If Anita Sorel has her way, the lines of people waiting to perform on the stage at the Studio Playhouse at LTV Studios in Wainscott will be as long as the lines to sit in the audience.

    “I want every waitress and every plumber and every fireman to perform,” she said in a recent interview.

    A community theater in East Hampton has been a dream of Ms. Sorel’s for years, and has finally become a reality.

    “I used to say that it’s a shame that we’re so close to the city with so many artistic people that there isn’t more theater here year round.”

    Ms. Sorel is originally from Los Angeles. When she was 4 years old, her mother took her to the Ice Capades, an experience that led her to an epiphany. Sitting in the audience, watching the theatrical ice dancing, she suddenly turned to her mother and said, “I want to do that.”

    And “that” became her ambition and quest in life.

    When Ms. Sorel was 13 years old, she had her first experience in professional theater, performing during a summer season at Laguna Beach, Calif. Her first speaking part was in “The Seven Year Itch.”

    “I was the French girl, I don’t know that she had a name, and I had three lines.”

    Ms. Sorel doesn’t speak French, so she learned the lines phonetically.

    “Then I played Giavonna in ‘Time of the Cuckoo.’ I had four lines, all in Italian.” Her next part was in “The Madwoman of Chaillot.” She had no lines at all.

    “I didn’t get to speak English the whole summer.”

    After graduating from the University of Utah, a school she chose because of its well-rounded theater and dance programs, she became a theatrical gypsy searching for her niche.

    She returned to Los Angeles, and found that Hollywood was not for her. Then, she tried teaching for several years at the University of Kansas, but the theatrical fire was still burning in her heart, and so she came to New York, where she found success.

    She landed a leading role in the soap opera “Search for Tomorrow,” playing Meg Roberts for three years, as well as touring with the National Shakespeare Company. But even with success as an actor, there still seemed to be something missing.

    Then, one day, she heard about a job opening in East Hampton to start a theater department at the Ross School.

    “In 1999, Mrs. Ross was beginning to create the high school and hired 43 or so of us to form the staff and create the curriculum. It was a marvelous adventure,” she remembered. “I was the theater department — a one man show. I not only directed three shows a year, but also created a fully integrated curriculum.”

    The first show the students put on was “Amadeus,” which was performed at Guild Hall.

    She spent seven years at Ross, teaching the students and building the program. But when an opportunity arose in 2006 to work in a theater program in Nairobi, Kenya, she decided to leave, feeling that she had accomplished her goal, and, as always, seeking a new challenge.

    It was while in Nairobi, teaching at the International School of Kenya, that she began to visualize her next challenge — forming a community theater company in East Hampton.

    And so, two years ago, she returned to East Hampton to do just that. “My goal is to have a theater that every resident knows, a theater where they can come and perform, they can sew costumes, they can help build scenery.”

    She knows it won’t be easy. “A lot of small theater groups try out here and they can’t sustain.”

     She began to work with LTV toward that goal. “What we decided is to make the theater an outreach program. The thrust is for a community theater here with a youth program, and a program for seniors where they won’t have to pay.”

    Last year was the first season. In addition to “Destry Rides Again,” a musical, “we did four original plays by local playwrights. We mounted them and had a great run. Each time we do a show, hopefully our reputation will grow. But I am very impatient,” she said with a smile. “I want it now! Our philosophy this year is, we want to get the word out.”

    On April 3 and 4, auditions were held at the studio for the first production of the year, the musical “Li’l Abner,” based on the mid-20th-century Al Capp comic strip. Lee Michel is the musical director, and the orchestra includes Mark York, a Broadway pianist.

    “ ‘Li’l Abner’ goes up in June.” After it closes, the theater will be dark for the month of July, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be busy.

    “We’ll be working, planning, building. Our season starts in August with ‘Amy’s View’ [by David Hare], then I want to do a play called ‘How the Other Half Loves’ [by Alan Ayckbourn]. It’s for six people. The third production is an evening of original works by local playwrights.”

    Ms. Sorel was ecstatic over the level of talent she saw during the auditions, but noted there are still a couple of key parts to cast.

    “When we first started,” she recalled, “we had an open forum for the town. We invited anybody who wanted to start a new theater. In walks a man in a fireman’s windbreaker. I went and hugged him. He was the lead in our first play.”

    And it’s not just actors she is seeking. “We need people to be involved. I have wonderful people who help when they can, so I’m able to direct, I’m handling getting the royalties, I’m designing the sets, I’m making the costumes, I’ve been doing it, but it would be so marvelous to have someone say, ‘I’d like to make some costumes,’ to have someone say, ‘I’m a director, I’d love to come in and direct.’ ”

    And, she added, “We need money. We’re a nonprofit. The monies we’ve used to mount a show go back to LTV and the profits we’ve made on each show have raised money for LTV. We’re a fund-raiser for LTV. To grow, we need outside contributions. That’s why I’m putting a campaign on Kickstarter.”

    Kickstarter is a Web site that helps raise money for the arts by setting a financial goal in a specified time limit, allowing anyone with an American bank account to donate, wherever they are, contingent upon the online goal being reached. Those who want to pitch in can do so by going to the theater’s own Web site at Studio-Playhouse.com.

    Donations can also be made to Studio Theatre, P.O. Box 799, Wainscott 11975.

    A friend of hers asked Ms. Sorel recently why, with her professional background, she wanted to build a community theater in East Hampton.

