The fourth annual Hamptons Take 2 Documentary Film Festival, which highlights work by local filmmakers, will open on Friday, Nov. 18, with a tribute to the filmmaker Richard Leacock at Guild Hall from 5:30 to 9:30 p.m.

    The evening begins with a cocktail reception, and then features two of Mr. Leacock’s documentaries, “Happy Mother’s Day,” and “Crisis.” D.A. Pennebaker, a fellow filmmaker, will lead a panel discussion on Mr. Leacock’s work afterward along with his children, Victoria Leacock Hoffman and Robert Leacock, also filmmakers, and Pam Wise.

    On Nov. 19, the festival moves to the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor, where screenings will run from 11 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. and on Sunday, the whole thing will be repeated at the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center.

    The Bay Street schedule offers a marathon of screenings beginning with Student Circle Films, three shorts by Long Island high school students at 11 a.m. “Happy Mother’s Day” will be shown again from 11:30 a.m. to noon, followed by “Inside the Perfect Circle: The Odyssey of Joel Thome” by Chris Pepino from noon to 1:15 p.m. The afternoon brings Cat Del Buono’s short “Take My Hair” at 1:15; Richard Kotuk’s “Travis,” about a 10-year-old boy with AIDS, at 1:45; “Rescued Twice: The History and Revival of the Amagansett Life-Saving Station” by Eileen Torpey at 3, Madeline Amgott’s “Esteban Vicente: Portrait of an Artist,” at 3:30 p.m., and “Suzanne Farrell: Elusive Muse” by Anne Belle, from 4:30 to 6:30.

    “Quarry” by Richard P. Rogers, a brief look at teenagers who hung around the Quincy Quarry in the early 1970s, will be shown at 8 p.m., and finally, “The Windmill Movie” by Alexander Olchs, about Richard P. Rogers of Wainscott, who was working on a film of his life when he died in 2001, will be shown from 8:15 to 9:45. 

    Ms. Del Buono, a part-time East Hampton resident, talked last week about “Take My Hair,” about growing her hair and cutting it off for her cousin’s wife, who was undergoing chemotherapy. “Hair to her is incredibly important. I figured I could do something for her by giving her my hair,” she said. She followed the hair from her head to a wigmaker’s shop. “I’d heard lots of the hair people donated gets thrown out, and then I heard that my cousin’s wife had cancer,” she said. “I found a wigmaker, which is hard in the U.S. It’s about $5,000 to make a wig. I found a guy who did these wigs for $500, specifically for chemo patients.”

    While interviewing the wigmaker, Ms. Del Buono found out he had cancer, and that making wigs for other people helped sustain him. “He kept the price down because of his chemo patients; no one else was doing that,” she said. The film took a turn when the wigmaker fell ill. “I wasn’t sure what to do with the film; it didn’t have an ending. But it is an ending. You can’t ever guess what will happen when it comes to cancer. It’s unpredictable. It’s not always the happy ending,” Ms. Del Buono said.

    In “Inside the Perfect Circle,” Chris Pepino explored the work of the Grammy-winning modern composer Joel Thome and his return to music following a stroke in 1991 that left him paralyzed on the left side of his body. Mr. Thome collaborated with Frank Zappa for many years, and composed for the guitarist Steve Vai, and for Pablo Picasso.

    Mr. Pepino followed him to therapy sessions and interviewed his music therapist. “The concert depicted in the film is his first concert in America after several years of working toward rehabilitation,” he said. “It was filmed in New York, and Joel has lived there for years. We’re excited to bring things full circle to show to a New York audience,” he said. Mr. Thome, Mr. Pepino, and Martha Mooke, who performed with the Scorchio Quartet, a string ensemble put together by David Bowie for Mr. Thome’s first return to performing in New York, will field questions after the screening.

    Anne Belle’s “Suzanne Farrell: Elusive Muse” traces another aristic life, that of Ms. Farrell, a ballerina who worked with George Balanchine. The film, which premiered at the New York Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award, was the third in a trilogy of dance films by the late filmmaker. “Anne was very proud of the film, rightfully so,” said Catherine Tambini, co-producer of the film.

    Those who keep up with local news are likely to know something of the background of “Rescued Twice: The History and Revival of the Amagansett Life-Saving Station.” In 1966, the late Joel Carmichael purchased the station for $1 to save it from demolition and to live in. It was donated to East Hampton Town after his death in 2006 and has since been returned to its original 1902 location on Atlantic Avenue. The film interviews the adult Carmichael children, who gave the building to the town, and explores the station’s East End and national significance.

    A day pass for the festival costs $35 and can be purchased at the Bay Street Theatre box office, at baystreet.org, or at the door. An evening pass is $20, for films from 8 to 10 p.m., and is available only at the door. Tickets for the tribute at Guild Hall are $75 and can be had in advance at HT2FF.com, or at the door.

