Before house-share reality shows like “Big Brother” or — dare we mention it? — “Private Stars,” there was “Betty’s Summer Vacation” by Christopher Durang, the well-known author of “Beyond Therapy,” “Romance,” and other theater favorites.

    Next week the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor will bring “Betty’s Summer Vacation” to the stage as its second full-scale production of the season. Trip Cullman, who has a long list of New York City stage credits, will direct the play, which, according to a release, “is about a young woman who spends the summer at the beach, in a house share that spins wildly out of control.”

    Betty’s idea of a summer vacation is blown to bits when her housemates start to file in. One after another, the inhabitants begin to show their true colors, “which are simply ‘psycho-delic.’ This will be a summer Betty will never forget.”

    The cast includes John Behlmann, Veanne Cox, Celia Keenan-Bolger, Heidi Schreck, and Bobby Steggert.

    Previews begin on Tuesday, with a July 9 opening night. Performances are Tuesdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 7. Wednesday matinees will be at 2 on July 13, 20, and 27, with Saturday matinees at 4 on July 16 and 23. There will be a talkback with the cast after the July 12 show.

    Nostalgia is not a sweet or minor matter, being, fundamentally, a form of boredom  and it is boredom,  not confinement, that will kill the lion. Forget the smiling, amiable, charming elder speaking winningly and dulcetly of the good old days for he (or she) has only contempt for the present and those good old days so deliciously described were as rotten as those of today and as similarly lamented.

    Men were not more manly yesteryear,  nor women lovelier. I’m sure that we would find Helen of Troy a drab and a disappointment and, as for Cleopatra, all that kohl and filleted hair would be dismaying.  Wasn’t she rather short for a queen? There are even those who lament present conflicts who point to past wars as being nobler, more on mannerly, gentlemanly lines and then all those glorious trappings: the horses, the poetry, the delicious sport of it all. Blood, of course, was bluer and redder then.

    Every age, it would seem, sighs for its past  and yet, when it comes to gardens. . . . They were just as lovely then as now. But the one thing that they clad themselves in like some gorgeous raiment and the one covering lacking in today’s gardens was the absence of foul, disturbing, downright disabling noise; The pre-industrial garden was a luxury of sweet repose.

    Instead of blasting blowers, exuding poisonous fumes along with deafening, military bombast, the garden of the recent past had the to and fro of whispers of sweeping brooms and bamboo rakes monitoring debris.

    Hedges were clipped by hand-held shears whose cuts were sweet to the ear rather than the ceaseless sounds of gas or electric pruners. (When they stop in your garden, they begin at your neighbor’s.)

    And the lawn, it was always a pleasant place, even while being mown, with a hand-pushed rotary machine that whirred with the sound of a moist spinning wheel and whose only defect was a tendency to get grass clogs. It got the job done a bit slower, true, but it also saved toads and frogs and butterflies. Far less tribulation to the nerves (did we have nerves then — I mean, in gardens?).

    In yesterday’s patch we had hand-held sheep shears to clip the edges, a bit arduous but awfully good for young muscles. Not the brutalism of today’s trimmers. Or we let the edges just grow and concentrated on lemonade and reading.

    What leaves had fallen in the fall gathered in great piles so wonderful for swan dives and tunneling for children and dogs. We burnt them (yes, we should have mulched and composted) in great slow pyres of delicious scent and I miss that odor so.

A New Gallery,

A Russian Artist

    The Arthur T. Kalaher Fine Art Gallery has opened at 28 Job’s Lane in Southampton and is showing the works of Henry Bing, Richard Ericson, James Knox, Charles Levier, and Abraham Rattner and featuring the paintings of Nahum Tschacbasov. The gallery has another space on Madison Street in Sag Harbor, which is showing large-format works by Tschacbasov.

    Tschacbasov, who died in 1984, was born in Baku, in the southeast of Russia, in 1899. His family settled in Chicago when he was 8, and his painting career began in the 1930s with work done in Social Realism and his satirical depiction of social injustice. He fused Cubism and Surrealism in the 1940s. From the 1950s until his death, he concentrated on the spiritual forces of the past using a Byzantine style. The exhibit is on view through the summer.