    “I know from all my experience that theater can change people. You take the plumber, you take the shy librarian, you take the mother who’s home all day. She gets involved with theater, she has a new family. I know what theater can do for you. Scratch the surface of a great actor and you’ll find that many are very, very shy. That’s what theater does for us.”

    “My goal is to have a true community theater where the quality of the productions is extremely professional. I’d love to see a time when the Hamptons had so many running theaters that people could come out for the weekend and see two or three shows and we’d be known as a theater town.”

    In January 2011, Bonnie Rychlak left the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum where she worked for 30 years to pursue her own artistic endeavors. It would prove to be a very short retirement.

    Ms. Rychlak, who still takes on independent curatorial projects and is a visiting assistant professor at Pratt Institute, was also recruited by LongHouse Reserve to organize this year’s outdoor sculpture exhibition, which became “Diversities of Sculpture/Derivations from Nature.” The exhibit opens on Saturday in conjunction with the reserve’s season opening.

    Last week, at her house in Springs, an open-plan modernist dwelling that she designed and built with her husband, Brian Gaman, over five years — and which owes something to the California architecture they both grew up with — she appeared to be relaxed and enjoying the art and curatorial projects that now claim her attention.

    She started her association with Noguchi when the sculptor was alive, and worked as his assistant from 1980 until his death in 1988. “I gave that place my youth,” she said, with a hint of wistfulness but seemingly no regret.

    In those days it was easy. She worked three days a week when Noguchi was alive and about four as the manager of the estate. But the creation of the foundation and the establishment of the Long Island City museum as a nonprofit meant money to raise, programs and staff to manage, and publications to organize. It became all consuming.

    After working full time for many years, she decided it was time to step back and give herself a chance to express her own artistry. “The last few years were tough. . . . I needed a quiet contemplative time.” She described her studio as a mess, but it merely shows the evidence of an active, creative mind at work. There are new wax sculptures, drawings, and some of her older water-themed sculptures and photo narrative works with pebbled glass, which she continues to work on from her earlier career.

    Her latest pieces were inspired by a residency at the American Academy in Rome in 2009. Struck by the figurative statuary fragments in evidence around practically every corner of the ancient city, she found contemporary relevance in their disconnectedness. She photographed these fragments from several sides. On the computer she layered them and then produced composite drawings, attempting to capture their three-dimensionality all at once. The resulting works are less Cubist than Expressionistic and became inspiration for works she carved in wax.

    This was a breakthrough for Ms. Rychlak, whose earlier sculptures were somewhat mired in allusions to harder edged midcentury modern design. “I wanted to loosen up a bit, be more free-flowing.” She decided to use wax as a medium and to keep things interesting, she inserted metal objects into the blocks to create obstacles that she would have to navigate in realizing her vision for the piece. While she prefers the texture and malleability of beeswax, she found that paraffin’s own brittleness better expressed the brittleness of her source material.

    Taking the operation of chance one step further in one of these objects, she mounted a wax piece on a stand and left it in a sunny spot in her studio over the summer while she was away. The resulting molten work, “Katsura,” resembles a Japanese wig on a stand, but also carries associations to ancient victory statues.

    With a number of conflicting undercurrents in the various series she has worked on, it is no surprise that the artists she has gathered for LongHouse share no obvious visual commonality. Instead, she said in the catalogue essay that they share “a tenuous connection to a web of historical tenets.” Seen together, she said last week, “the oppositions and contradictions in their work accumulate,” something she finds as compelling as the similarities would be.

    She was interested in midcareer artists, and Dore Ashton, who nominated her for LongHouse’s exhibition committee, said that the group wanted to show younger artists after a focus on well-established or regional artists. “If they happened to be East End artists, great, if not, then that was okay too.”

    Coming up with a group that would look well together and outside was challenging. “When you show outdoors it’s always a surprise. You’re always fearful that what you see in the studio or gallery setting will look minuscule on a big lawn with a huge sky.”

    Instead, she said, four of the six works she chose from artists including Mr. Gaman, Jene Highstein, Anne Chu, Ronald Bladen, Judith Shea, and Daniel Wiener look larger.

    They will join the more familiar work of Sol LeWitt, Yoko Ono, Willem de Kooning, Toshiko Takaezu, Dale Chihuly, Lynda Benglis, Peter Voulkos, and Miquel Barcelo that are on permanent display.

    Bladen, who died in 1988, was a pioneering Minimalist, who kept his expressiveness and the human form as inspiration. Mr. Highstein saw Bladen’s sculpture in a 1960s sculpture show and took its gestural qualities further into post-Minimalism. Mr. Gaman is also a descendant of this stylistic family with iron and steel globes that both imitate and somewhat challenge the stricter tenets of Minimalism. In her essay, Ms. Rychlak said there may be other shared allusions to metaphysics and Japanese gardens.

    Mr. Wiener’s work is no less abstract, but more “free-flowing and organic,” longing for a grass base rather than the more hard-edged gravel on the site. “They’re very fanciful,” Ms. Rychlak said at her house. “No one quite knows what to make of them. . . . You feel like you’re getting a glimpse inside his brain.” She said that children will appreciate his “big alien mushroom forms.”