    What’s so funny about peace, love, and easy listening? Randy Parsons, an East Hampton songwriter and guitarist, has released something different: a CD for adults . . . quiet, thoughtful ones.

    The comparison is far from exact, but to these ears, when the plastic starts spinning, “Morning Sky” inevitably conjures the sadly defunct Lowen and Navarro, circa 1993 and “Broken Moon.” (What was it called then? “New folk”?) Not the California duo’s harmonies, no, but the feel of the stuff — mulling past relationships, appreciating unexpected new ones, leave-taking, benign nature peeking over the horizon.

    Mr. Parsons gazes westward, too, in “Lost Along the Way.” Sung by Tim Buppert, it tells of a guy far from home in a Montana valley trying to “eke out a living, land unforgiving, no friends and family here.” His woman comes to visit him, but he doesn’t leave with her, the pull of the landscape taking apart not the strongest of relationships.

    There’s plenty here for seaside locals as well, namely “House by the Sea,” in which the speaker, with a crying need to reach his “humble” getaway, negotiates not only bumper-to-bumper traffic out of New York but also depressing news on the radio and a nagging sense of time wasted in lines — a kind of stillness that brings no calm.

    The players on the disc include Johnny Blood, known for his yeoman guitar work with the Nancy Atlas Project, Lauren Coen, a singer with a touch of Judy Collins but without the grating higher registers, and, most welcome, John Margolis, a bluesy vocalist who knows how to take his time with a song.

    “Morning Sky,” which came out last month, is a cold-weather work. Fall winds blow throughout it; there’s a sense of hunkering down for winter. It’s one for the post-work wind down, to be slipped in while the bottle of Napa Valley cab breathes and the Duraflame log combusts in its own wrapper.

    It’s hectic out there. Relax, you deserve a break.   

    Guild Hall will open three art shows this weekend with a reception on Saturday from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. — exhibits of work by Drew Shiflett and Rafael Ferrer (see related story) and a permanent-collection show.

    Ms. Shiflett’s “constructed drawings” can look like hand-painted fabric because they use handmade paper as their support. She applies graphite, ink, watercolor, and Conte crayon to sections that she then layers and places together. She won top honors at the 2009 Guild Hall Members Exhibition from Jodi Hauptman, a drawings curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City who served as juror for that show.

    She was “intrigued by the way the artist emphasized the material aspects of the work of art . . . the many mediums used, the handmade paper, and the actual putting together of the pieces,” Ms. Hauptman said. “It made me want to see more of this artist’s work.”

    Ms. Shiflett’s work will be on view with Mr. Ferrer’s “Contrabando,” key selections from his work from 1972 to the present with a focus on painting. Esperanza Leon was guest curator for the exhibit. All three shows will be on view through Jan. 16.

    The art exhibits will have a number of public programs associated with them. On Sunday from 2 to 4 p.m., there will be a celebration in Spanish and English called FIESTA! Events include a puppet show, “La Cucarachita Martina,” or “Martina, the Little Roach,” by Teatro SEA of Puerto Rico and New York from 3 to 4 p.m. for children ages 3 to 8, a crafts workshop for children 5 and older at 2:30, and a gallery talk by Mr. Ferrer. The events are free.

    On Nov. 12 at noon, there will be a hand-papermaking workshop with instructors from the Dieu Donné organization, which has its own handmade paper mill. There is a $25 fee for the workshop, $20 for museum members. Each student will have an opportunity to make a sheet of paper and create their own art with it.

    An autumn day, after hard frost, and an early northeaster. An autumn day of Indian summer equal to that other stunner, that miracle, a languorous June afternoon when all is still. And painful. “The present usually hurts” — Blaise Pascal (“Pensées” No. 47).

    Both have freshened lawns, new blues of onion and garlic chives. Houseplants are going out or coming in, turned round entire to be clipped, divided, fed, pots washed and saucers, too. But brown skins falling from tulip bulbs is unique to autumn, as is blue monkshood but not blue autumn crocus, which has its replica in spring. Cold nights echo both seasons. Bucks grind the felt off their antlers on sturdy yew trunks instead of chewing branches. There are late roses like early ones, although they are pinker, redder, and whiter in the later season. There are intimations of things fat and lazy and complete (“Complacencies of the peignoir”).

    But all comparisons cease with the gingkoes. In a day, gold. On another, a fall of gold like the old fairy tale of a princess in a tower with a waterfall of golden hair, like a stairway painted gold or the very air turned mineral. In spring there is manuring. In autumn, fallen foliage does the same.

    The sun grows weaker, its rays more and more slant. “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.” (Miss Dickinson, I believe.) And who was it said something about literature being a mirror dawdling down the road?

    We are finishing the last of the painting at Madoo. Three pale violet chimneys look fine against mocha windows and doors, and what greens we have done are to be called Madoo Green by our supplier, Stark Paints.