Silveira at Kramoris

    The Romany Kramoris Gallery in Sag Harbor is presenting a show of Jorge Silveira’s found-object art through June 30. Mr. Silveira fashions old wooden objects, acrylic paint, and pieces of found rusty metal into eccentric characters. According to the artist, “I really like expressing my creativity by finding discarded objects from the forest and the ocean and turning them into raw and abstract characters or scenes.”

    He is from Uruguay, where many poor people repair and reuse old cars and refrigerators many times over. Coming from that culture, he has said, he finds the things that people toss out here fascinating and enjoys using them in his art.

RVS Looks at Desire

    RVS Fine Art in Southampton will show work by Jeff Muhs in the show “The Color of Desire,” beginning tomorrow with a reception Saturday night from 6 to 8. The new oil paintings represent a softer approach to the artist’s more chromatic paintings. In them he looks again at the still-life genre and breaks down the interrelationships of forms.

    The Southampton native’s techniques and aesthetics are derived from his training at the School of Visual Arts and from a close study of art history. He has also integrated into his work the environment of the South Fork, including its light. He is a sculptor, too, and recently developed a furniture collection that is being shown in Manhattan and Milan.

    “The Color of Desire” will run through June 30.

Soffer’s Abstraction

    Sasson Soffer, who was born in Iraq but was a longtime East Hampton resident until his death in 2009, will have work in a solo exhibit to inaugurate the new Tachi Gallery on Washington Street in TriBeCa. The gallery and show will open today.

    “The Abstract Experience” will be the first of several shows dedicated to Soffer’s work and will remain on view through Aug. 31. The artist was influenced by the European as well as the American tradition of abstract painting. He also worked in sculpture.

    Born in Baghdad in 1925, he took an early interest in drawing. Because of unrest and anti-Semitism in the region, he fled to Iran and then, by the 1950s, to this country, where he studied at Brooklyn College under Ad Reinhardt, Burgoyne Diller, and Mark Rothko. Rothko became a friend and mentor to the artist and a supporter throughout his career. Stella Sands, Soffer’s widow and a novelist, still lives in the couple’s East Hampton house and in New York City.

Giles at Delaney Cooke

    Beth Giles will be the featured artist in an exhibit opening at the Delaney Cooke Gallery in Sag Harbor tomorrow with a reception on Saturday from 5 to 8 p.m. The show is titled “Paper, Paper” and will include handmade paper works in two and three dimensions. The pieces have a circular focus, including circular books with pigmented and textural pages that can be turned for an interactive experience of the work.

    The artist is a printmaker as well, and has a studio on North Haven. She was the director of the Avram Gallery at Southampton College and taught undergraduate and graduate classes in printmaking, papermaking, drawing, and art history for almost 20 years. She now teaches at Suffolk Community College.

Steven Corsano at Boltax

    Steven Corsano, a painter from Springs, will have a new show at the Boltax Gallery on Shelter Island. Opening tomorrow, the show, “Start With a Faucet,” is a series of abstract mixed-media works on paper. A reception will be held on Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m. at which Mr. Corsano’s first film, “Giddy-Up Lunchbox,” will be shown. The exhibit will be on view through July 4.

From Sag Harbor to Milan

    In addition to an opening of Ben Fenske’s work on Saturday from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m., the Grenning Gallery announced this week that Ramiro, one of the artists it represents, and who divides his time between Sag Harbor and Italy, is having a retrospective in Milan on view until July 2.

    The show, “Ramiro: Reality of Two Worlds,” is presented by Fondazione Stelline. The artist is a native of Venezuela who paints in a classical style, striving for images that connect the viewer to the beauty, balance, and truth that can be found by looking closely at nature.

    Many of the works will travel to Sag Harbor for a solo show later this summer at the Grenning Gallery. The Web link for the show in Milan is stelline.it.

Models by Gary Lawrance

    The Southampton Historical Museum is showing “Phenomenal Places: Architectural Models by Gary Lawrance” through Sept. 3. Mr. Lawrance’s firm, Lawrance Architectural Presentations, provides models and development services to architects, landscape architects, and interior designers. He will exhibit a dozen scale models of houses, including many designed by prominent South Fork architects, Francis Fleetwood, Peter Cook, Preston Philips, Kitty McCoy, and Frank Greenwald among them.

