The Choral Society of the Hamptons closed its 2017-2018 concert season on Saturday at the Bridgehampton Presbyterian Church with two performances of Carl Orff’s “Carmina Burana,” one of the most popular and widely performed pieces in the choral repertoire. A large and expectant audience attended the 5 p.m. performance, which I attended.

“Carmina Burana” was written in 1937 for chorus, large orchestra, two pianos, boys choir, and a great deal of percussion, and it was intended for performance with dance and visual elements. Its immediate popularity resulted in a reduced version for two pianos and percussion, allowing for performances by choirs with more modest resources, and that version was offered on Sunday.

Much of this variation and contrast in the work is provided by Orff’s use of orchestral color and by sudden juxtaposition of varying masses of choral and orchestral sound. Orchestral color is not available in this arrangement (approved by Orff) but rhythmic energy and dynamic contrast remain intact and opportunities abound for passionate and compelling music making. 

The Choral Society singers, three soloists, and a children’s chorus, as well as the pianists and percussion ensemble, under the direction of the society’s music director, Mark Mangini, made the most of them.

These opportunities lie in the text and Orff’s masterful setting of 24 medieval poems bewailing the fickleness of fortune and extolling the pleasures of love, lust, drinking, and other pursuits of young students in the 11th hrough 13th centuries. (In “Catulli Burana,” part of the triptych to which “Carmina” belongs, cautious community choruses have occasionally chosen to omit translations of some of the racier portions of these texts.)

The opening movement, “O Fortuna,” may be the most widely familiar choral music in the repertoire, having been used in movies, commercials, television shows, video games, and figure-skating routines. The piece literally begins with a bang, the tympanist nearly punching a hole in the skin of his drum and the singers entering a beat later with a full-voiced howl at the cruel and inevitable mistreatments dealt by fortune.

The effect of this opening is enhanced by an immediate contrast with a soft but intense elaboration of fortune’s misdeeds, the intensity largely achieved by precise and emphatic articulation of consonants. Mr. Mangini’s careful preparation of the singers was immediately evident here, as it was in the handling of the many changes in meter and tempo that Orff frequently calls for and in the accelerando in “Tempus est Iocundum.”  

The chorus was joined by three soloists, all of whom acquitted themselves wonderfully, if very differently. The soprano Chelsea Shephard’s rendering of one of the most song-like numbers was a pleasure, the tenor Alex Guerrero sang the famously high solo of the roasted swan in a wonderful and pure non-falsetto, and the baritone Dominic Inferrera dazzled with range and expressivity.

The full ensemble was joined twice by the well-prepared young singers from Sag Harbor’s Pierson School, and the contrast with the mature voices of the soloists and Choral Society singers was delightful. Their presence had the added benefit of bringing parents, grandparents, and siblings to a performance they may not have attended otherwise. One has to wonder, though, what the families of these talented youngsters, primarily girls, may have thought about the decision to substitute them for the boys choir that sings about virginity making them “frisky.”

The intensity, passion, and confidence of the chorus seemed to increase as it approached the closing numbers so that as fortune’s wheel completed its turn with the reprise of “O Fortuna,” the tricky dissonances of the opening measures were sung with more conviction and more bite than they had been at the opening. The opening may have been more effective in the second performance. The reprise, however, made for an exciting and satisfying close to the concert.

Despite the preparation and passion of the singers, the skill and precision of the pianists, Konstantin Soukhovetski and Matthew Maimone, and the power provided by the five percussionists, the absence of full orchestral accompaniment was frequently felt and occasionally almost fatal. This was especially true in some of the slower movements.  The orchestra is often called upon to provide lengthy sustained chords underneath the singers, something a piano is simply unable to do. If it is a matter of resources, the Choral Society deserves the kind of support that would allow it to provide community performances with orchestra when that is what the composer calls for.

The intelligence and creativity of Mr. Mangini’s concert programming has been obvious for some time, but whether coincidental or intentional, the choice of “Carmina Burana” to close the 2017-2018 Choral Society concert season provided a wonderfully creative and subtle counterweight to its performance of the German Requiem to conclude last season. 

