The annual Box Art Auction to benefit East End Hospice will be held at the Ross School’s Center for Well-Being in East Hampton beginning at 4:30 p.m. on Saturday. Arlene Bujese organized the auction of the work of some 75 East End artists who contributed their takes on a plain box — keeping it simple or making rather grand transformations.

   There will be two auctions, a silent one starting at 4:30 and a live auction conducted by Bonnie Grice of Peconic Public Broadcasting at 6. Admission is $75, which includes wine and hors d’oeuvres catered by Dreesen’s of East Hampton. More information can be had by e-mailing Theresa Murphy of East End Hospice at [email protected].

Ramiro Returns

    After four years, Ramiro, a classically trained painter, has returned with a new show of his works at the Grenning Gallery in Sag Harbor. A reception will take place on Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m.

    Born in Venezuela, at the age of 6 he was accepted into the Ninos Cantores school for musically gifted children. At 14 he decided to become an artist and apprenticed with a realist painter and eventually studied at the Florentine Accademia di Belle Arti and the Florence Academy of Art. By 22, his work was winning awards and in prominent Italian collections.

    In 1998, he started spending his summer months on the East End. His subjects include portraiture, allegorical figures, interiors, and plein-air landscapes. According to Laura Grenning, “he believes that the artist’s job is to connect the viewer to the emotion, the balance, and the truth that can be found by looking closely at the world around us.”

    The exhibit will remain on view until Sept. 18.

Resika at Butler’s

    Butler’s Fine Art in East Hampton is exhibiting a collection of floral still lifes by Paul Resika through September.

     Born in New York in 1928, Mr. Resika began art studies at a young age and, as a teenager, was a studio assistant and student of Hans Hofmann from 1945 to 1947. He then lived and studied in Venice and Rome from 1950 to 1953.

    From his formal basis in Hofmann’s abstract techniques, Mr. Resika incorporated influences from the French modernists and Fauves, capturing “the power of nature through his uniquely personal exploration of color and form through observation,” according to the gallery.

    His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, among many other public and private collections.

    Other work on view includes art by Esteban Vicente, Mary Abbott, Herman Cherry, Nicolas Carone, Stephanie Brody-Lederman, Eugene Brodsky, Sally Egbert, Casimir Rutkowski, Harry Kramer, and Natalie Edgar Pavia.

On Pollock and Picasso

    Michael FitzGerald will present “Drip, Brush, and the Unconscious: Pollock and Picasso at Midcentury” on Sunday at 5 p.m. as part of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center’s summer lecture series. The series is held at the Fireplace Project across the street from the center at 851 Springs-Fireplace Road in Springs.

    Dr. FitzGerald, who is the director of the art history program at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., and a part-time resident of Sag Harbor, will examine the two artists’ attitudes toward the redefinition of painting that took place in the first half of the 20th century, beginning with Cubism and then Abstract Expressionism. He will compare and contrast the achievements of Picasso and Pollock, painters who epitomize divergent poles of modernism.

    Dr. FitzGerald is the author of “Picasso and American Art,” which accompanied a traveling exhibit that originated at the Whitney Museum of American Art. He is also the author of “Picasso: The Artist’s Studio.”

Charneco at Solar

    Solar in East Hampton will open “Islands of Memory,” featuring new works by Darlene Charneco, on Saturday with a reception at 5 p.m. This is the first solo show for the artist at Solar, who is known for her work in resin, nails, and mixed media. She incorporates network theory, geographic information systems, video games, virtual worlds, childhood toys, and educational tools.

    The islands she refers to are her current home, Long Island, and her parents' native Puerto Rico. Of her sculpture, she said, “These clusters are like thought-forms . . . a chunking of concepts that I am trying to hold, mix, marry, communicate with, make tangible.” She has exhibited at the Katonah Museum, the Hunterdon Museum, the Islip Art Museum, and the Parrish Art Museum. In addition to the reception, the artist will be available to talk about her work during the East Hampton Village gallery walk next Thursday from 6 to 8 p.m.

    Eric Ernst will visit Solar on Sept. 17 for an “Artists on Artists” talk at 4:30 p.m. Reservations, which are required for all events, can be made by e-mailing [email protected]. The show is on view through October.

Art Happening in Sag

    The Delaney Cooke Gallery at the Haven’s House Art Space in Sag Harbor will offer “Mixed-Media: A Group Perspective Art Happening” beginning tomorrow with a reception on Saturday at 7 p.m.

    The show is organized by Robert Nasatka and brings together “a motley crew of visual artists, musicians, poets, actors, teachers, and students comfortable with their own unique passion and flare for life without excessive vagueness. It aims to not only have a good time but educate as well through sensible outreach and honest discussion.” The participants have both traditional and more progressive approaches to art.