    Mr. Lawrance is the co-author of “Houses of the Hamptons, 1880-1930” and writes two blogs, Houses of the Hamptons and Mansions of the Gilded Age.

Schaffner’s Photos

At Canio’s

    Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor will present “Temple and Sky: Images of Korea,” a photo exhibit by Val Schaffner. Mr. Schaffner and his wife, Min-Myn, were owners of the Nabi Gallery in Sag Harbor from 1996 to 2002 and in New York City from 2003 until this year. He is the author of three books of fiction and essays.

    The photos are from years of visiting his wife’s family in South Korea. He finds the country “an enchanting and paradoxical land, at once surpassingly ancient and cutting-edge modern, with a tragic history, a proud culture, and the most Internet connectivity anywhere.”

    On Saturday from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. the store will host a reception for the artist. The show will be on view through July 18.

Reichart Curates

Design in N.Y.C.

    The Center Gallery at Fordham University’s Lincoln Center campus has a design show organized by Lindsay Reich­art of East Hampton and Abby Goldstein through Aug. 15. The exhibit, “Benchmarks: Seven Women in Design, New York,” includes the work of Louise Fili, Carin Goldberg, Paula Scher, Gail Anderson, Eileen Boxer, Elaine Lustig Cohen, and Lucille Tenazas.

    The featured work exemplifies a pivotal point in the direction or approach to design practice by the women, each of whom has made significant contributions to graphic design.

Keefe at Demato

    The Richard Demato Gallery in Sag Harbor will present work by Christine Keefe starting Saturday. The exhibit is called “Walking Into” and represents the artist’s encounters with psychoanalysis.

    Ms. Keefe said she looks “for images that represent a range of emotions, like love and loneliness, envy, passion or fear, uncertainty, and bravery. Most often I decide to reproduce an image on canvas without considering whether or not I am able to paint it.” The resulting paintings are fragmentary or vaguely abstracted.

    The show will open officially with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m. Saturday, but the work can be seen today.

Open Studios This Weekend

    Jim Gingerich, Brian O’Leary, and Walter Us will open their studios to the public on Saturday from 1 to 4 p.m.

    Mr. Gingerich, who paints landscapes and figures in oil on canvas in a frank, realist style, has a studio at 48 Foster Avenue, off Butter Lane, in Bridgehampton.

    Mr. O’Leary paints abstracted works that are somewhat organically inspired yet devoid of color. His studio is at 1 McGrath’s Stand Lane, off Noyac Road at the intersection of Brick Kiln and Stoney Hill Roads in Noyac.

    Mr. Us, who is from Austria, paints South Fork landscapes in what he calls an “American style” distilled from Hudson River School tendencies. His studio is at 14 Rolling Hill Court East in Sag Harbor off Brick Kiln Road and Highview Drive.

“Super Nature”

In Southampton

    “Super Nature,” a group show of work by three young women artists, will open today at the 4 N. Main Gallery in Southampton. The show, which has been organized by Carole Reed, will have a reception on Saturday night from 6 to 8.

    It features work by Meghan Boody, Melinda Hackett, and Kathryn Lynch, each of whom has a connection to the South Fork. The three artists are friends and each is inspired by nature. Ms. Boody uses digital photography to communicate her symbolic approach to the wild nature of the human psyche. Ms. Hackett’s paintings employ symbolism in examining the natural world through lively unicellular beings. Ms. Lynch explores water, wind, and sky in paintings inspired by both the real and the imagined. The show will be on view through Tuesday.

    Packing a whip and a six-shooter, the musical comedy “Destry Rides Again” arrives at LTV Studios for a three-night stand beginning next Thursday.

Based on a 1939 movie starring Jimmy Stewart as the laconic hero and Marlene Dietrich as Frenchy, a tough-talking saloon owner with a heart of gold, the play debuted on Broadway in 1959. Featuring music and lyrics by Harold Rome, it ran for 472 performances.

The tuneful show tells the story of Tom Destry, who is asked to become an assistant deputy and clean up the Wild West town of Bottleneck, run by the villainous Kent. After much fightin’, shootin’, singin’, and dancin’, Destry, who refuses to carry a gun, manages to vanquish the varmints and in the process wins Frenchy’s affections.