    Both spring and autumn are times of great turmoil and change and the other two seasons are rather fixed and predictable. Winter days are winter days, clear, clean, and hard with sound cut off. Summer “. . . is a long road lined with roses and thunder,” wrote James Schuyler.

    It is hard not to be sad, spring and autumn, when nothing quite lasts and everything is thus unreliable. It is the way of renewal and dwindling, heat going on, heat going off. I move houses then. And studios, too. It seems to be the same sort of thing, putting out watering cans and metal vases or storing them once more.

    We always yearn for what is not here. Someone in “The Cherry Orchard,” is it? “I am in mourning for my life!” And it is a question as well as a wail.

    Dawn, dusk, midnight, noon, tides partial and entire, the perpetual earth, warming and cooling. Whether you hear it or not, it is the tree that wins and its fall matters so.

    Every “Seinfeld” fan recalls the episode in which Jerry’s wacky neighbor incorporates himself and takes on a young intern named Darren. Darren’s duties at Kramerica include laundry detail and scheduling high tea with a certain Mr. Newman. We laugh because it’s clever. It doesn’t matter that the kid’s being used, that he’s wasting money on empty credits and ridiculous experiences. Sanity prevails in a neat 22 minutes when his college dean puts a stop to it.

    But what if no one comes to Darren’s aid? What if he’s not really a bit player on a sitcom but a symbol of something real that’s taking place globally right now? The joke is no longer funny, and the laugh track that follows each one of Cosmo’s draconian demands becomes grotesque and more than a bit shameful, which is precisely why Ross Perlin includes dialogue from this episode in a chapter of “Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy.”

    Mr. Perlin, a native of New York City and graduate of Stanford, explores the essence of what it means to be an intern in this impressive muckraking exposé. Who are these people and what exactly do they do? Interns might fetch coffee or do cartwheels in a Mickey Mouse costume. Some write speeches for senators, while others make copies like nobody’s business. Sometimes they’re paid a minimum wage, sometimes not. They’re the privileged children of country club buddies from New Haven, but also that scholarship kid who crashes on friends’ couches while he works for free.

    Interns could be just about anybody and do just about anything, which is why their waters are often so muddied. “The very significance of the word ‘intern’ lies in its ambiguity,” Mr. Perlin explains.

    The author begins his quest by describing a recent visit to Disney World: “The curtain rises . . . interns are everywhere. . . . Even Mickey, Donald, Pluto and the gang — they may well be interns. . . .” Disney has playfully confounded us with its brand of hocus-pocus for generations, yet that’s nothing compared to the way it has completely reimagined the role of the college intern.

    In exchange for the prestige of the Disney name on a résumé, interns “earn their ears” by working completely at the company’s will. “Disney has figured out how to rebrand ordinary jobs in the internship mold,” Mr. Perlin writes, “framing them as part of a structured program . . . without sick days or time off, without grievance procedures, without guarantees of workers’ compensation or protection against harassment or unfair treatment.”

    Despite these harsh working conditions, between 7,000 and 8,000 college students arrive each year at Disney to do the Mouse’s bidding. “We’re there to create magic,” one intern told the Associated Press.

    As Super Bowl-winning quarterbacks continue to flock to Disney World, the same can be said of Chinese nationals. Once Disney’s H.R. team realized the big savings it was enjoying by having a perpetual work force of temporary employees, they decided to go a step further. Based on the federal J-1 Exchange Visitor Program, Disney’s international internship program was born. “Workers brought in from hundreds or thousands of miles away are always easier to control, even more so if the legality of their presence depends entirely on the employer.”

    At least Disney goes through the machinations of a genuine internship for college credit. At the University of Dreams, a 10-year-old company in Redwood City, Calif., there are no real students taking notes simply because there are no professors handing out assignments or grades. “That’s right, you pay ‘U of D’ $1,000 per week to work, which makes college tuition look cheap.” Mr. Perlin reveals how the company makes no effort to ensure its clients a paid internship, which brings up the question of who should actually be paid for their work.

    Unless an internship offers a substantial training program, and many do not, an intern is considered an employee entitled to minimum wage and other protections under the Fair Labor Standards Act. The author wonders why no one’s blowing any whistles, and the answer is quite sobering. The employer-intern relationship hinges on power: contacts, references, and impressive-looking résumés. Should interns start shaking up the workplace, demanding fair pay and treatment, it would completely defeat their purpose. How will they ever make it onto the A team if they don’t prove themselves to be team players?

    The economic impact of all this free labor by willing victims is jaw-dropping. “Using up-to-date, but still conservative figures (500,000 unpaid interns at the 2010 federal minimum wage), the money that organizations save through internships approaches $2 billion annually.”

    A recent national survey revealed that one out of 18 college freshman expects to become an actor, musician, or artist. “This is where ‘the rock-star jobs’ and the glamour internships are — the more glamour is perceived, the more vital the connections are and the less likely it is that pay will ever enter the equation.”

