonard Bernstein’s classic “Candide,” and directed a Sondheim retrospective, “Sondheim: The Birthday Concert,” in side-by-side collaboration with the composer, filming it for PBS as it was staged at the Philharmonic in March 2010.

    At Guild Hall Mr. Price is returning to straight theater with “LUV,” a three-character play that examines, as in “Company,” relationships and contemporary mores.

    “It’s a play I read when I was younger,” he said. “Josh Gladstone asked me if I wanted to do a play in the Hamptons this year.” Mr. Price previously worked with Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor, a experience he treasures, and so he accepted Mr. Gladstone’s offer, and the two agreed on “LUV” as the perfect vehicle.

    The play has aged enough that it is now seen as a period piece, but one that is in many ways prescient. “It’s an absurdist comedy,” said Mr. Price. “Everybody is completely narcissistic and self-involved. People haven’t changed, certainly not in my life. ‘We’re all just living in our little compartments,’” he added, quoting from the show.

    The director enjoys the change of pace in the transition to straight theater. In a musical, he agreed, the book is subservient to the songs, with the catharsis coming in the music. In straight theater, the cathartic moments are in the language, or perhaps more accurately, in the moments the language creates.

    “It’s all about subtext,” Mr. Price said.

    His next theatrical journey will be to the Bucks County Playhouse, where he is directing an homage to Rodgers and Hammerstein, reprising the 1993 Rodgers and Hammerstein Broadway review, “A Grand Night for Singing.”

    “I’ve been lucky,” Mr. Price said. “It’s been a dream to work with these guys. I like surrounding myself with talented people. I like building a family.”

    In the case of “LUV,” one member of the family will be quite new. Ricardo Chavira of “Desperate Housewives” fame was slated to appear in the production, but had to bow out at the last moment. His replacement was being selected at press time.

    The production also stars Robert Stanton, whom Mr. Price worked with at Bay Street, and Jennifer Regan, who auditioned for the show “and nailed it.”

   The Animal Rescue Fund of the Hamptons will open its thrift store doors on Saturday night for a preview cocktail party to showcase the work of several prominent New York designers who will transform its inventory of gently used treasures into rooms worthy of a style doyenne.

    On Sunday and Monday, the 10 rooms put together by Jeffery Howard Brodersen, Nancy Corzine, Gary Crain and James Alan Smith, Michael Grim, Gigi Mahon, Jeff Pfeifle, Scott Salvator, Rob Southern, and Tony Urrutia will be open to the public for a suggested donation of $10 with children admitted free. Nothing purchased from the rooms will be removed from the store until after the weekend concludes.

    The event is chaired by Sandra McConnell, with Peter Hallock and Lisa McCarthy serving as vice chairs. This year’s honorary chairwoman is Betty Sherrill. All proceeds will benefit ARF and its shelter animals.

    Almost a fifth of ARF’s annual operating budget comes from money raised by the Sagaponack thrift shop. Last year, the building was renovated and expanded allowing the organization to accept more donations.

    Last year’s designer showhouse, which inaugurated the new space, was a great success and the organization plans to continue it as an annual event.

    All the designers who are participating are animal lovers who are donating their time and expertise to help the shelter. Each room will feature thrift shop items and pieces donated from the designers’ own collections. Unlike traditional showhouses, every item in the ARF designer showhouse will be for sale. 

    Over 200 guests drawn from the design world and the South Fork social community are expected to attend the preview cocktail party. Cocktails. including wine, will be donated by Channing Daughters Winery and hors d’oeuvres will be donated by the Dancing Gourmet.

    Designers such as Ms. Corzine and Mr. Salvator will design bedrooms and Mr. Brodersen will create a men’s dressing room. There will also be fanciful interpretations such as Ms. Mahon’s animal celebratory tea party and Mr. Pfeifle’s doggie luncheon at the beach. Other rooms and tableaus will feature garden themes.

    Special guests will include a number of ARF dogs and cats who are looking for new homes.

    A preview hour prior to the cocktail preview begins at 5 p.m. and costs $300. The party begins at 6 p.m. Tickets cost $150. All purchased items will stay in place until Tuesday, at which point they will be available for pickup.