The play is the first production of Studio Playhouse, a community theater that has found a home at LTV. Anita Sorel, an actress who lives in East Hampton, directs.

“Destry Rides Again” will be at LTV Studios, at 75 Industrial Road in Wainscott, next Thursday, Friday, June 17, and June 18 at 7:30 p.m. Tickets, which are available online at ltveh.org or by calling 537-2777, cost $15 for adults, $10 for children under 12 and people over 65.

        On Saturday from 5 to 6:30 p.m., Nicole Bigar of East Hampton and New York City will sign copies of her new book, “Koukoumanias: A World of Fantasy,” at a publication party at Book­Hampton on Main Street in East Hampton. The book commemorates 45 years of her creative work.

    Born in Paris and feeling uprooted once her family immigrated to New York, Ms. Bigar, in her own words, “experienced a second birth, a new independence, self-belief, and the opening up of my world through my studies of art.” She studied anatomy and drawing at the Art Students League in between high school and college.

    Coming as she did from a strict family and marrying as a very young woman, Ms. Bigar felt liberated by being able to paint. It seems to have been a refuge from all the expectations those around her had of her, as a daughter, a wife, a mother.

    Once she was living in East Hampton, she met Victor D’Amico, the founding director of education at the Museum of Modern Art, who also started the Art Barge, a summer art school on Napeague, and Willem de Kooning, who encouraged her to explore her own sense of color.

    Over the years, she has had several one-person shows in New York, as well as exhibits at the Arlene Bujese, Elaine Benson, and Nabi galleries. This summer she is teaching a course at the Art Barge that explores Mr. D’Amico’s painting techniques.

    Many of her oil paintings, often in lush colors, feature playful looking, semiabstract goddesses. Archetypal themes suffuse her work. Ms. Bigar took courses at the Jung Institute and has always experimented with new techniques. Her travels to Cambodia, Myanmar, Morocco, Greece, and Norway also influenced her painting. Subjects from Genesis and the Song of Songs appear in her work. She has always been fascinated by the “power of women, the mystery of childbirth. Their attunement to the earth,” as she wrote in her book.

    The recent rave is the tropical look for our gardens, get out and get under the continent, go south, enthuse the pundits, quite forgetting that the gardener up north has always enjoyed the tender and the cosseted and is entirely familiar with their needs. Take the vegetable garden. Eggplant, tomatoes, pepper, cucumbers, basil, to name some, are clearly from southern climes. In the flower garden, we have zinnias, marigolds, calendulas, dahlias, gladiolas . . . and so many others. What are being proposed now are bigger, brassier, and extraordinarily demanding. And I’ve succumbed. I grow brugmansia, even though they are a magnet for white flies, have to be set back into dormancy by a variety of methods the first sign of chilly weather. Images of Ellen Wilmott’s 99 gardeners wheeling agapanthus in huge pots out for summer’s recreation and then wheeling the behemoths back into the greenhouses sweep my mind as I similarly handle my few.

    I’m also raptured by alocasia foliage, which runs from a near chartreuse to an almost ebony and is similarly allergic to cold, although the huge leaves of gunnera manicata do give them a run and are perennial. But an alocasia (or calocasia) in a pot simply has no substitute and once you try one you’re a victim. So many of these plants have to be wheeled, protected against strong sun, and wind is of course out. They are like a pair of grandparents put out for an airing on the lawn and have to be quickly wheeled in first sign of a cloud. (Grandma needs water and Grandpa has had enough sun.) No matter. They are glorious.

    Abyssinian gladiolas are abundant in their blooms and extremely graceful and require no staking but lifting in the fall, free of soil and put in peat bags for the winter if such be your pleasure. They are, however, so delightfully cheap that starting with a fresh batch each season is a clear possibility.

    Lemongrass goes out each late spring and in again for the winter in early autumn and so does rosemary. Don’t be gulled by trumpetings of winter-hardy rosemary. They don’t exist for zone seven. Not reliably, that is.

    That wonderful nursery person Cathy Warren has given Madoo two enormous cycads. I don’t know what I’ll do with them this winter. Eat and sleep under their fronds, I suppose. Somehow I’ll make room for them.