“Intern Nation”

Ross Perlin

Verso, $22.95

    The dreams and desires of young people are as strong as ever, but without financial backing of some kind, how long can they actually pursue these interests? “Perhaps more than ever before, the rich are working and dominating particular industries.” Mr. Perlin interviews a young art history major, “John,” about his interning experience at an auction house to illustrate the point: “. . . one of the interns I was working with was literally royalty. The amount of work she was ready to do was next to nothing. Her father is a customer.”

    This disturbing trend continues in Washington, D.C., where “job creation is preached, not practiced.” One Capitol Hill intern informs Mr. Perlin that out of every 30 interns, 25 of them may be “packed,” an insider term for the children of donors, friends, and important constituents. Interns aren’t paid on the Hill or at the White House, where even President Obama characterizes the experience as “answering the call to service.”

    Despite the scandals between politicos and interns that have rocked the nation, the author maintains that this shameful practice is very much alive and well. According to the veteran political analyst Andrew Sullivan, some Washingtonians simply refer to their interns as “the flesh.”

    Mr. Perlin’s timely book raises many questions about the future of our country. Critics might describe it as one-sided or accuse the author of ax-grinding if it weren’t for the fact that the book is so well written and thoroughly researched. Its message leaves us slightly stunned and more than a bit illuminated. Are interns taking their future into their hands, paying their dues until they’ve earned their way into a chosen field, or are they privileged children being handed something for nothing?

    The answer is both. Yet what does it say about a country whose art, music, film, and politics are fueled almost entirely by the wealthy? Why do the powerful prefer to exploit our young for little to no pay and give handouts to friends of friends rather than mentor our best and brightest?

    Mr. Perlin offers solutions, yet even these hinge on powerful entities finally doing what’s right. Colleges and universities must look out for their charges, keeping a safe distance from the “Wild West of sketchy internships,” and the Department of Labor must enforce the law. The world at large needs to understand that an intern is actually a type of worker and not a student.

    Otherwise, Mr. Perlin suggests, it might be time to act. “A general strike of all interns would show all that they contribute for the first time. Bringing a delicious, low-level chaos to the world’s work. . . .” A low-level chaos, as I complete this review during the month of October in New York City — why does that phrase sound so eerily familiar?

—

    Ross Perlin is a regular visitor to East Hampton, where he has family.

    J. Bryan McGeever, a graduate of Stony Brook Southampton’s M.F.A. program, teaches writing and literature in the New York City public schools. His work has appeared in Thomas Beller’s “Lost and Found: Stories From New York.”

As with others who have chosen the East End as an artistic retreat, Rafael Ferrer, 78, who lives in Greenport, made his way here in a circuitous route, one that reflected his own journey in making art.

    Beginning on Saturday, Guild Hall will present “Contrabando,” an exhibit that started out as an abridged version of a much larger show at El Museo del Barrio in New York last year and ended up being something else entirely.

    Esperanza Leon, who acted as guest curator for the exhibit, said she had previously worked with Museo del Barrio and had wanted to work with a Latin American artist. Although Mr. Ferrer said that as a Puerto Rican-born artist he is not technically a Latino, he is quoted in the show’s catalog as saying his art has “an accent, one influenced by a Latin temperament.”

    Mr. Ferrer wrote in an e-mail message that a “Puerto Rican cannot be a Hispanic or a Latino because Puerto Rico is not a sovereign country. Puerto Rico is owned by the United States and remains the oldest colony in the world. So the short answer is that I began and remain an individual artist.”

    He added, “I first registered in the New York art scene in the 1960s, before ethnicity was introduced. Curiously, my coming-out moment involved ice, leaves, hay, and grease.” He was associated early on with process art, and one of the early conceptual pieces that he exhibited with artists such as Robert Morris and Richard Serra used those materials.

    “My peers were English speaking and American born. Ethnicity was born with the social upheavals of the 1960s-1970s. Hispanics and Latinos, i.e., individuals from any of the South or Central American republics, joined African-Americans, women, and gay, lesbian, and transgender minorities in the struggle for equal rights and respect.”

    Mr. Ferrer attended Syracuse University for two years before studying at the University of Puerto Rico. During the summers while he was in school he spent time in California with José Ferrer, his much older half brother, who was a film actor married to Rosemary Clooney, and in Paris, where he met surrealists such as Andre Breton and Wilfredo Lam.

    He said that José, who was born in 1912, studied in Switzerland and graduated from Princeton University, where his acting career began and “subtle Waspy racism was perceived but never made an issue of. That was not his nature.”

    For Mr. Ferrer and his artistic reputation, returning to painting was far more radical than any question of ethnicity. He did so in the early 1970s, which is when the Guild Hall show begins, taking us up to his current works.

    “This is a unique show for Guild Hall,” Ms. Leon said last week, “nothing to do with the El Museo del Barrio” one, which was a full retrospective. Because the art establishment was more interested in his earlier work, the New York City show “was a revelation for most people.” It focused on paintings rather than conceptual pieces, which were documented mostly with photographs.