    The female artists in the show work in a figurative tradition. Ms. Shea will show a bronze piece from a series inspired by Sept. 11, 2001, called “Idol,” which casts “a strange golden glow that changes with the light.” Ms. Chu’s “Maranao Man” was inspired by Southeast Asian guardian figures, but also reminds Ms. Rychlak of the Greek god Pan or the Green Man, a pagan deity of vegetation and growth appropriate to the surroundings at LongHouse.

Also at LongHouse

    Another exhibition on view simultaneously with “Diversities of Sculpture/Derivations from Nature” in the LongHouse pavilion will be “Accumulations: NOW,” a group of craft works by Anni Albers, Olga de Amaral, Junichi Arai, Peter Collingwood, Helena Hernmark, Sheila Hicks, Chunghie Lee, Dorothy Liebes, Ed Rossbach, Kay Sekimachi, Ethel Stein, and Lenore Tawney. They will include furniture and objects in fiber and clay.

    Both exhibitions premiere at LongHouse’s season opening on Saturday and will be on view through Oct. 6. Tickets to the opening of the gardens beginning at 2 and the reception from 5 to 7 p.m. are $10. Members get in free.

This season, LongHouse Reserve will also launch INstore, an online and retail museum store based on the grounds. It will feature unique items for house and garden from around the world, culled and cultivated by Jack Lenor Larsen. Sales will benefit the reserve.

Guild Hall’s Members Show

    On Saturday from 5 to 6 p.m., Guild Hall will have a free opening reception for its 74th annual artist members exhibition. The show will remain on view through June 9.

    Lilly Wei, an independent curator, essayist, and critic who writes regularly for Art in America and is a contributing editor at ARTnews, will serve as guest juror. She will award prizes such as best in show, best representational painting, best abstract painting, best sculpture, best work on paper, best mixed media, best photograph, and numerous honorable mention citations.

    Michelle Klein, a curatorial assistant at Guild Hall, organized the show, Christina Mossaides Strassfield, the museum’s director and chief curator, will supervise the installation. Select works will be available for sale.

Harnicks Outside

     “The Outdoor Museum” is a group of photographs taken by Margery Harnick and included in a book of the same title with poems by Sheldon Harnick, a selection of which will be on view at Guild Hall’s Boots Lamb Education Center opening Saturday from 4 to 6 p.m. through July 29.

     The couple, who have had a second home in East Hampton for decades are typically known for other mediums. Margery is a painter and actress who has taken up photography relatively recently. Sheldon is a famous Broadway lyricist, who received a Pulitzer Prize for the musical “Fiorello!” and a Tony Awards for such musicals  as “Fiddler on the Roof.”

   The exhibit will feature, as the book’s subtitle states, “not your usual images of New York” and will include some 15 works with accompanying verse. It is an unexamined view of the city that is by turns gritty, graceful, melancholy, and romantic.

Birth of Feminist Art

    Gail Levin, a scholar and curator whose most recent book was a well-received biography of Lee Krasner, will speak about “1960s Los Angeles and the Birth of Feminist Art” on Saturday at 6:30 p.m. at the Parrish Art Museum.

    Ms. Levin will discuss how the all-male scene at the Ferus Gallery, antiwar protests, demonstrations against a curator who showed no women’s work at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and conflicts over the expression of sexuality in art gave rise to the feminist art movement in Los Angeles. The author of “Becoming Judy Chicago,” Ms. Levin will draw upon conversations with those who were there, such as Eleanor Antin, Chuck Arnoldi, Larry Bell, Billy Al Bengston, Vija Celmins, Mark di Suvero, Henry Hopkins, Allan Kaprow, Arlene Raven, and Judy Chicago.

    Ms. Levin is a distinguished professor of art history, American studies, and women’s studies at Baruch College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and is the acknowledged authority on the American realist painter Edward Hopper.

    The lecture is presented in conjunction with the Southampton museum’s show “EST-3: Southern California in New York — Los Angeles Art From the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection.” Tickets cost $5 for members, $10 for nonmembers.

“Realism/Abstraction”

    The Crazy Monkey Gallery in Amagansett will present the work of Beth Barry and Joyce Silver in “Realism/Abstraction,” opening tomorrow.

    Ms. Barry will supply the abstraction. She studied painting at Connecticut College and the Pratt Institute and works as an art therapist. Her landscapes have been likened to Milton Avery’s. Ms. Silver, who has been a psychotherapist and a fabric designer, attended Cooper Union and the University of New Mexico. She paints in a figurative style.

    Artwork by Lance Corey, Jim Hayden, Jana Hayden, Wilhelmina Howe, Cathy Hunter, June Kaplan, Diane Marxe, Daniel Schoenheimer, Ellyn Tucker, and Mark E. Zimmerman will also be on view.

    A reception will be held on Saturday from 5 to 7 p.m. The show will be on view through May 28.

“Seven Deadly Sins”

    The Grenning Gallery in Sag Harbor will open “Tonalism, Trompe l’Oeil, and the Seven Deadly Sins” on Saturday with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m. It features the art of Kevin Sanders, Colin Berry, and Chad Fisher along with Stephen Bauman, Melissa Franklin, Jimmy Sanders, and Thomas Shelford.

    According to the gallery, the show continues a long American fascination with tonalism, which often depicts landscapes at dawn or twilight with some evidence of human presence, and trompe-l’oeil paintings while showcasing Mr. Fisher’s bronze sculptures, “The Seven Deadly Sins.”