Using biblical texts, the Requiem offers listeners a classically refined, tender, and sublime expression of solace in the aftermath of life lost.  “Carmina Burana” sends a full-throated barbaric “YAWP!” over the roofs of the world, a lusty “Song of Myself” based on poems written seven or eight centuries before Whitman’s and one that celebrates and extols life lived fully (if a bit recklessly) while roundly cursing fortune for whatever troubles are encountered along the way.

  The pairing and contrast, a year apart, of “Carmima Burana” with the Requiem, even if it requires that listeners exercise long-term memory, is a wide musical embrace of the varieties of human experience. It is also an understated touch of satisfying brilliance.

Two performances by the Strangemen Theatre Company and Dancers for Good, a benefit evening of dance, will take place at Guild Hall during the next ten days.

A nonprofit troupe founded in 2010 by graduates of the State University at Purchase Acting Conservatory, the Strangemen Theatre Company focuses on developing original plays and encouraging collaboration between artists from different disciplines.

“Bernie and Mikey’s Trip to the Moon,” which will be performed on Monday evening at 7, is a new play by Scott Aiello about an Italian-American family in Chicago in the 1990s that experiences the challenges and joys of raising a child with a cognitive disability. Billed as a dark comedy, the story includes a baseball bat, Elvin Presley, the moon, and a giant pot of tomato sauce.

Inspired by Greek mythology and poetry, “The Shape of Stars,” written and directed by Frank Winters, is a modern story of a family torn apart by grief whose individual members struggle to come to terms with their agony. It will be presented July 23 at 7 p.m.

Both plays will be followed by garden receptions with the casts and production teams. Links to tickets, which range from $30 to $90, can be found on Guild Hall’s website.

Seven dance companies will participate in Dancers for Good on Friday, July 20, at 7 p.m. The evening will honor Chita Rivera with the Lifetime Achievement in Dance award, and Bebe Neuwirth with the Dance Humanitarian award.

The program will include performances by the Amy Marshall Dance Company, Carolyn Dorfman Dance, the Martha Graham Dance Company, Pam Tanowitz Dance, Rock the Ballet, Eryc Taylor Dance, and the Paul Taylor Dance Company.

Proceeds will benefit the Actors Fund, which offers a broad spectrum of programs and services to help meet the needs of those who work in entertainment and the performing arts. 

Dancers for Good is a nonprofit formed in 2015 by Michael Apuzzo, a dancer with the Paul Taylor Dance Company, and Eric Gunhus, an event planner and Broadway performer, to produce dance festivals that support of the arts.

Tickets, available at eventbrite.com, range from $150 for the show only to $500 for preferred seating and an after party, with a limited number of $50 tickets for students and senior citizens.

A new version of “Confessions of a Mormon Boy,” which earned its writer-director Steven Fales an Outer Critics Circle Award nomination for outstanding solo performance, will have five performances at Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor from Tuesday through Sunday. The production is directed by Scott Schwartz, Bay Street’s artistic director, who will also direct when the play opens Off Broadway in the winter of 2019.

“Confessions” premiered in 2006 at SoHo Rep in New York City and has been performed since then at venues large and small throughout the world. “Steven and I have worked together on the play,” said Mr. Schwartz, “so it’s a new version. There will be a few projections, a few sound cues, but it’s really Steve up close, personal, and pretty raw. The show is funny, and it’s pretty graphic at points, so it’s definitely for adults.”

Born in Provo, Utah, Mr. Fales is a sixth-generation Mormon whose life ranged from missionary work in Portugal and marriage with two children to conversion therapy, excommunication from the church for homosexuality, and work in New York as a high-end male escort.

When it played at the Coast Playhouse in West Hollywood in 2007, David C. Nichols of The Los Angeles Times wrote, “Wrenchingly honest, hilariously jubilant and utterly clear-eyed, Steven Fales’s autobiographical testimony of his journey from devout Mormon to Manhattan escort is an exceptional achievement to rank beside the best of the solo genre.”

“Confessions” is the first play in “Mormon Boy: A Trilogy of Solo Plays.” “Mission Statement” focuses on his time as a missionary “in which he shows things about the rituals and the clothes of the Mormon church that aren’t really public,” according to Mr. Schwartz. “Prodigal Dad” focuses on the efforts of his wife to prevent him from ever seeing his children. 