    Of course I have dreams of things citrus, particularly kumquats, and must restrain myself. If only the greenhouse were larger, higher, I would do palms and tree ferns and, of course, avocados. I did once grow the latter from a pit and, after it reached the 15-foot ceiling of the winter house, I was forced to give it away.

    Caladiums come in colors fine and ghastly and should not be dismissed out of hand because most gardeners tend to grow the most obnoxious varieties they can find. Imagine a cosmetics counter under aerial attack and you have the sort I mean. Jelly beans on cocaine.

    Nothing soothes more than a tibouchina in bloom. It says hush.

    The greatest caveat with the tropicals is their outrageous sexuality. They come from a climate of incredibly competitive plant life and thus their foliage and flowers are almost always larger, shinier, more colorful, more odorous, more aggressive than our native species and are apt to overwhelm your planting scheme. I recall a tithonia that tried to eat the inner garden and nearly succeeded. A stewing vegetable if ever I saw one.­

The MTK: Music to Know Festival has announced the daily lineup of performers for the shows on Aug. 13 and 14, and a limited number of one-day tickets are on sale.

On Aug. 13, the performers will be Vampire Weekend, Matt and Kim, Tame Impala, M. Ward, Tom Tom Club, We Are Scientists, Francis and the Lights, Suddyn, and Nicos Gun.

On Aug. 14, Bright Eyes, Cold War Kids, Chromeo, Ra Ra Riot, Dawes, Fitz and the Tantrums, the Naked and Famous, the Limousines, and the Young Empires will perform.

The music will begin at noon each day and end at 10 p.m.

The event is to be held on an unused runway at the East Hampton Airport. Single day tickets are $110, while two-day tickets are $195 and two-day V.I.P. passes cost $645. Tickets are available at musictoknow.com, or at 668 the Gig Shack and Sole East in Montauk, Indian Wells Tavern in Amagansett, Khanh Sports and Eyewear and Nichol's restaurant in East Hampton, Sylvester & Co. and the New Paradise Cafe in Sag Harbor, Flying Point in Southampton, and Jetties Surf in Westhampton.

    If I had to do it all over again (and I just might — why should Hindus have all the fun?) I would come back as a magnolia, and not just any old deciduous one but the king of all of them, magnolia grandiflora, whose blossoms are huge throughout the season, blooming until frost, with a perfume so powerful it makes the knees of gladiators feeble in combat and is an old, old treasure, dating eons past to when giant herbaceous reptiles dined on their blossoms and possibly on their leaves, which (ah, Darwin!) came to be lovely looking but thick and coarse and, I would assume, inedible. It is the only thing about the tree that is substandard and leads to clattery leaf fall to where they lie like hard, dry bits of leather and refuse to compress or rot and must be lifted one by one lest the base of the tree and the general surround of the garden look like a graveyard of foliage, however much a steady rain on them gives a percussive sound as if one’s fingertips were on the high end of a drum.

    I hope I will be planted well so that I thrive. Old hats have it that I am not “reliably hardy” north of Washington, D.C., but that has never been true (Boston even has some and New York City, many) and the warming cycle we are supposedly in has made this caveat obsolete.

    The rule of trowel or green thumb is that I would be delighted to have a southern exposure against a wall (and a house one will do) and a perch of well-draining soil lest winter frosts leak at my roots and cause me to implode.

    I would want, or rather, demand, that I be the old-fashioned grandiflora and not one of the new, winter-hardy magnolias that have lost blossom size in their breeding.

    I would want, no, expect, a cushion of small bulbs beneath me in the spring and, perhaps, a clematis to partially climb me in the summer. Huldine will do.

    I would need compost annually and no cultivation around me for my roots would be close to the surface and they would, as they do now, “resent interference” in the form of stirring, prodding, or manipulation of any kind. Do be sure of my eventual spot because I transplant poorly.

    Snow may gather on my foliage and must be swept off (a broom will do) for although I hold a lot there is a point at which my branches will snap. I really look dreadful when mutilated and take seasons to recover my good looks. I prune well, however, but wrenching and ripping are definitely not my thing.