    The focus at Guild Hall is “on paintings and the enormous diversity of objects.” Some 50 pieces make up the installation, which will be shown in just one gallery, the others showing work by Drew Shiflett and pieces from the permanent collection.

    “The Guild Hall exhibit allows us to show different examples of works that hopefully add in the understanding of the various trajectories,” Mr. Ferrer said. “In a sense it has an intimacy not as clearly seen at El Museo.”

    There will be several smaller pieces and a few monumental paintings, as well as small sculptures, a collection of individual paper bag works (typically faces ranging in style from primitive to early modern), and a large new installation of the artist’s blackboard pieces, which have to do with language.

    Ms. Leon said she found that the importance of language was key to Mr. Ferrer’s work. “He emphasizes a great deal that he is bilingual in Spanish and English.” Working on the catalog, which is also bilingual, it became “interesting how things translate. ‘Contrabando,’ the title, that’s him playing between two places of language and culture elements, the official sphere of art and contemporary art. He’s always working on the margin somewhere, just outside that center of the art world.” He is not an artist who can be pigeonholed, and he’s comfortable with that, she added.

    The exhibit will open with the other shows at Guild Hall on Saturday with a reception from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m.

    On Nov. 12 at 3 p.m., Mr. Ferrer will speak with Barry Schwabsky, the art critic of The Nation. On Dec. 10 at 3:30 p.m., Edward J. Sullivan, a professor of art history at the Institute of Fine Arts and New York University, will also examine Mr. Ferrer’s work with the artist in attendance. The talks are free with museum admission.

     There is a feeling of excitement from the Avram Theater to Chancellors Hall at Stony Brook Southampton, the center for Southampton Arts. The burgeoning graduate arts program headed by Robert Reeves has recently added theater to its roster of offerings. There are already M.F.A. degree programs in creative writing and literature. Bringing the theater arts program to Southampton is a natural progression.

    “We’re always aware of how much derives from the cultural legacy of the East End,” Mr. Reeves said  Monday. “The campus will be something it’s always wanted to be — a cultural mecca.”

    Nick Mangano, the chairman and artistic director of the Master of Theater Arts program at the State University at Stony Brook, apologized the other day for the disarray at his new office at the Southampton campus, which is where the program has been recently relocated and expanded under his leadership.

    “I moved in this summer but my stuff just arrived,” he said.

    The master’s program in theater at Stony Brook is new, with four different tracks: dramaturgy, playwriting, directing, and film. “The M.F.A. in dramaturgy was all that was offered at Stony Brook,” Mr. Mangano said. “With this expanding program, the emphasis is on the creation of new work and to foster unique voices who want to come in and form new collaborations. We’re looking for the entrepreneurial artist.”

    Theater offerings at the Southampton Writers Conference, which is sponsored by Stony Brook during the summer, have been expanding, too, with the third annual playwriting conference and a new theater-directing conference this year. Programs in screenwriting and a new digital filmmaking conference this past summer could provide other paths for the school’s graduate arts programs to evolve naturally.

    Mr. Mangano is from New York City and graduated from Hunter College there, going on to earn an M.F.A. in directing at Columbia University. He has worked professionally on and off Broadway and is a co-founder of the Garson Theatre Company in Santa Fe, N.M., where he served as artistic director from 2002 to 2005. He lives in Bellport, which he said was exactly halfway between Stony Brook and Southampton.

     His own development of an incubator program for new voices came from his personal observations. “When I came into academia,” he said, “I became increasingly aware of this path that many schools seem to offer, with a specialization in getting hired, right when many of the institutions that might hire were dwindling.”

    “Artists were no longer driving the bus, they were fitting into a sellable package. It’s impossible to try to find your voice when you’re trying to fit in,” he said.

    Mr. Mangano led a tour of the Avram Theater, the Southampton campus’s 429-seat proscenium-style venue. “We have the use of this theater, which has been renovated.” He added, however, that he hoped to renovate a “black box” theater on the second floor, which was padlocked.

    “We’re not going to be doing mainstage productions,” he said. The program, he explained, is “not production-oriented; it’s project-driven.”

    Initially, the plan is to admit five students in each track, for a total of 20 inaugural students. “This is geared toward the nontraditional student,” Mr. Mangano said.

    “We’re also very much aware of where we are located on the East End, with a cross-discipline of artists,” he said, and he looks forward to drawing on some of those artists to lead classes or workshops in the future.

    In five years, Mr. Mangano projected, the campus will be home to 60 students, if the three-year master’s program is filled. “We will have artist-teachers who also serve as mentors,” he said, which is a reason why the program will remain at that level of matriculation. “We don’t want to overload the teachers with too many students to mentor, and we certainly don’t want students to be shortchanged. This will be a good ratio.”