Performances of “Confessions of a Mormon Boy” will take place Tuesday at 7 p.m., next Thursday and July 21 at 5 p.m., Friday, July 20, at 8 p.m., and July 22 at 2 p.m. Tickets range from $40 to $135, $39.99 as an add-on to a 2018 Mainstage subscription. 

The Old Whalers Church in Sag Harbor will host a reading of “Mission Statement” on July 22 at 7 p.m. and of “Prodigal Dad” on July 23 at 4 p.m. Tickets are $10, and seating is limited.

Lucie Arnaz in Concert

A few tickets remained as of press time for “Lucie Arnaz: Songs From My Musical Past,” which will be performed at Bay Street on Monday evening at 8 as part of its Music Mondays series.

In this new concert, the Emmy Award-winning Broadway star will perform iconic songs from some of Broadway’s greatest shows and share anecdotes and recollections about her co-stars, directors, and musical collaborators. Tickets are $59 to $89.

The Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival is celebrating its 35th anniversary from July 19 to Aug. 19. The festival, with 18 concerts and a variety of interesting and stimulating events, has “Destination America” as its overarching theme.

“There’s something about taking stock at year 35, and thinking about life and how lucky we are that we have all these wonderful musicians, and all the influences they bring to bear in their music making,” Marya Martin, the founder and artistic director of the festival, said last week. “Out of 43, something like 25 were not born in America, though most of them now live here. I think it is only five that we bring from various countries.”

“And then of course you look at the composers. There are many composers who came to this country because they loved what America had to offer, but also to escape the ills of the world; and America was one place where they could come and realize a wonderful life. There’s something about celebrating that at our 35th year that just feels very right.”

Among the composers represented will be those who came to flee oppression (Igor Stravinsky, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Arnold Schoenberg, Bohuslav Martinu, and Erno Dohnanyi), to explore new opportunities (Antonin Dvorak, Astor Piazzolla, Osvaldo Golijov, and Zhou Tian), or are the descendants of slaves (William Grant Still) or immigrants (Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Philip Glass, John Corigliano, Paul Moravec, Bruce MacCombie, George Tsontakis, Mark O’Connor, Jennifer Higdon, and Kenji Bunch), according to a release.

Highlights of the month include a free outdoor concert on July 25, “Waltzes to Tangos: The Art of the Dance,” on the lawn of Bridgehampton Presbyterian Church. The annual Wm. Brian Little Concert on Aug. 10 will be a Bernstein centennial program that celebrates the friendship between Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland, with “Appalachian Spring” and songs by the two composers performed by the internationally known opera star Nathan Gunn, who is appearing with the festival for the first time. At the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill on Aug. 6, what has been an annual event is also now an all-American program, called “American Dreams.”

Composers from the established European canon will also be well represented, including Haydn, Strauss, Fauré, Schubert, Schumann, and Franck, and in programs such as “Mozart and More” (Aug. 5), Beethoven’s “Ghosts” (Aug. 15), and “An Evening of Bach Sonatas” (Aug.18).

The actor Alan Alda will appear for his third season as the host and narrator for a composer portrait program, in two performances, on July 22 and 23, a Sunday and a Monday. This time it will be about a well-known composer, Felix Mendelssohn, and his less-well-known sister, Fanny Mendelssohn, who is only recently receiving the attention and exposure that she deserves.

“Fanny was younger, a female, and told by her father to stop composing, find a guy, get married, and have kids,” Ms. Martin said. “Sometimes, to get her works played in important places, Felix would put his name on the score!” The concert will include her Piano Trio in D minor.

“The Octet is the last piece of music on the program, is such an incredible piece, and Felix composed it when he was 16. It’s mind-boggling!” she said.

A benefit concert will be held at the Atlantic Golf Club in Bridgehampton on July 28, with selections from Vivaldi’s and Piazzolla’s “Four Seasons,” as well as John Corigliano’s “Voyage for Flute and Strings,” composed in 1983. Cocktails and dinner will follow.

As a new feature to kick off this anniversary year, there will be five “pop-up concerts” by the Rolston String Quartet at various times on July 19 to 21 at the Southampton Arts Center (a family program on July 19), the Parrish, the Hampton Library in Bridgehampton, the John Jermain Memorial Library in Sag Harbor, and the Madoo Conservancy in Sagaponack. The Rolston Quartet, from Canada, won first prize at the Banff International String Quartet Competition in 2016.