    The group includes Mr. Nasatka, J.K. Legos, Breahna Arnold, Ray Colleran, Anna Atanasova, Billy Martin, Benjamin Faraone, Chandra Elmendorf, Matisse Patterson, Yung Jake, Matty Liot, Mark Schiavoni of the Montauk Project band, Human Error, Paddy Noble, 4 Alarm Chili, Keogh Collections, Jason Nower of Why We Climb, Yong Jo Ji, Open Minded Organics, Ashley Tomkiel, and Philip Kess.

    The reception will feature performances and more. The installation will be up through Sunday.

Troy’s Ceramics at Celadon

    The Celadon Clay Art Gallery will show Jack Troy’s wood-fired and reduction-glazed ceramics beginning tomorrow and running through Sept. 5. The artist will speak about his work on Sunday at 4 p.m.

    In his career, Mr. Troy has been a teacher, potter, and writer. He is retired from Juniata College, where he taught for 39 years. He has led more than 185 workshops for potters at colleges, universities, and art centers in this country and abroad. His work is in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution, at the Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park in Japan, and in the Auckland Museum of Art in New Zealand. He has written several books on ceramic techniques as well as poetry.

Markel Shows Fayer

    Kathryn Markel Fine Arts in Bridgehampton is showing recent paintings by Laura Fayer. There will be a reception on Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m. Ms. Fayer uses a variety of mediums to explore the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi, which describes a world that is transient and incomplete.

    “I rely on visual memories of childhood years living in Japan,” she has said. “The memories are vast and fluid.”

    Those who view the images may sense waves, wind, music, or moving trees that belie her process, one that is more complex than the results would indicate. She lives in New York and has received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant. The show will remain on view through Sept. 11.

Tabor’s “Horse Whisperings”

    The Tulla Booth Gallery in Sag Harbor will show “Horse Whisperings” beginning on Saturday with an opening from 6 to 8 p.m. The artist will be on hand to sign copies of his book of the same title, with proceeds going to Autism Speaks.

    Mr. Tabor is a creative director and photographer who is known for large-scale prints of his equestrian works and landscape and seascape “portraits” of the East End. He treats his subjects like athletes, exploring their inner strength, spirit, and power.

    His images have no title, simply a number. He believes that the viewer should have an experience of the image without preconceptions. He uses only natural light. The show is running in connection with the Hampton Classic Horse Show in Bridgehampton, which opens on Sunday.

Noto Comes to Demato

    The Richard Demato Gallery in Sag Harbor will have a solo exhibit of works by Russell Noto, an artist from Savannah, Ga. The show opens on Saturday with an artist’s reception from 6 to 8 p.m.

    In his current series, he paints pit bulls that have the names of colors painted on them. They are stark but also fierce looking, usually with mouths agape. His work is realistic but also self-conscious in its references and ironic implications. The images play with stereotypes as well as the real fear of the different and unknown.

    The artist was born in Scranton, Pa., and earned an undergraduate degree from Keystone College in 2009. While attending college, he completed two paintings for the Scranton Parking Authority’s permanent collection. He will finish his Master of Fine Arts at the Savannah College of Art this year.

    Guild Hall will celebrate its 80th birthday on Saturday at 8 p.m. with “A Night of Stars,” a roster of well-known performers from stage, screen, and concert halls.

    Elaine Stritch, Blythe Danner, Eli Wallach, Larry Pine, Jake LaMotta, Melissa Errico, Anna Bergman, Tovah Feldshuh, and others will take the stage to perform works by Terrence McNally and new material from Jules Feiffer, Marsha Norman, and Joe Pintauro. Tickets range from $50 to $125.

    The show continues an all-star tradition established at Guild Hall’s 50th and 75th anniversaries.

    This week’s regular Guild Hall programming includes a screening of “The Art of Getting By,” a film by Gavin Wiesen, as part of the Red Carpet Film Series. Mr. Wiesen will be available for discussion and questions afterward. Tickets are $12 and $10 for members.

    A production of Stephen Sondheim’s “Company” with the New York Philharmonic will be screened on Monday at 7 p.m. The cast includes Neil Patrick Harris, Patti Lupone, Stephen Colbert, Jon Cryer, and Christina Hendricks. This was a very recent addition to Guild Hall’s schedule, and reserved seating tickets, at $22 or $20 for members, have been selling fast.