    Along with the conventional school year, the theater arts program already plans to bring the three-day Michael Chekhov International Theatre Festival to the campus next summer, with more than 50 actors in residence. Stella Adler called Chekhov, the nephew of the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, “the greatest actor of the 20th century.” He turned to teaching his technique, and his book, “To the Actor,” is required reading in almost every theater program in the nation.

    The program is not offering a master’s degree in acting; the students themselves and the artists in residence will perform works by the students. “We want to find like-minded organizations,” Mr. Mangano said. For example, over the summer the Ensemble Studio Theatre visited the campus for three weeks as artists in residence led a series of master classes and workshops.

    Mr. Mangano is actively recruiting for the class of 2012; there will be an ad heralding the new, expanded program at Southampton in American Theatre magazine.

    His dream? “To have a team of students, or an individual student, that we have fostered — we’ve produced their work in workshops and a full-scale production.” He sees the Southampton theater program as “expanding the community of artists who are creating new work. We want to develop projects here, produce them here, and then hopefully have them go on from here.”

Chase and Ebert Show

    The Halsey Mckay Gallery in East Hampton will show an installation of new work by Louisa Chase and Sally Egbert beginning Saturday. According to the gallery, the exhibit of paintings and works on paper will display “lyrical, bold, and intuitive works that operate more as natural and corporeal extrapolations rather than traditional abstract expressions.”

    Ms. Chase pairs cool geometry with more expressive and gestural marks in a palette that is saturated but tranquil. She has a distinguished exhibition history and an academic background that includes the Venice Biennale and an M.F.A. from Yale University.

    Ms. Egbert draws her inspiration from the regional landscape and environs, including the fabled East End light. Her forms are suggestive but not definitive and often expressed in rich, high-toned color. She has received several grants and awards for her work and has exhibited widely.

    The show will open with a reception from 6 to 9 p.m. on Saturday and remain on view through Jan. 7.

Albertini at Ashawagh

    Those who may have missed Sydney Albertini’s midweek summer show at Ashawagh Hall in Springs will have a second chance to see her work this weekend in “In, Between, and Around,” on view from Saturday to Monday.

    The exhibit will include an installation by Robert Leibel in the small room. He interprets the show’s title as referring to space and light and what we think we see.

    Ms. Albertini said she has been inspired to think about the meaning of art and preconceived notions of value and use. She will show quilts made from hand-painted fabric and small landscape paintings done on her iPad.

    There will be a reception Saturday evening from 5 to 7.

“The Joys of Toys”

    This weekend, the Southampton Historical Museum will open a show designed to inspire the imaginations of young and old. “The Joys of Toys” will include playthings from the late-19th century to the early-20th century in tin, cast iron, and wood, along with dollhouses, penny banks, soldiers, and versions of Noah’s ark with all the animal accessories.

    The show will open on Saturday and be on view through Dec. 31 from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Madness and Video

    The Watermill Center will welcome guests to a by-reservation but free pair of open rehearsals by current artists in its residency program on Saturday at 4:30 p.m.

    The first of two works in progress is a video performance by Abbas Akhavan called “Phantom Head,” which is about madness. Mr. Akhavan was born in Tehran, Iran, and lives in Toronto. His work includes drawing, installation, and radically modified domestic objects.

    Next, Allie Avital Tsypin and Gabrielle Herbst will perform a live multimedia piece for voice and chamber ensemble about hot and cold places in nature and fantasy. It also addresses pop culture and female seduction. Reservations can be requested at [email protected]. The center is on Water Mill Towd Road.

Papermaking Workshop

    In conjunction with the opening of a show of assemblages by Drew Shiflett, Guild Hall in East Hampton is offering a very much hands-on papermaking class at noon Saturday with staff from Dieu Donné papermakers of New York City.

    A quick lecture starts the program, after which participants will be instructed on how to “pull” and “couch” a sheet of paper. A variety of colored linen pulps will be provided. Those attending have been advised to wear clothing and footwear — boots, preferably — that can get wet.

    The cost is $25, $20 for Guild Hall members.

Groot at John Jermain

    Barbara Groot, a painter who lives in East Hampton, will show a number of her “Hamptons Wetlands” series this month at the John Jermain Memorial Library in its temporary location at 34 West Water Street in Sag Harbor. An afternoon opening will be on Saturday from 3 to 5. Ms. Groot has a varied background that includes fashion and textile design. She now paints full time.

    The library has moved to West Water Street while extensive renovations are under way at its Main Street building. It is open Monday through Wednesday from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. and until 9 p.m. on Thursdays. On Friday and Saturday it is open until 5 p.m., and on Sunday, from 1 to 5 p.m.

Pierre’s Shows Isham

    Sheila Isham’s new series, “Comic Myth,” is on view at Pierre’s restaurant in Bridgehampton through the end of the month. The series consists of collages on Japanese rice paper and blends the sensual and the comic. The imagery comes from shapes cut from marbleized paper left open for viewers to apply their own interpretations and meanings.