    The beauty of nature will contrast with the beastliness of humanity in this show, which is on view through June 3.

   Is it possible that someone born a century ago could have upended the conventions of painting so much that his work is just as relevant to today’s artists as it was some 65 years ago when it was first painted?

    Few can claim such an impact, but one artist who continues to challenge, confound, and set the benchmark for absolute expressive abstraction well after his death is Springs’s own Jackson Pollock. Whether he is ignored, contemplated, aped, mocked, or appropriated, artists who have followed him have had no choice but to react in some way to his work.

    “The Persistence of Pollock,” opening today at the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, addresses the ways in which artists of his time and after have reckoned with his legacy.

    Bobbi Coller, the chairwoman of the Pollock-Krasner House advisory board, and Helen A. Harrison, the director of the house and study center, served as co-curators of the show. Ms. Coller writes in the catalogue essay that “when Pollock first started to exhibit his singular and revolutionary poured paintings, he caused an earthquake that shattered the syntax of visual language, destabilized fundamental expectations of how a painting should be made, and liberated future generations of artists.”

    It wasn’t just the work that made him an intractable part of the American artistic imagination, but his persona as well. The swashbuckling, womanizing, fireplace-pissing, cantankerous drunkard, who was tamed for a time by his wife, Lee Krasner — who brought him the sobriety and space to have the breakthroughs we so celebrate — is still the Pollock legend most prevalent in people’s memories. While Krasner tried to quell the myths in the legend, they were in the end too powerfully irresistible to anyone who wanted to believe the tortured-artist stereotype was true.

    As the curators point out, both art and persona combined to inspire “numerous creative responses in many forms: musical compositions, poems, novels, choreography, performance art, a superb film with Ed Harris, and a one-act play by his friend B.H. Friedman.”

    For the purposes of this show, it is the visual artists of this and the prior century who will be presented. Expected names like Pollock’s friend Alfonso Ossorio and artists known for appropriation or transgression such as Mike Bidlo and Vic Muniz join the unexpected. Some of the more surprising artists include Janine Antoni, whose work typically involves elements of performance that can, in this instance, be likened to action painting, and Norman Rockwell, surely one of the most conservative artists of his day. In 1962, Rockwell transformed his studio into a space where he too could crouch over a canvas and splatter his paint for a Saturday Evening Post cover called “The Connoisseur.”

    The inclusion of Lee Ufan, a Korean who moved to Japan in 1956, is indicative of how Pollock’s work infiltrated even Eastern cultures, influencing both the Japanese Gutai Art Association and Mr. Lee’s Mono-ha movement. Ms. Coller noted in the essay that Mr. Lee’s piece in the show “Pushed-Up Ink” is the result of pressing an ink-filled brush against paper in a way that “creates a rhythm that is both intoxicating and expansive.”

    Others who join in the homages and challenges to the Oedipal father figure include Robert Arneson, Lynda Benglis, Arnold Chang, Francois Fiedler, Joe Fig, Red Grooms, and Ray Johnson.

    The exhibition will be on view through July 28.

Primo Levi Tribute

    The Montauk Library will offer a free presentation of “But When We Started Singing . . .” on Saturday at 7:30 p.m.

    Robert Spiotto, the artistic director of community arts programs at Hofstra University, will be the sole performer in this tribute to Primo Levi, an Italian-Jewish author who died in 1987. Levi was a novelist, essayist, and poet who was best known for his recountings of his imprisonment at Auschwitz during World War II. The event will commemorate the 25th anniversary of his death and International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

‘Tempest’ Fund-Raiser

    The Green Theatre Collective is in the process of raising money for its outdoor production of William Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” at Quail Hill Farm in July. The theater company’s goal is to raise $10,000 by May 1 through Fractured Atlas, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping arts groups raise money for their projects. Raising money through the Fractured Atlas site allows for contributions to the group to be tax-deductible.

    The collective’s goal is to present theater productions in outdoor spaces with a minimal ecological footprint. Its fund-raising Web site is fracturedatlas.org/s/ campaign/600.

Bay Street Benefit

    Liza Minelli will give a special performance as part of the Bay Street Theatre’s first Honors Benefit at 6 p.m. on April 30 at the Manhattan Penthouse on lower Fifth Avenue in New York City. The proceeds will support the theater’s programs.

    Joy Behar, Adrianne Cohen, and John Downing will be honored. Susie Essman from the “Curb Your Enthusiasm” television series and Richard Kind, a Bay Street board member, will be presenters.

     Tickets can be purchased through Mary Ellen DiPrisco at the theater.

Political Documentary

    On Saturday at 8 p.m., the Hamptons Take 2 Documentary Film Festival will screen “Patriocracy,” an hourlong film about partisanship run amok in Washington, D.C., and why it has brought lawmaking to a standstill.

    Those interviewed for the piece include senators, representatives, journalists, pundits, and academics. They will describe the problems and offer some solutions.

    A discussion led by Ken Rudin, NPR’s political editor (who appears in the film), and Brian Malone, the producer and director, will follow the screening. The presentation coincides with the New York State presidential primaries on Tuesday. A $15 donation will be requested at the door.

Chamber Players

    The Stony Brook Contemporary Chamber Players and their director, Eduardo Leandro, will play at the Southampton Cultural Center on Saturday at 7 p.m. as part of the center’s chamber music series.