    “Bombay Beach,” the last of the SummerDocs series presented in association with the Hamptons International Film Festival, will be screened next Thursday at 8 p.m. Alec Baldwin will host the director Alma Har’el. The film is $22 and $20 for members.

    On Friday, Sept. 2, at 8 p.m., Rosanne Cash will take the stage in an intimate concert in the John Drew Theater. She is the eldest daughter of the late singer Johnny Cash and has released a number of chart-topping singles. Tickets start at $55 and go up to $110 for prime orchestra seats.

    Yale University’s  Whiffenpoofs will be in town tomorrow at 4 p.m. to sing at the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor. Tickets are $25, $15 for students and children.  

     Every year, 14 seniors at Yale are chosen for the Whiffs, which has been all-male since it was founded in 1909. The group began as a senior quartet that met for weekly concerts at Mory’s Temple Bar in New Haven.

This year the singers include Raphael Odell Shapiro, a Ross School alumnus who is from Sag Harbor. This is not his first Bay Street appearance; he has been seen there in productions of “Our Town” and “Pippin,” and has been in a number of Stages productions.

The Whiffenpoofs competed recently on NBC’s “The Sing-Off 2.” Every year they make a world tour, which will include all seven continents for the first time during the 2011-2012 season.

    Andrea Martin’s self-proclaimed “hybrid grab-bag” of comedy awaits audiences at the American premiere of her one-woman show, “Final Days! Everything Must Go!” on Monday at 8 p.m. at the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor.

    The show is a “retrospective of my career, all in 20 minutes,” the Emmy and Tony Award-winning comedienne joked last week. “It’s a tag sale of comedy, a potpourri of comedy. I tell stories about being a parent, having kids, dating, and non-dating. There’s a 20-minute medley of all the Broadway shows I’ve been in, characters from ‘SCTV’ [the Canadian equivalent of Saturday Night Live], characters from ‘My Big Fat Greek Wedding,’ video appearances with Johnny Carson, and there’s a rap song at the end. It’s everything and the kitchen sink.”

    According to Ms. Martin, there will be audience participation as well. “We like to humiliate people in front of other people. I’m looking for two strong and able men. I’ll teach them how to dance a Greek dance. Men really want to go up, they want to get up like the men in ‘The Price Is Right,’ or their wives are pushing them, so either way, you can’t lose,” she said. 

    Ms. Martin attributes much of her show’s success to Seth Rudetsky, the music director, and host of “Seth’s Big Fat Broadway” on Sirius/XM Satellite Radio, whom she called “the hardest white man working in show business.” The two met on her first one-woman show in 1993 and have collaborated for almost 20 years.

    “When I did that first show it was a very self-reflective time in my life. I had a mission to see if I could be onstage myself. I’d been working with comedy groups,” said Ms. Martin. “This is much more of a party. No life will be changed. I hope they’ll laugh for an hour and 20 minutes.”

    The show, she said, originated from a place of strength and reflects her current state of mind. “It’s a celebration of my life. It’s very empowering to be 64, to be up there creating this and performing,” she said. “It’s the third chapter of my life. I feel good about where I am, so why not get up and share it?”

    Her first big break was on SCTV, followed by roles in “Young Frankenstein” on Broadway, “Fiddler on the Roof,” “My Favorite Year,” “Club Paradise,” and “Breaking Upwards.”

    “I’ve been all over the map,” she said.

    When asked who inspires her, she said “Jane Fonda,” without missing a beat. She “is my idol. She reinvents every age she is. She kept me fit in the ’70s, in my pregnancies, and she’s keeping me fit now.” Ms. Martin praised Ms. Fonda’s autobiography “Prime Time,” in which she talks about navigating her own third chapter in life. “It’s an optimistic outlook,” Ms. Martin said. “That part of your life is of great wisdom. It’s of service, and of what you can give back. This show is a celebration of what I’ve done, and what I can give back to people.”

    As for embracing life’s progression, Ms. Martin said this: “Everybody freaks out when we get older because we keep thinking we’re going to die. At a certain point we think about our mortality. I think everyone is living longer. It’s a great time to stop and be able to listen to yourself and ask yourself, ‘What am I living for?’ We don’t do that when we’re younger. We think ‘What do I do? Who am I dating?’ ” The most profound question, she said, is “What is the purpose of my life? Mine is performing, so why not share that with the world?”            Tickets to Ms. Martin’s show cost $65, or $60 for Bay Street members.

    Anne Roiphe is certainly a prolific writer. At the front of her latest book she lists 9 novels and 10 nonfiction works. “Art and Madness” is her third memoir. In it she goes back to her days as a very young woman, employing a somewhat confusing format by skipping back and forth in time between scenes from the 1950s and ’60s, creating an impressionistic mosaic of these years.