Ms. Martin said that in trying these pop-up concerts as a “prelude” to the main season of events, “we wanted to do something that celebrated community and music. It’s an experiment, and I’m excited about it.” These 45-minute concerts are free, but reservations have been strongly recommended.

The festival has commissioned two new compositions that will be premiered this summer: On Aug. 5, a work for piano and winds by Mr. Bunch will have its first hearing, and for the last concert of the season, on Aug. 19, “A New Country,” a commissioned song cycle by Mr. Moravec, a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, will be premiered, heard alongside the music of Brahms.

“I wanted to include Walt Whitman because I’m a big fan, and because he’s a Long Islander,” Mr. Moravec said last week. “I also wanted it to be about New York, and about immigration. There are three texts from Walt Whitman, excerpts from his larger poems, all having to do with his attitude toward immigration, and in particular to the Irish, which was the large immigrant group in his own experience. I had never set ‘The New Colossus’ by Emma Lazarus, the poem that is about the Statue of Liberty and New York as an immigrant port,” with the familiar line, “Give me your tired, your poor. . . .”

The mezzo-soprano for that occasion will be Jennifer Johnson Caro, who made her Metropolitan Opera debut in the 2009-10 season, and since then has logged more than 100 performances at the Met. “A New Country” is scored for flute, violin, viola, cello, and piano, in addition to voice.

“One thing to listen for is the use of musical motifs. . . . There are motifs that occur throughout and across the five songs, and they give musically a unified whole composition,” Mr. Moravec said. “The songs are integrated structurally and musically. The work has an abstract dramatic arc across the five songs.”

An earlier festival commission by Mr. Moravec, the 2003 Chamber Symphony for Flute, Clarinet, Horn, Violin, Cello, Piano, and Percussion, will be heard again on Aug. 12.

Among the performers who are returning to the festival’s roster are Frank Huang, violin, Richard O’Neill, cello, Stewart Rose, horn, Gilles Vonsattel, piano, and Kenneth Weiss, a Long Island native, harpsichord. Onstage for the first time will be Ran Dank, an Israeli pianist, Alexi Kenny, a violinist and the recipient of a 2016 Avery Fisher Career Grant, and Mihai Marica, a Romanian-born cellist.

Locations, days, and times of the concerts vary, but the six “Core Classics” concerts take place on Sundays and Wednesdays at 6:30 p.m. at the Bridgehampton Presbyterian Church, the festival’s main venue. Tickets range from $35 to $75 for most concerts, $10 for students. Much more information, including a complete list of performers and works to be performed, is at bcmf.org, or 631-537-6368 after Sunday.

“I’m really excited about our anniversary, because in the old days, people said to us, ‘This will never work,’ ” Ms. Martin recalled. “And we were putting on only two concerts that first year. ‘Save your time and energy. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.’ It’s not that I want to prove them wrong, but I’m so very happy that there is a place here for good music.”

On a late June afternoon, Larissa Lockshin’s clay sculpture “Ruby Slippers” beckoned guests into a backyard that has been transformed as an art installation. An implied yellow brick road led to an unassuming building that has made a significant mark in the art world since it was launched as the exhibition space East Hampton Shed seven years ago.

Leading the endeavor is Hadley Vogel, whose parents, Paul and Abigail Vogel, own the property. Her eclectic background and interests include art making,  exhibition space management, teaching preschool, and — in keeping with her father’s line of work — bookbinding.

Recently, Ms. Vogel has started to unify her different metiers in ways that imply something transformational, a cross-pollination already generating new hybrids.

Until last year, the Shed’s exhibitions had relied on an ever-evolving partnership between Ms. Vogel and Nate Hitchcock. “We started this in 2012 and the whole thing is so intimate and personal,” she said while giving a tour of the current exhibition, “Moondog,” a celebration and reunion of all the artists who have exhibited with them either in the space or at art fairs.

Although they were dating at the beginning of the partnership, it continued through other relationships, relocations, family illnesses, marriages, and engagements. The idea to show art in this bijou space came from Landon Metz, a friend of Mr. Hitchcock’s from preschool, who visited them at the East Hampton house, where her mother had set the shed up as an open air bedroom. Joking, Mr. Metz said he wanted to show there; Mr. Hitchcock liked the idea and they went forward.