    The program will explore European and American contemporary music of the last 50 years and will include a selection of works from the 2011-12 season by composers such as Luciano Berio, Steve Reich, Pierre Boulez, and more.

    Tickets cost $20, or $10 for students, and will be sold online at scc-arts.org and at the door.

Rooftop Vegetables

    On Sunday, Christian Duvernois and Jacob Lange of CD Gardens will present “From Versailles to the New York City Rooftop: A Vegetable Garden Odyssey,” from 1 to 3 p.m. at Bridge Gardens in Bridgehampton.

    The two are working on a history of the kitchen garden and will examine the cultural and political history of kitchen gardens.

    The lecture is $15 and is free for Bridge Garden members. Reservations are required by calling the Peconic Land Trust office or e-mailing events@peconiclandtrust.org. The gardens will also be open that day.

Parrish Spring Fling

    Parrish Art Museum’s annual Spring Fling celebration and fund-raiser will be held on Saturday evening from 7:30 to 11.

    The event, co-chaired by Susan Davis and Nancy Hardy, will include live entertainment by Todd Barrie Music, and hors d’oeuvres donated by Sant Ambroeus. Guests have been invited to enjoy an open bar with Glacier Potato Vodka martinis, wines from Niche Import Company, and Southampton Publick House ales.

    Luxury items up for bid during a silent auction include such things as a cocktail party for 100 guests, golf play at the Bridgehampton Golf Club and the National Golf Links in Tuckahoe, V.I.P. passes to the Hampton Classic horse show, designer handbags and jewelry, and gift certificates, among other things. The museum is also offering a raffle for two dinner tickets to its July Midsummer Party, a $2,000 value. Anyone can enter the raffle, whether they plan to attend the Spring Fling or not; the $50 raffle tickets can be purchased by phone or online at parrishart.org.

    Tickets for the Spring Fling are $150 or $100 for museum members. All tickets will increase to $175 at the door. The money raised will help support the museum, its exhibitions, lectures, films, performances, concerts, and classes, as well as its new 34,500-square-foot facility, expected to open this fall.

   On Saturday, the East Hampton Historical Society will present a daylong illustrated seminar on famous and infamous antiques fakes and forgeries with Charles F. Hummel.

   Mr. Hummel, an expert on antiques and American decorative arts, is the author of “With Hammer in Hand: The Dominy Craftsmen of East Hampton.” He has documented the Dominy family as well as the history of East Hampton and is the retired senior director of the Winterthur Museum in Delaware, one of the most important collections of American decorative arts.

   After handling and examining hundreds of objects, Mr. Hummel has seen pretty much everything, from the truly excellent to the merely mediocre and the outrageously faked. He will share his knowledge with eager collectors and casual enthusiasts so that they, too, can be antiques detectives in their own encounters with dealers and merchants. He will discuss the details that define each period as well as the materials that were available then and the construction techniques of the time. He regards his programs on fakes as consumer protection exercises, but he relates the information with an ear for the narrative, offering stories while describing the tools needed to foil a fake.

   An early acquisition misstep as a curatorial assistant at the Winterthur in the 1950s led him to a career of calling out fakes and reproductions to prevent the same thing from happening to someone else. He helped put together a study collection of inauthentic objects, including furniture, silver, ceramics, and practically every other type of object possible. It has grown through vetting of the Winterthur’s own collections and acquiring the best of the impostors to help educate Winterthur students, collectors, and the general public in lectures and workshops. The items also serve as a reference for members of the museum’s staff.

    In addition to his educational efforts, Mr. Hummel has also been asked regularly over the years to vet antiques fairs and shows to ensure that the attendees are seeing only authentic works. In this capacity, he was associated with the Delaware Antiques Show for several decades.

    “Fakes and Forgeries: An In-Depth Journey Into the Intriguing Field of Antiques Authentication” will take place from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Clinton Academy. Registration is $60 and includes a box lunch. The proceeds will benefit the society and its programs. Space is limited. Registration in advance has been suggested and can be made by calling the society.

   Fred Melamed was 22 in 1978, the first time he played the title role in Anton Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya,” which he is now reprising in an innovative and daring production directed by Stephen Hamilton at the John Drew Theater at Guild Hall for a limited run next month.

    Mr. Melamed had graduated from Hampshire College the previous summer, where, as a freshman, he’d joined the music department.

    “I was trying to get girls,” he said Friday during a break from rehearsal. He quickly realized that at Hampshire, while there were a lot of male competitors for women in the music department, the competition was much less fierce across the hall in the theater department.

    After this whimsical beginning, four years later he was accepted into Yale Drama School.

    “Right away when you got there, your first year, they’d give you a big role like this or King Lear, something you couldn’t possibly handle. Everybody was a big fish in whatever college they came from, they were Mr. Theater wherever they came from.” By giving their rookie students classic, epic roles right out of the gate, Yale made sure that “the big fish” learned just how deep the dramatic ocean is.

    Mr. Melamed remembers about playing the part: “I could see what was beautiful about it, but a lot of it was distant to me.”

    “Now it’s quite different,” said Mr. Malamed, who will turn 56 during the play’s run at Guild Hall. “Now it’s a great challenge, but I take it with relish because it is so beautiful. It is so filled with real feeling. He’s a character very familiar to me, being a Jew and Eastern European, because he complains all the time. He complains about everything.”