    She covers marriage and motherhood, her prior student days at Smith and Sarah Lawrence, her upbringing by wealthy, emotionally estranged Jewish parents in their Park Avenue apartment, and her involvement with various writers from The Paris Review crowd.

    The style is sweeping and high flown but the effect is confessional. With devastating honesty she recounts her abasement to the demands of the writers whom she revered. From the first meeting at the West End Bar with Jack Richardson, her darkly handsome, talented husband-to-be, he dazzles her with long, fluid monologues, and when he asks her to pick up the tab for his drinks, she doesn’t hesitate, offering as a bonus to drive him back to Queens, where he lives, she being the one with the money and the car.

    A pattern is set for the dynamic of their relationship and subsequent marriage. She will work to support them both, and at night she will type up his manuscripts while he trolls the bars to pick up women and spend the money he has acquired pawning her china and jewelry: “He was not meant for the ordinary tasks of mortal days. Like Dracula he came to life at night, sleeping during the day with the shades pulled against the light. He survived on scotch and bourbon and cigarettes and German philosophy and French paperbacks. . . .”

cid and had become delusional.

___

“Art and Madness”

Anne Roiphe

Nan A. Talese, $24.95

___

    They both frequent parties at George Plimpton’s apartment, famous for the literary luminaries who had had their writing published in The Paris Review and gathered each Friday night to drink and pontificate. Harold Humes (known as Doc) had founded The Paris Review with Plimpton and Peter Matthiessen, but he had not weathered as well as they had, mainly because he was dropping a    Since her husband was so blatantly unfaithful, she saw no reason not to respond in kind, but did she have to pick Doc Humes as the next famous writer in her bed? Even she admits that this was masochistic. By this time she has had a baby daughter — always referred to in her book as “the child” — with Jack Richardson, and she recounts an episode in which Doc phones in the middle of the night to tell her he is hearing voices and that someone has smashed his face into a mirror; he can feel cuts and blood gushing and yet when he looks in the uncracked mirror, he sees no injury to his face. He is panicked.

    He tells her he will be dead by morning. She immediately bundles up the child, pulling a sweater over the baby’s pajamas, and hurries out to find a taxi and presumably save Doc from his demons. It is at this juncture that she tells the reader that despite her actions, her love for her child “is greater than all the seas that heave across the planet.”

    I begin to suspect that Ms. Roiphe may be an unreliable narrator.

    The memoir is naturally told exclusively from her point of view, and she is not only relentlessly self-involved, she is fanatically drawn to writing and writers (in college she had absorbed the works of Beckett, Sartre, and Camus, Steinbeck and Dos Passos, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and, of course, the heartbreaking J.D. Salinger). She claims that “for me the art of the story, the written word, was worth dying for.”

    While not a drinker herself, she says “alcohol was the lubricant of genius” and is drawn to the dramatic behavior it fuels because it satisfies her craving for the extreme, an attraction that is evident throughout the writing in “Art and Madness.”

    After her marriage breaks up, she buys a little black notebook and, as though finally given permission, begins to write her own prose. She also continues to attend Plimpton’s parties, taking home sundry writers. By this time she is gaining some insight and makes a perceptive comment about the true nature of these gatherings: “Despite the heavy air of flirtation, the perfume of illicit sex that wafted through the book-filled rooms of George’s apartment, the game was something else. It was the famous men or the would-be-famous men flexing their skills, strutting their stuff. . . . It was the writers impressing each other, hoping to triumph over the one who was talking with an anecdote even more pointed, even more outrageous.”

    Toward the end of the book the scene shifts to East Hampton, where she again socializes with writers and artists, in particular those with small children, playmates for her daughter: Jack Gelber, whose 1959 play, “The Connection,” was the first to explore the drug culture, Terry Southern, a casualty of that culture, Frank Conroy, Larry Rivers, and William Styron, who tends to turn up in various sex-and-alcohol-soaked memoirs.

    Then abruptly she tires of fame; she begins to worry about its detrimental effects on the child. She starts dating doctors. She has a serious relationship with a Dr. Reiner, a psychoanalyst, and after him a psychologist, and then she meets Dr. Roiphe. The irony surely cannot have escaped her that having made such strenuous efforts to throw off the conventional restrictions of her parents’ upper-class Jewish background, she ends up in what is a classic Jewish joke: She marries a doctor.

    Did she finally find contentment and an outlet for her passion for the written word? Well, she writes prodigiously and she was married to the same man for 40 years. Also, I notice that this memoir is dedicated to a Dr. Herman Roiphe.