    Caution: This review is probably not for the sexually faint of heart. “Seven Days in Rio,” the second novel by Francis Levy, is the story of Kenny Cantor, a C.P.A. from New York City who has come to Rio de Janeiro as a sex tourist and has one week to fulfill his sexual fantasies. Without hesitation, equivocation, or doubt, I can state that a more sex-obsessed narrator I have never encountered. There is certainly not a page, and probably not a full paragraph, in the entire novel that does not concern itself with sex.

    In stark contrast with his down-and-dirty sexual fixation, Kenny as narrator is extremely erudite and articulate, discussing literature, philosophy, anthropology, and psychoanalysis with everyone he meets and tossing out terms like stichomythic and prolepsis. Despite his evident and profound intellect, Kenny narrates the book in a kind of informative but absurdist deadpan voice that lacks emotion and demonstrates a fairly complete lack of understanding of, or empathy for, anyone, but especially women.

    Though it is never stated, Kenny seems to be somewhere on the Asperger end of autism spectrum disorders, wherein people are prone to difficulties in their social interactions and to highly restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior and interests and activities. On his first night in Rio, he approaches the first sexy woman he sees on the Copacabana. She is wearing high heels and a bikini.

    I have always found communication between myself and other human beings to be a problem, and often worry that I haven’t succeeded with women where I otherwise might because my words get caught between my teeth. . . . “I’m Kenny,” I said. “Do you understand anglais? I am new to your country and I wanted to introduce myself while also initiating myself into your highly permissive sexual culture. I will put my cards on the table: I’d be glad to engage you to perform sexual acts on me for a fee.”

    I don’t speak a word of Portuguese, so for a moment I entertained the idea of simply squeezing her breasts and spanking her very ample and exposed buttocks.

    Luckily for all involved he doesn’t do that, and the woman merely walks away. Kenny has a pet name for prostitutes, Tiffany, which he uses as both proper noun and noun. He asks Victor, the concierge at his hotel, to help him find a suitable sex partner and soon a whore is sent up to his room. She is beautiful but, like a New York City cab driver, “chattering on her cell phone even as she lifted her skirt to show me her goods, whispering that she wanted the equivalent of $100. It felt so much like being in a New York cab that I accidentally blurted out ‘Forty-third and Fifth!’ instead of telling her to dance a sexy merengue in the nude.”

    Kenny objects to this Tiffany’s being on the phone and dismisses her. But lest there be any doubt as to his aims and desires, later he is in the elevator and a very sexy woman (“author of several sexually charged memoirs about her life in art”) makes a pass at him. “I felt embarrassed to say no, but I suddenly realized I had come to Brazil for the prostitution, not to have free sex with a French intellectual.” Nevertheless, many of the prostitutes he meets are quite sophisticated; they read and discuss Marcuse or Sontag or Derida. One transgender Tiffany has a Ph.D. in anthropology from Stanford.

“Seven Days in Rio”

Francis Levy

Two Dollar Radio, $16

    In addition to his dedication to prostitutes and prostitution, Kenny has only one other interest in life. “My interest in psychoanalysis dated from my days as a Scout. I wanted to be an analyst the way some kids want to be rock stars . . . after I became an accountant, I toyed with the idea of being a lay analyst, that is, someone who practices without an MD degree. I was young, and it seemed like a great way to get laid.”

    As it happens, there is an international convention of psychoanalysts meeting at Kenny’s hotel. He encounters an Asian psychoanalyst whom he mistakes for a Tiffany (something Kenny does with nearly every woman he encounters). Her name is Dr. Dentata. China Dentata. Now interlaced with his rhapsodies concerning the pulchritude of Brazilian whores, Kenny throws in little bits of psychoanalytic theory and history.

    “I returned to the lobby to look for Victor the concierge. He hadn’t been much help, but it has always been my philosophy that it’s good to do the same thing again and again even if it fails to produce results. I remember my analyst telling me that there are people who in fact unconsciously want to bring about the outcomes they so often complain about. There is even a word for it in the psychoanalytic literature: parapraxis.”

    Kenny walks around for the first third of the novel without his pants, following the baton of his lust from one Tiffany to another, and the remainder of the book wearing a pair of pants tailored so tight that one can tell at a glance whether he has been, ah, circumcised.

    Kenny spends the book in pursuit of the perfect whore bar in which to find the perfect whore upon whom to consummate his desires. He goes to bars like the Gringo, the Catwalk, and Uva (the interior of which “was designed to look like the inside of a uterus”), where one extremely attractive sex worker nearly gives him a case of “tardive dyskinesia, or uncontrollable licking of the lips.”

    But, interestingly, Kenny does not manage to consummate his desires. Perhaps it is a case of, as Voltaire so flawlessly put it: “The perfect is the enemy of the good.” Though he meets several gorgeous and available Tiffanys, for one reason or another he never concludes the act. “Was this the mental health I’d been searching for all these years with prostitutes and analysts — a state of heightened desire whose consummation ultimately eluded me?”