    After Yale, Mr. Melamed worked at the Guthrie Theater, then joined the fledgling Shakespeare and Company. He became a regular in Woody Allen films, among others, but he found his true niche, or so it seemed at the time, in the idiosyncratic world of the voice-over.

    Mr. Melamed has a deep, layered, rich voice, one that has the sound of comfort, and authority, and it quickly became the voice for major American corporations in the world of television.

    It was a lucrative world for Mr. Melamed and his wife, Leslee, a graphic artist. They had an apartment in the city and a weekend house in Montauk.

    Then, two events occurred that altered the trajectory of their lives, and Mr. Melamed’s career.

    Nine years ago, Ms. Melamed gave birth to twin boys, Alec and Lee. When the boys were 6 months old, they were diagnosed as being autistic.

    The parents began their search for a school for the boys, which led them to the Child Development Center of the Hamptons in East Hampton, which specializes in nurturing gifted and challenged children. The Melameds decided to make their Montauk house their year-round home.

    At the same time, Mr. Melamed’s bread and butter, the commercial voice-over world, changed. What had been in vogue for so long, the “voice of authority,” was no longer in demand. Instead, advertisers wanted “real”­­ voices, the guy or gal in the street. It was a sound alien to Mr. Melamed.

    Out of work, he took stock of his situation. It was early 2009. The family had enough money, he realized, to last one year before they would be forced to make radical decisions. Mr. Melamed decided to use that year to abandon the commercial world and return to acting.

    Then, one day, he received a call from Joel Coen, who, with his brother Ethan, had just written the movie “A Serious Man.” They wanted him to play the villain. He accepted the part, and the film went on to be nominated an Oscar for best picture. He has been working nonstop ever since.

    He is a regular on Larry David’s “Curb Your Enthusiasim,” as well as CBS’s “The Good Wife.” He has several films due for release in the coming months, including “The Dictator,” with Sacha Baron Cohen and Sir Ben Kingsley, “Fred,” with Elliot Gould, and “In a World . . .” directed by Lake Bell, in which he plays, ironically, a voice-over actor.

    But over the years, “Uncle Vanya” — both the play and the character — has remained with him.

    Stephen Hamilton, director, drama coach, and co-founder of the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor, shared the same obsession. The two men met when Mr. Melamed did a reading at Guild Hall with Alec Baldwin.

    “I’d been working on ‘Uncle Vanya’ for six, eight months. When I met Fred, I thought, this is a great opportunity,” he said on Sunday over the phone.

    Mr. Hamilton’s vision of the play is inspired in part by the Louis Malle film, “Vanya on 42nd Street,” made after three years of rehearsal with the producer Andre Gregory.

    Mr. Hamilton recalled seeing Mr. Gregory and Wallace Shawn, who was in the film, interviewed on “The Charlie Rose Show.” Mr. Shawn spoke of being in the back of the house of a Broadway theater while onstage two actors did a sexy, intimate scene in loud stage voices.

    “Wallace said, ‘This is crap. This is bullshit. This is not theater.’ ”

    It is Mr. Hamilton’s vision to bring the audience onto the stage, to share the intimacies of the Chekhovian classic. There will be only 55 audience members per show, all seated on the stage, with the actors.

    “It’s a very small audience, and they’re so close,” Mr. Melamed said. “It’s like film acting, they’re right on top of us. Any falseness is immediately detectable so the whole thing has to be quite internal and quite real.”

    Mr. Hamilton is also acting in the play, playing Dr. Astrov. Mr. Hamilton acknowledges the challenge of acting and directing at the same time, a tradition that was commonplace in the theater world of the 19th century.

    During rehearsal on Friday, in a scene between Astrov, Sonya, played by Alicia St. Louis, and Yelena, played by Rachel Feldman, the quiet, truthful intensity of the actors made each moment seem like magic, to be embraced and savored, yet, at the same time, seductively conversational and inviting.

    At the end of a particularly delicate scene, Mr. Hamilton began to speak, then paused. “The truth about directing has come out,” he said, laughing. “The less I say, the better I am.”

    The actors were where they needed to be.

    Mr. Hamilton’s main challenge was assembling the cast. They have been working on the piece whenever their busy careers allow them to. After meeting Mr. Melamed, Mr. Hamilton felt that he’d found his Vanya, and asked him to do a reading with the cast.

    In Mr. Melamed’s mind, he was just sitting in, because he had Ms. Bell’s “In a World . . .” coming up. “But I really wanted to do the play,” he said.

    Then Ms. Bell’s production schedule was suddenly moved up, and the time slot needed for Mr. Melamed to do Vanya became available.

    Mr. Hamilton quickly assembled the rest of the cast, mostly using actors he’d already been working with on the production, some of whom were known to him from the past.

    Such an experimental production would not be possible without enthusiastic producers who accept the production’s shelf life. About the possible future of the production past Guild Hall, Mr. Hamilton said, “I see it more as a stand-alone production, having its life here.”

    Despite being written in 1897, the play is amazingly relevant. Astrov, for example, speaks of the deforestation of Russia with the same passion as a contemporary environmentalist trying to save the wetlands.

    Mr. Melamed said, “This is a play about people stuck together on a country estate who have deep love affairs with one another, and great hatreds for one another, and all those things are based on not the reality of who the other person is, but needs in the individuals that fuel these passions.”