—

    Anne Roiphe had a house in Amagansett for many years.

    Jennifer Hartig, a former Broadway stage actress, regularly reviews books for The Star. She lives in Noyac.

    “I bought my car based on what I could fit into it,” Cynthia Knott said recently at her Springs studio, gesturing at her all-terrain vehicle. “That way I can go on the beach and get out of the way of hurricanes.”

    All the canvases hanging in the modest workspace behind her house — about 10 in all that have been shipped to the DC Moore Gallery in Chelsea — were started on location at one beach or another in the last nine months and represent a whole new body of work. Ms. Knott figured out a way to put the canvases in her car, even when, at 7 by 4 feet, her reach would certainly exceed her grasp. In addition to the large paintings, she had done about 34 works on paper, seascapes done in watercolor and pastels, the drawing done with paint sticks.

    The term Luminist, used to refer to late-19th-century painters who were influenced by the Hudson River School, was apparently not coined until 1954. In Luminist paintings, brushstrokes are hidden and there is attention to detail as well as the effects of light on landscapes or seascapes — the spiritual significance of luminosity, as exemplified by Martin J. Heade and Frederick E. Church, among others. Ms. Knott’s paintings bring to mind some of the work of Newton Haydn Stubbing and J.M.W. Turner.

    While she nodded at the reference to Turner, she said that she was also “greatly influenced by Mark Rothko,” and by Dan Flavin.

    Ms. Knott has become well known in the last 20-plus years for her paintings of the sky, clouds, water, and horizon, which have been exhibited both in solo and group shows all over the United States, including New York City and the South Fork, and as far away as Japan. Her East End gallery is Pamela Williams in Amagansett; DC Moore represents her in Manhattan. She has amassed significant awards, appointments, and lecture invitations, and last year was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant.

    Growing up in New Jersey, Ms. Knott spent a lot of time with her Irish grandfather, who had arrived in this country as an orphan and whose first job was in Philadelphia, where he was trained by a tailor. He taught her and her sisters to sew on buttons in such a way that they would never come off. “He loved having all seven of his grandkids at once,” she said. “He inspired us to tell stories, ‘head stories,’ which we had to make up on the spot,” she recalled.

    He also owned a quarry, where he took his grandchildren. He helped Ms. Knott in particular collect minerals and rocks that she would crush, producing pigments that she mixed with baby oil and put into little glass bottles. How could she have known then that much later on she would do something similar with ground pigments, linseed oil, paint, and other materials?

    Taking the children to the Jersey Shore, the old man enchanted them with sea stories, always autobiographical, and sang them sea chanteys. “It was important to him that we become characters,” she said. “He was the one who got my imagination going.”

    Ms. Knott at first wanted to study marine biology in college and went to Washington University in St. Louis, but she turned out to be more interested in drawing what she saw under the microscope, and after a semester, she dropped out.

    Her parents were not pleased, so, to pay her tuition for night classes at the Boston Museum School, where she earned her B.A., she had to work by day at the Pewter Pot Muffin House and Dunkin’ Donuts.

    She got her B.F.A. at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan and worked pulling prints for Robert Blackburn, with whom she had taken a printmaking workshop. Louise Bourgeois taught her gravure.

    Ms. Knott felt at home in the city, with “the essence of being in New York City and the energy level, you felt you were more in the mix of the downtown art scene,” she said.

    After finishing at Visual Arts Ms. Knott studied textile design and, when a friend suggested she try painting directly on fabric, she ended up painting on silk and being sidelined into a whole “fashion thing,” as she called it, selling their creations to Halston and having them photographed for Vogue by Vera Wang and Jade Hobson.

    “I wanted to paint, and so I painted with hot wax and foam rubber brushes on silk,” she said, even saving the newspaper that was used to catch the excess dye under the silk and using it for her first show at a gallery in Lower Manhattan.

    Marriage and a move to upstate New York attenuated slightly her gradual move toward being a full-time painter. She and her husband bought a five-acre farm for a song, built a house from scratch, and raised chickens, sheep, and goats. While she was there Ms. Knott took a plein air-painting course at Hudson Community College.

    “I started noticing the phenomenon of natural light, which was when I decided: I want to figure out light,” she said. After a stint at the Vermont Studio School, she was accepted to the M.F.A. program at New York University and proceeded to commute from the upstate farm to the fifth-floor walkup she had kept in the city.

    After Paul Brach gave her a graduate show she was picked up by the Tibor de Nagy gallery, which gave Ms. Knott her first solo show at about the time when her husband decided he wanted to move to the East End, which is how she fetched up in Springs.