“Nate has a really great eye. He chose most of the artists we put in the shows,” Ms. Vogel said. After he moved on, it took a year to figure out how to continue it in the way she wanted. Last winter, she decided to have a reunion show. “I wanted to reinvigorate people’s curiosity. Over the last six years, there’s been so many great artists who have shown here and I wanted to remind people that we’re here, and I have my finger on the pulse — or Nate did — but I’m going to keep that going.”

Even so, “It’s going to move into a new direction. I don’t have the foresight to say this person’s art is what everyone will want, but we can all build on that,” she said. “Some of our artists have become untouchable in their popularity, but they still want to show here.”

During this same period, Ms. Vogel helped support her father’s business, started her own bindery in Queens, and began offering bookbinding classes for adults and children, all while commuting between New Jersey and Long Island City, and East Hampton on weekends. She also began a series of artist collaborations, where she would make a book based on content the artist provided.

For the “Moondog” exhibition, she has produced books with two artists. Brian Kokoska and Ms. Lockshin. Ms. Lockshin’s binding is pink and dotted with tiny studs to look like quilting, which complements her floral abstractions. Mr. Kokoksa’s book is covered in black and white stripes and stretched over a polymer clay that gives three-dimensional form to the motifs of the drawings within it.

In her own bookbinding, she has incorporated a longtime interest in fashion. Her books, boxes, passport holders, and other luxury goods employ accents such as mink dyed in Day-Glo colors, leather barbed wire, piercings, tattoos, and other edgy touches.

Her aesthetic is often inspired by found and repurposed objects and scraps from her father’s commissioned projects. “I wouldn’t be in the bookbinding business without him.” His studio has always been in the house, first in the basement and then a renovated garage next to the kitchen. During busy times, it was all hands on deck, and she and her mother became de facto apprentices. “Yeah, I had no choice, it was ‘Hadley get in here,’ ” she said with a laugh.

“At Christmas time he gets orders that are very repetitive, like 100 books for a publishing house that they give to best-selling authors and celebrity authors as a present. It was redundant enough that he could show me one step, and then I would be able to do it over and over.”

She made her first book at the age of 10. It recorded her attendance at church and became a scrapbook of sorts. 

As a Ross School student from 8th through 10th grade, she devised an internship with her father one semester. “I made a book and documented everything we did. We took a lot of trips” to the Grolier Club and other different book clubs in addition to the Morgan Library, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Cloisters to look at their medieval manuscripts.

At Columbia College in Chicago, she tried fine art, but ended up studying art history. She began her curatorial and exhibition management career in Chicago and then at the Shed. Last year, she returned to the fold to help out while her father was ill. Then, she had an opportunity to take some of his extra equipment and set it up in a space in Long Island City, which became the Queens Bindery.

There she makes books, desk and personal accessories, signs, business cards, and other items. “One of the differences between what my dad does and what I do is that someone will ask for something specific and then he’ll make it for them. I make things like that as well, but I also like to play around.”

In traditional luxury binding, archival materials, which remain pristine, are the sine qua non. Such materials are not necessarily for her. “The materials I use for my clients’ projects are all archival, but the skins I use for mine are not necessarily archival, because I can’t get the same color or treatments in archival materials.” She uses archival-quality tape and glue, however, for both types of projects.

Comparing work done on computers to books, which imply permanence, she said, “Things on a computer can always be altered and deleted. I wonder if there will be a little renaissance with book- binding. It’s both a luxury good and a physical thing you can hold,” she said.

“I don’t know if being archival is that important to me. We’re not living in a very archivally minded society, especially when we’re buying things.” She also works with a lot of artists whose work will take much effort to preserve. “It’s not about how it will look in a certain amount of time, but how we’re all relating to these objects now.”

“Moondog” is on view through Sunday. Opening on Friday, July 27, is “Tiny People,” an exhibition of work by Abby Lloyd and Chris Retsina.

The Havana Film Festival New York, which features movies from and about Cuba, Latin America, and Latinos in the United States, will show two this summer at the Southampton Arts Center.

“The Last Suit,” an Argentine feature about an aging Jewish tailor who leaves his life in Buenos Aires to find the man in Poland who saved him from certain death at Auschwitz during World War II, will be shown on Sunday at 5 p.m. Tickets are $10.