    “And that’s why it is still more contemporary and modern than anything you’ll see on reality television or most movies, for that matter.”

    “Chekov was the first dramatist to put into practice the idea that the thing that motivates people in life is not the words but what is beneath the words,” Mr. Melamed said.

    “Astrov says in the play, ‘You know how you’re walking through the woods at night, you see a light far away from you, because you move towards the light, even a distant light, you don’t feel the pain of the brambles as they scratch your face, the light keeps you moving forward.’ Well, that’s the way these characters are. They know they are moving towards something.”

    Mr. Melamed reflected on the path that brought him to this production, on his wife and his two sons, who are now thriving in their caring environment.

    “It’s a rare thing to get a second act in life, a second act in your career. I feel grateful to have gotten this chance,” Mr. Melamed said.

    Tickets are $25 for the general public and $10 for students. Those interested can find them online at guildhall.org or theatermania.com, by calling 866-811-4111, or at the Guild Hall box office starting May 3.

    The limited engagement runs from May 3 through May 20. In addition to Mr. Hamilton, Mr. Melamed, Ms. Feldman, and Ms. St. Louis, the cast also includes Janet Sarno, Herb Foster, Delphi Harrington, Daniel Becker, and Dominick DeGaetano.

   Initially, it might be difficult to reconcile Dan Flavin’s Expressionist tendencies with his use of the quite literally linear form of long, colored fluorescent lightbulbs to express himself for most of his creative life. Yet a new exhibition of his drawings at the Morgan Library demonstrates that his stylistic influences were varied and well outside of the Minimalist milieu with which he is primarily associated.

    For Flavin, who lived in Wainscott and Bridgehampton for much of his later life until his death in 1996, it pays to remember that it was not just the lights and mounts that were a part of the work, but the way the light moved and dissolved the walls behind it, which was the full realization of his vision. While the straight bulbs were structurally and rigidly linear, the light that emanated from them was broadcast in waves that could bend and flow in ways way beyond the stiffness of their source.

    The artist was a native New Yorker who was born in 1933, early enough to be a second-generation Abstract Expressionist, but late enough to join those who rebelled against that previous generation. He appears to have straddled both worlds, at least initially, but even in his most fully realized Minimalist works, his painterly use of light could be likened to painters like Mark Rothko.

    In his youth he trained for the priesthood, but then left to enlist in the Air Force during the Korean War and studied art during his tour. He came back to New York and studied at the Hans Hofmann School before enrolling at Columbia University to study painting and drawing.

    The appeal of Expressionism to the artist is made manifest from the earliest drawings on view in the gallery: beautiful flowing watercolors, quick powerful sketches of artist icons such as Paul Cezanne and Constantin Brancusi, and landscapes in charcoal. A blue grease pencil study of trees is a whirlwind of energy with agitated lines transforming the trees into manic abstractions that resemble flapping birds as well as objects.

    Similarly expressive, but employing the Minimalist instinct that would balance his artwork throughout his life, is the drawing of Cezanne, a crisp and confident work employing some of the artist’s own blocky-ness in the beard and shadowing around the face, in a double homage.

    One of the show-stopping moments in the exhibit is a work dedicated to Vincent van Gogh. “Vincent at Auvers” is a collection of gestural watercolor and ink drawings on paper that have been collected in a sketchbook. The works have a bold monumentality that transcends their small format and are as powerful as many of the best works of a previous generation.

    Some of these early attempts also incorporate text. In the van Gogh book, there is an inscription based on an unsent letter found with the artist after his suicide: “As for my work, I do it at my life’s risk, and half my reason has foundered in it.” In another series he quotes the words of James Joyce in seven poem drawings with watercolor swirls as illustration.

    After these atypical works, the show moves quickly into the preparatory drawings for the artist’s earliest light sculptures. At first, they were complicated contraptions: boxes in which to set regular and florescent lightbulbs. Eventually, they evolved into the diagonal works that would define the moment of his artistic maturity. There are several examples in drawing and one example in light form.

    These build into more complicated arrangements and schemes for full gallery installations. Sketches for one of his seminal conceptual works, “Monuments to V. Tatlin,” are also on view from his notebooks. Some are little sketches that were part of Flavin’s daily practice. They were made on 6-by-4-inch pages he kept in notebooks he carried with him. Others were executed on more regular 8-by-11-inch pieces of paper.

    Later efforts were completed after the sculptures were realized and were used instead to document those works. They would be given to the collector who purchased the sculpture. Eventually, many became separated from their original works and started to be prized as works in their own right. Flavin himself did not execute them, however, most on view were done by members of his family and have a very crisp geometric efficiency, more mechanical than artistic.

    Concurrently, however, Flavin was still exploring his own expressive needs in landscape and seascape drawings he made along the Hudson and then on the South Fork. These images of sails and trees continued through the 1970s and 1980s and up through the end of his life. Often no more than one or two lines, he appears to have learned from his light compositions how economical one can be with illustrative elements. He also kept up with his drawings of artists, this time using his friends such as Donald Judd as subjects.

    In the last gallery of the show, there is a selection of drawings he collected, including a number of Hudson landscapes by John Frederick Kensett. But there are also Modernists such as Jean Arp and Piet Mondrian. At the preview for the show, the curator Isabelle Dervaux noted that the condition of drawings did not matter to him. Pointing to a badly damaged Kensett, she said it was the image that mattered. For an institution dedicated to the preservation of drawings, she noted that it was highly unusual to hang works with severe damage such as foxing or mildew. Still, their presence does add to the overall understanding of the artist and what made him tick.