    “I didn’t want to do genre painting,” she said. “I looked out at the sea and the horizon line and watched it go by.” She studied Cartwright Shoal, on the south tip of Gardiner’s Island, and looked at the horizon line “that comes and goes and changes colors,” she said. “I prefer the light in Springs; it is buoyant and luminescent.”

    “The real source of the artist’s identity is how you make your marks — the delineation of the horizon line.” Ms. Knott underpaints the linen she works on, which has a texture, a nub to it, and which catches the copper pigment. Then she takes the mixture she’s made of oil paint, metallic pigments (sometimes gold, silver, or lapis lazuli, as well as copper), heated beeswax, Damar varnish, and linseed oil and layers that onto the surface with a palette knife and then a brush, scraping, in fact, through the paint right down to the linen, before reapplying it. The paste-like substance has the consistency of honey.

    Before she underpaints the linen, however, she has already sized or treated it with gesso and a type of glue. The whole thing is a process of many layers, “repeatedly scraped away and reapplied, creating a ‘skin of memory,’ ” she said. The varnish makes the surface hard and the oil paint dries through oxidation and the movement of air over the encaustic, which is why she has fans on all the time in her studio.

    The 200-square-foot space, which she is about to quit, has been the birthplace of 10 one-woman shows.

    In only one of the paintings in her studio was there no apparent or even subtle horizon line, just light floating above water. Some of her pictures are incandescent and uplifting and others brooding and dark, no doubt varying reflections of her own experience. In the 22 years she has been on the South Fork, she said, “I have gone through a lot of dark times, bright times, and muddled times.”

    She often gets invited to artists’ residencies and goes to the ones that are on water, such as at Fogo Island, a 25-by-14-kilometer island off the east coast of Newfoundland and Labrador. “I get excited to look at something that’s atmospheric,” she said. She has painted seascapes in Ireland, Scotland, and on the coast of Maine.

    Ms. Knott, who has been dubbed a “horizonologist” by her friend Billy Collins, a former U.S. poet laureate, signs her paintings on the back. She doesn’t want the letters to interfere with the viewer’s grasp of the whole expanse of water, sky, horizon, and light. “The horizon line has become my signature line,” she said.

    There’s such a dizzying number of things going on at Guild Hall over the next eight days that it’s hard to know where to begin.

    On Friday, Aug. 26, Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick will appear along with Mario Cantone, Joy Behar, Scott Adsit, Tovah Feldshuh, Eugene Pack, and Dayle Reyfel in “Celebrity Autobiography: In Their Own Words” at 7 and 9 p.m.

    The brainchild of Eugene Pack, the production stars an A-list comedic ensemble performing passages from actual celebrity memoirs, running the gamut from the “poetry” of Suzanne Somers to the shocking “romance tips” from Tommy Lee to the most famous Hollywood love triangle in history — Elizabeth Taylor, Debbie Reynolds, and Eddie Fisher.

    “I would listen to a lot of books on tape, particularly autobiographies, and was astounded at what people would write about,” Mr. Pack said in a release. “If I got a hold of one of the books, I’d read it out loud to a friend, and they’d insist I was making it up . . . but people actually wrote these words.”

    Co-hosted and co-produced by Dayle Reyfel, “Celebrity Biography” has covered more than 300 different biographies and run in sold-out Off Broadway shows for three years,  garnering the 2009 Drama Desk Award in the category of Unique Theatrical Experience. You can’t make this stuff up.

    Tickets start at $40, $38 for members, and are available online at guildhall.org.

    Guild Hall’s Red Carpet film series, tonight at 8 p.m., will bring a screening of Christopher Guest’s mockumentary “A Mighty Wind,” followed by a question-and-answer session with Bob Balaban and Michael McKean, two of the film’s stars.

    Tickets start at $12, $10 for members.

    Tomorrow at 8 p.m., Guild Hall and the Hamptons International Film Festival will present “L’Amour Fou,” as part of their SummerDocs series. The documentary looks at the relationship between Yves Saint Laurent and his business and life partner, Pierre Bergé, who were bound not only by their love for each other, but by a love of art and fashion.

    Hosted by Alec Baldwin, the screening will be followed by a Q. and A. with Simon Doonan, a “creative ambassador at large” for Barneys New York, and Cintra Wilson, an author and cultural critic.

    Tickets start at $22, $20 for members.

    A musical recollection with Christine Andreas and her husband, the composer Martin Silvestri, is on tap for Saturday at 8 p.m. The couple will offer “Two for the Road,” described as a “personal ‘scrapbook’ ” of music, memories, and their marriage that will feature everything from Broadway classics to original compositions.