    I hope you won’t mind but I prefer any other odoriferous plant, shrub, or tree to be a good distance from me as my perfume does not cotton to dilution. An open window will reward, particularly a bedroom one, a study or library one being definitely out as I am too strongly a bar to concentration. Or talk, for that matter, so the living room is out as well.

    I am not a flower for a closed room, nor would I recommend me for the nursery. Give me a hall for happiness to reign.

    Otherwise, I just might return as a quite disagreeable warthog.

    The Hamptons International Film Festival will launch a Summer Sunday Classics series this week at Solé East in Montauk.

    Beginning at 7 p.m., the resort will serve a casual barbecue and cocktails for purchase, with a free outdoor screening after sunset. This week’s movie is “To Catch a Thief” with Cary Grant and Grace Kelly. The 1955 thriller is set on the French Riviera with breathtaking scenery and car chases, all in Technicolor.

    Karen Arikian, the executive director of the festival, said the program offers a selection of “timeless, beloved films that provide an opportunity for movie lovers to enjoy some of the cinema’s most memorable moments,” most of which are appropriate for the whole family. “When is the last time, if ever, that you saw ‘The Wizard of Oz’ on a big screen?” she asked. Audiences can do so on Aug. 28.

    Others in the series include “Summer Stock,” “American Graffiti,” “The Hudsucker Proxy, “West Side Story,” “The Muppet Movie,” “The Fantastic Mr. Fox,” and “Big Night.” Screenings will be listed weekly in The Star’s film calendar.

    The Westhampton Beach Performing Art Center has announced its lineup for the 2011 summer season, including an appearance by Elvis Costello and the Imposters on July 24 and Wynonna Judd on Aug. 13.

    A former movie theater, the center seats 425 and features dance, theater, comedy, and music year round.

    Garrison Keillor, the host of “A Prairie Home Companion” on public radio, kicks off the season in a sold-out show on Sunday. Josh Ritter, an Idaho folk singer, is next on Friday, June 3. Tickets start at $40. Other performances in June include Rita Rudner’s comedy show on the 25th and Patti Lupone the following night. Ms. Lupone, who grew up in Northport, won a Tony Award in 1980 for her performance in the musical “Evita.” Tickets start at $100.

    Kenny Loggins, a Grammy winner with more than 20 million albums sold, performs on July 1. Tickets start at $125. The Blue Sky Riders will open. The next evening, Brian Stokes Mitchell, a Broadway baritone and Tony Award winner who has starred in “Man of La Mancha” and “Kiss Me, Kate,” takes the stage.

    Helping to heat up July will be Grand Funk Railroad on the 10th and Steve Tyrell performing songs from his forthcoming album, “I’ll Take Romance,” on the 17th. Tickets start at $50. The next evening, the Indigo Girls appear in a sold-out show.

    Zoppé, an Italian circus, will also be onstage in July, from the 29th to the 31st. The month will conclude with the comedian Joan Rivers on the 30th and “Golda’s Balcony” with Tovah Feldshuh the following evening. Ms. Feldshuh’s show, about Golda Meir, the former prime minister of Israel, is the longest-running one-woman show on Broadway. Tickets start at $65.

    The New York City Opera will perform on Aug. 6 with young stars of the opera led by George Steel in a $60 show. V.I.P. tickets at $200 come with pre-performance cocktails, dinner, and wine at the Westhampton Country Club. Also in August: the Broadway singer Kelli O’Hara on the 20th, the trumpeter Chris Botti on the 21st, and Pilobolus, a modern dance collaborative, on the 27th. On Aug. 28 there will be two performances of “Angelina Ballerina: The Musical,” based on the PBS Kids series. Showtimes are at 3 and 6 p.m., and tickets start at $15.

    Other performances include Ron White, a comedian, on June 10, Daniel Lanois’s new musical project Black Dub on June 19, Paula Poundstone, a comedian, on July 9, Fab Faux, a Beatles tribute band, on July 16, Sachal Vasandani, a singer, on July 23, “Sleeping Beauty” on Aug. 26, Jane Krakowski, a cabaret singer, on Sept. 3, the singer and songwriter Richard Thompson on Sept. 4, and Keb’ Mo’, a blues man, on Sept. 24.

    Tickets range from $15 to $250, and shows begin at 8 or 8:30 p.m. Further information can be found online at whbpac.org.