    The exhibition will be on view through July 1.

Beethoven’s Beloved

    Guild Hall and the Hamptons International Film Festival will present “Immortal Beloved,” a film about Beethoven and his mystery love, to whom he wrote a letter just prior to his death. Alec Baldwin will host and will discuss the film with Bob Balaban after the screening.

    Bernard Rose brings the viewer into the mind of Beethoven with his masterful portrait of the deaf composer. Gary Oldman is the star and the music in the film was conducted by George Solti and performed by the London Symphony Orchestra with Yo-Yo Ma and Murray Perahia.

    The event will take place at Guild Hall on Saturday at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $22 and $20 for Guild Hall members and may be purchased at GuildHall.org or at the box office three hours prior to curtain.

Concert at Watermill

    The Watermill Center will present “Congruence,” a work-in-progress concert tomorrow at 6:30 p.m.

    The piece was composed by Tristan Perich in residence with Argeo Ascani, a saxophonist. It is a new piece for baritone saxophone and electronic sound. Mr. Ascani will play the saxophone part.

    According to the center, “ ‘Congruence’ represents an evolution of Perich’s sound to the gritty lower frequencies, where tone breaks down and the electronics take on a visceral quality, complementing the physical presence of the saxophone’s guttural voice.”

    The event includes a talk on the science behind 1-bit audio, which is the electronic component of the concert, and will be followed by a Q and A and a reception with the artists. Reservations are required and can be made at tristanandargeo.eventbrite.com.

Seeking New Voices

    The Choral Society of the Hamptons is looking for new members to join up for its summer concert. Singers with experience in choral music or those who can read music and want to give choral singing a try have been invited to audition on May 7.

    Rehearsals for the summer concert will begin at 7:30 p.m. on Monday at the Bridgehampton Presbyterian Church. The concert will be on July 7 at Most Holy Trinity Catholic Church’s Parish Hall. The program will feature the Haydn Lord Nelson Mass and include a Handel Coronation Anthem and an orchestral overture.

    Auditions can be scheduled through the society’s executive director, Veronika Semsakova, at execdir@choralsociety ofthehamptons.org. Interested singers are also welcome to attend the first rehearsal and schedule an audition at that time. Further information about auditions and general information can be obtained at choralsocietyofthehamptons.org.

Gatsby’s Long Island

    Natalie Naylor, a New York Humanities Council speaker in the humanities, will discuss “Gatsby’s West Egg and the ‘Slender Riotous Island’ in the 1920s”  at the Montauk Library at 3:30 p.m. on Sunday.

    F. Scott Fitzgerald began writing “The Great Gatsby” during the 18 months he lived in Great Neck, which became his West Egg. It was Nick Carraway, who called our landmass “that slender riotous island.” Fitzgerald immortalized the Gold Coast mansions on the North Shore, the Great Neck crowd, the old money in Sands Point, which was East Egg, and the Valley of Ashes in Corona.

    While much of Long Island was still farmland, its beaches and airstrips became major attractions, while rum-running and even Ku Klux Klan parades gave the festive atmosphere a dark side.

    Focusing on the historical reality, including aspects featured in “The Great Gatsby,” this presentation also examines the mythologizing of history and memory in Fitzgerald’s novel.

Hamptons Look Wanted

    Those who have the Hamptons look are invited to apply to join the cast of “Royal Pains,” which will begin filming soon on Long Island.

    Grant Wilfley Casting said it is searching for “people with the affluent look and the wardrobe to portray the high-society Hamptons elite.” The casting agent is encouraging those interested to send recent clear photos in their best “summer-fabulous Hamptons” look.

    Roles up for consideration include socialites, model types, ladies who lunch, beachgoers, yachtsmen, golfers, tennis players, owners of ultra high-end cars, bankers, brokers, doctors, nurses, orderlies, E.M.T.s, and attractive partygoers. Submissions are being accepted from Sag/Aftra union members and non-union new faces.

    Those interested should e-mail the photos and include in the body of the e-mail the name, best contact number, union status, height and weight, and age range (within five years of actual age), and which role is of interest. Those with high-end vehicles should include the color, year, make, and model of the car. All materials should go to this address: RPS4@gwcnyc.

‘Vagina Monologues’

    “The Vagina Monologues” will be presented on Sunday at 5 p.m. at Incarnation Lutheran Church of the Hamptons on Montauk Highway in Bridgehampton to benefit the Retreat women’s shelter.

    The play is based on Eve Ensler’s interviews with more than 200 women of all ages and stages of life. The piece celebrates women’s sexuality and strength.

     Tickets are $20. They can be purchased in advance by cash or check by contacting lruhl@fegs.org. Limited tickets will be available at the door.

Latin Guitar Works

    “Works by Contemporary Latin American Composers,” a concert by Francisco Roldan, a guitarist, will take place on Saturday from 7:30 to 9 p.m. at the Montauk Library.

    Mr. Roldan, a Colombian musician educated at the Mannes School of Music who has performed widely abroad and in this country, will play for the first time at the library. A member of the ZigZag Quartet, he is on the faculty of the Mannes College of Music Extension and Preparatory Divisions and also teaches at Lehman College of the City University of New York.