    Tickets start at $40, $38 for members.

    “Selected Shorts,” a celebration of the short story, and also a public radio series, will come to Guild Hall on Sunday at 7:30 p.m.

    Isaiah Sheffer, the series host, the Tony Award-winner Denis O’Hare (“Take Me Out,” “True Blood,” and “The Good Wife”), and Sonia Manzano, best known to parents and youngsters of a certain age as Maria from “Sesame Street,” will bring to life stories by Nicholson Baker, Molly Giles, and T. Coraghessan Boyle. Tickets start at $30, $28 for members.

    The Atlantic City Ballet will perform in the John Drew Theater on Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. The dancers will perform four ballets — “Eclipse,” a rock ballet choreographed by Phyllis Papa, “Tango,” which captures the elegance of tango, but on pointe, “Drums,” an African-influenced performance, and “Love Royale,” a ’40s and ’50s collegiate love story choreographed by Kristaps Kikulis with music by the French composer Yann Tiersen.

    Tickets start at $15 for children, $35 for adults, and $30 for people over 65.

    A concert reading of “Giovanni the Fearless,” a new musical by the composer Mira J. Spektor and the lyricist Carolyn Balducci based on a classic Italian folk tale, will take place at the Montauk Library on Saturday evening at 7:30.

    The cast includes Mark Singer in the baritone role of Jacopo; the soprano Lilah Gosman as Colombina, Dory Schultz singing the lead tenor role of Giovanni, Dominique Grelsamer in the soprano role of Adelina, and the bass Bill Krakauer as the Narrator and the Ghost. Gary Swanson is the director and Barbara Ames is the pianist and musical director.

    The humorous, romantic tale involves the Bombasto Theatrical Troupe, an itinerant group of eccentric actors and singers who encounter Giovanni in their travels. There’s a practical joke about a buried treasure in a haunted castle, a Giant Ghost in the form of a puppet, a Real Ghost, the moonstruck Colombina, a broken curse, a tree bearing coins and precious jewels, and, in the end, all living happily ever after.

    The musical is in the style of a commedia dell’arte, sometimes known as Italian comedy or comedy of craft, a kind of 16th-century presentation performed by professional players who traveled throughout Italy doing improvisational theater on temporary stages. “Giovanni the Fearless” is a somewhat more modern version, and, according to a release, is “infused with its tradition of the improvisational nonrealistic style of acting.”

    “It is meant as a family show, like ‘The Fantasticks,’ ” Ms. Spektor said last week. Commedia dell’arte was also an influence on that longest-running Broadway play. She pointed out that Saturday’s accompaniment will include only a piano; “The Fantasticks” originally had only piano and harp.

    Ms. Balducci, when asked how she came to choose this fable to work with, said, “As a child, I always liked folklore.” Later in life, “I needed to know more about my heritage and the language of my father and husband,” who is a professor of Italian at the State University at Stony Brook, and this led to her reading many anthologies and becoming familiar with the tale.

    In its concert version, the performance, which is free, will include all 17 songs and most of the dialogue, but without full staging or props. It has been slightly edited for five actors and a smaller stage.

    This will be the second performance of “Giovanni the Fearless.” In October, a similar production was presented by the Dramatists’ Guild in Manhattan. The playwright and theater critic Mario Fratti wrote in America Oggi, an Italian-language newspaper, that the production was “well structured, poetic, moving in its originality and sensibility.” Ms. Balducci’s lyrics were “direct and clear,” he said, and Ms. Spektor’s music was “melodic and stimulating.”

    This is the first time the two have worked together. They came to know each other over a period of time as Ms. Balducci, the program director of the Montauk Library, presented the Aviva Players, of which Ms. Spektor is the artistic director, as well as some of her other music. “We’ve had a great time working together,” Ms. Spektor said of their recent collaboration.

    Ms. Spektor, who has a house in East Hampton, has written other musicals and chamber operas, including “The Housewives’ Cantata,” “Lady of the Castle,” “The Passion of Lizzie Borden,” and “Villa Diodati.” She also wrote the musical score for the film “Double Edge,” which starred Faye Dunaway, and for the documentary “Arts in Its Soul,” seen on PBS.

    Ms. Balducci’s published works include biographies of Grazia Daledda, a Nobel Prize laureate, and the American transcendentalist Margaret Fuller, and the novels “Is There a Life After Graduation, Henry Birnbaum?” and “Earwax.”