    Kenny does hook up with the desirable China Dentata, who conducts with him an entire Lacanian analysis in a series of one-minute sessions. (Jacques Lacan was famous for introducing the idea of “variable-length sessions” of a few or even a single minute, though methinks he did not ever intend anyone to “undergo the equivalent of 19 years of analysis in roughly four days.”) China conducts this unorthodox analysis while watching soccer on television and exposing her crotch to Kenny. Eventually she has sex with him.

    “ ‘I just find that you are the most interesting patient I have ever had. You are very special,’ China said, momentarily ejecting me from her mouth like a DVD. I noted that she was very special too, particularly in regard to her ability to perform psychoanalysis and fellatio at the same time.”

    “Seven Days in Rio” is a learned, at times very funny, and fascinating novel. I must confess though that I found the idea that every female character in the book was either a prostitute or just sexually available to Kenny tiresomely sexist. At one point, Kenny, in one of his many moments of self-analysis, tells us that “my intellectuality is a defense that I often use to avoid confronting my issues.” Perhaps the intellectuality of the book itself, though often intriguing and impressive, combined with the relentless sexist sexuality, keeps this novel from being as emotionally engaging as it might otherwise have been.

—

    Francis Levy is the author of the novel “Erotomania: A Romance.” He lives in Manhattan and Wainscott.

    Michael Z. Jody is a psychoanalyst and couples counselor in Amagansett and New York City.

    “The first time I saw the movie, it had a profound effect on me,” said Murphy Davis, the artistic director of the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor. Mr. Davis is directing a stage version of Harper Lee’s classic drama “To Kill a Mockingbird” as part of the theater’s Literature Live series.

    The objective: to take the curriculums of East End schools to the stage.

    The play opens next Thursday with a school performance, and then will be presented to the public for the next three weekends, starting on Friday, Nov. 11, and Nov. 12.

    Published in 1960 in the midst of a burgeoning civil rights movement, the novel was loosely based on an actual event that occurred near the author’s hometown of Monroeville, Ala., in 1936.

    The story revolves around Scout, a tomboy, and her little brother, Jem, who are children when the book begins but gradually lose their innocence as they become aware of the racism and hate that predominate in their town, culminating with a black man put on trial for raping a white woman, a case their father, Atticus Finch, litigates.

    “To Kill a Mockingbird” went on to win a Pulitzer Prize for the young Ms. Lee, who never published another novel, but who also was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2007, the highest civilian award, for her contribution to literature.

    Two years after it was published, the book was adapted into a film, which won Academy Awards for the screenwriter, Horton Foote, and for Gregory Peck’s performance as Atticus Finch, who has also been named “the greatest movie hero of the 20th century” by the American Film Institute. The movie also featured Robert Duvall as Boo Radley, in his screen debut.

    The challenge, Mr. Davis said, is working with something so iconic. “I’ve discussed it with the cast,” he said. “How do you make it immediate and in the moment when most of the audience know the story and know how it ends?”

    In spite of the familiarity of the piece, Mr. Davis said,  “it is universal and timeless. It deals with an unsettling view for the capacity to hate in our culture, but when I saw it as a kid, I was also changed by it.”

    “It was the first time I felt what it was to be a part of humanity, with its challenges and pitfalls and the triumphs that are possible,” said Mr. Davis.

    Literature Live at Bay Street is a program geared toward presenting books onstage that are currently being read by a majority of middle and high school students. “We offer three to five choices and we poll the schools to see what they’re interested in,” Mr. Davis said. “We want to keep this curriculum-based.” The program debuted two years ago with “The Diary of Anne Frank,” and last year Bay Street offered up a production of “The Miracle Worker,” based on the early life of Helen Keller.

    This production features some familiar East End faces, along with a few newcomers and some out-of-towners. The cast list includes Shonnese C.L. Coleman from New York City (Calpurnia), Lily Spellman from Hampton Bays (Scout), Susan Galardi from Sag Harbor (Miss Maudie), Keith Francis of Patchogue (Judge Taylor, Mr. Cunningham, Boo Radley), Seth Hendricks of Southampton (Heck Tate), Joanna Howard of Westhampton (Mayella Ewell), Joe Pallister of Sag Harbor (Bob Ewell), Myles Stokowsky of Sag Harbor (Jem), Hudson Galardi-Troy of Sag Harbor (Dill), Ken Foreman of New York City (Atticus Finch), McKinley Belcher III of New York City (Tom Robinson), and Scott Thomas Hinson of Southampton (Mr. Gilmer).

    “It’s been a treat working with talented local actors,” Mr. Davis said.

    Tickets for “To Kill a Mockingbird” cost $10 for students, $20 for adults, and are on sale at the Bay Street box office or online at baystreet.org. Performances will continue on Nov. 18, 25, and 26.