    In addition to the composer and lyricist, four others in the production have South Fork connections. Ms. Gosman is a native of Montauk and has appeared with the Annapolis Symphony and the Aspen and Tanglewood music festivals. Ms. Grelsamer, whose family has a house in East Hampton, has sung with the OperaWorks Emerging Artist Program and the Bel Canto Institute; she will attend New York University in the fall. Mr. Swanson co-produced and played the lead role in a feature film, “Whiskey School,” and founded the Montauk Group, an acting workshop and summer residency program, and Ms. Ames, who was recently affiliated with Stages, a Children’s Theater Workshop in East Hampton, is also the director of the junior and intermediate choruses at Mannes College The New School for Music preparatory division.

    Of those who will be new to the East End audience, Mr. Singer is the lead baritone of New York’s Magic Opera Circle Repertory Ensemble and founder of the Catskill Mountain Foundation’s Mountaintop Celebration of Song. Mr. Schultz has recently sung the roles of Jean Valjean in “Les Miserables” and Gastone in “La Traviata,” and Mr. Krakauer was recently seen in an episode of “Life With Louie” on Fox TV and will soon appear a the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival.

    “Giovanni the Fearless” has been selected by the League of Professional Theatre Women as part of its yearlong “30 Plays” program, honoring the league’s 30th anniversary.  

    An unlikely hero, Josh Grisetti has a face like a question mark. His raised eyebrows and nose are the curve and his often agape mouth forms the dot at its base. As the protagonist of “Enter Laughing,” he can mold that face like putty, looking doltish or debonair in the span of a second.

    While he ably carries the musical comedy based on the early life of Carl Reiner, at the Bay Street Theatre this month, he is supported by a cast of strong group and individual performers, among them Jill Eikenberry, Richard Kind, and Michael Tucker. Those names may be familiar from “L.A. Law” or “Spin City,” but the cast includes other great performers such as Ray DeMattis, Erick Devine, Gerry McIntyre, Kate Shindle, and Emily Shoolin.

    The play, set in the 1930s, takes place in a New York where the parents are all from the “old country” and radios and other electrical appliances are taken to a repair shop rather than recycled. It has the kind of old-style humor and musical numbers one might remember from television variety shows or reruns of Carol Burnett.

    Mr. Reiner was a TV fixture for many years in the 1950s and 1960s on “Your Show of Shows” and “The Dick Van Dyck Show,” which he created and wrote as well as acted in. His 1958 novel “Enter Laughing” was first adapted to the stage in 1964, with a book by Joseph Stein, whose credits include “Fiddler on the Roof” and “Zorba.”

    The show has had two successful runs off Broadway, with Mr. Grisetti earning much praise from critics and some awards. His ability to convince the audience of his gawkiness as well as his charm, in addition to his agility as a singer and dancer, make the show consistently engaging. Several of the actors who appeared with him in the earlier run at the York Theatre are in this production as well.

Bay Street’s presentation is a marvel of theatrical design and staging, once again demonstrating how so much can be done in such an intimate space. For musical numbers featuring the entire company of 14, the crowd may pack the small stage, but the players move agilely in and out of the wings and even the aisles.

For orchestration, the play makes do with a piano and bass at stage right and a drummer who provides other percussion but remains out of sight. It’s minimal, but plenty at the same time. Phil Reno, the pianist and musical director, takes the stage himself in one scene, adding another multitasking dimension.

The set design, by James Morgan, could not be simpler — design reduced to its essence. A window is the backdrop for Foreman’s Machine Shop, where David Kolowitz, the lead character, works as a delivery boy. The same window fronts a hat shop where he makes a delivery, and then a luncheonette where he has a date with his girl, Wanda. Chairs, counters, worktables, desks, a chaise longue and other elements are mostly brought in by cast members with a flourish and danced offstage when the scene changes.

    The musical numbers are all impressive. The women in particular do great work, together or solo. The biggest crowd-pleaser, though, was a number by Mr. Tucker and Mr. DeMattis, “Hot Cha-Cha.” The two veteran performers threw in a few flourishes that were both unexpected and delightful.

    The only sour note in the production comes from the story itself. The awkward and untalented David Kolowitz is a would-be actor who becomes a star despite himself, thanks to a dearth of talent in New York at that time. Although the situation is played for laughs and there’s a good-natured ending, David’s eventual acceptance is all too reminiscent of certain periods of prolonged mediocrity on the Great White Way in both production and playwriting. For this observer, the laughter, while often genuine, glossed over something sinister lurking beneath the cheerful veneer.

    Performances of “Enter Laughing” will continue through Sept. 4. Tickets can be purchased through the box office or at www.BayStreet.org. The show’s producer, Dan Whitten, has since announced that he will bring it to Broadway after it ends its Sag Harbor run.