“Juan of the Dead,” a Cuban zombie horror-comedy, will be screened on Aug. 5.

Strange, how a man once regarded as the personification of political evil can grow in stature in the memory. Many in the audience at Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor, where “Frost/Nixon,” the 2006 Peter Morgan play, is onstage until July 22, probably cheered when Richard Milhous Nixon, the 37th president of the United States, announced his resignation in 1974 following the Watergate scandal. Three years later, they probably cheered again as his mea culpa drama was broadcast during a famous series of television interviews conducted by the British talk show host David Frost. 

Yet those very people, now a few decades older, as well as anyone too young to have tuned in to the Watergate trials, might well watch this smartly entertaining Bay Street production and believe the crooked president to be something of a tragic Shakespearean figure, a strangely sympathetic character, and also a jokey one, the one we most want to see in order to have an entertaining evening at the theater. 

And therein lies the unanswerable question: Was my inability to register exactly how slippery a fellow the former president really was a result of the playwright engaging in some well-documented invention of the actual events? (Historians have criticized the writing for crossing the line of dramatic integrity, calling it a gross misrepresentation.) Or does Tricky Dick simply seem remarkably less egregious, so much more intelligent, thoughtful, and, well, presidential compared to the current occupant of the office? Or even the one from 2001 to 2009, during which time the play was written.

Conjecture seems pointless. Instead, go see this staging, in which Daniel Gerroll plays Frost, a feckless star-chasing interviewer who finds his purpose, and Harris Yulin is Nixon, a man mired in his own ambition who loses his. It will be impossible to watch the show and not marvel at the relevance of the material today — the fake news, the political trickery, the controversy regarding Trump and Russia, and all the eerie resemblances to Watergate.

Sarna Lapine, with impressive Broadway and national credits, directs, and, after the first 20 minutes or so, which seem to lack a sense of stakes, the action grows into something altogether more substantial. The one-on-one interviews, which we can watch onstage or above on a series of television screens in terrifying close-ups, are superb. The set, designed by Wilson Chin, aided by clever video projections by Tal Yarden, is flexible and simple, easily morphing from studio to aircraft to hotel room to Nixon’s San Clemente mansion, where he lived in virtual exile. 

Our guide and narrator of the stage version of events is Jim Reston, the journalist who spent years methodically documenting Nixon’s crimes. Reston’s anger and resentment against the man he held personally accountable for bringing down America is superbly portrayed in this show by Christian Conn. Others in supporting roles as Bob Zelnick, the experienced television newsman, and John Birt, Frost’s trusted friend and producer, seem to treat Nixon as though he were merely a querulous relative. But Stephen Lee Anderson as Swifty Lazar, Nixon’s publicist, is thoroughly entertaining as the showbiz caricature that Swifty truly was.

Mr. Morgan, one of Britain’s leading contemporary dramatists, specializes in stories that pit two figures against each other, David and Goliath-like. In the screenplay for “The Queen,” produced in 2006, Prime Minister Tony Blair convinces a frosty Queen Elizabeth to show her grieving subjects more empathy over the death of Princess Diana. In “The Last King of Scotland,” produced in 2007, a young Scottish doctor discovers the brutality of Idi Amin and leaves him, and the monstrous Amin is devastated. So, in this story, Frost must win out over Nixon, even if that technically never happened. 

The playwright once described “Frost/Nixon” as “a thinking person’s ‘Rocky’ . . . written as a clash of two contrasting characters — one man who felt enormously comfortable with human beings and one who wasn’t comfortable at all.”

As a result, a brilliant duel unfolds onstage, with both men fighting for their professional lives. Mr. Gerroll, a British native with numerous stage, television, and film credits, bears an uncanny resemblance to the television interviewer and simply smashes it as the loafer-wearing, flip, and flashy showbiz version of the considerably more substantial and accomplished character that Sir David Frost was, even in the 1970s.

Credit must go, too, to Mr. Yulin, the veteran actor who owns lengthy screen and stage credits and, even at 80, is still enjoying a robust career. It cannot be easy to inherit a role that Frank Langella embodied and dominated on Broadway and in the 2008 “Frost/Nixon” film adaptation, for which he received an Oscar nomination. But Mr. Yulin attacks the role of a man so caricatured by decades of political satire that he has almost ceased to be real. He brings back to life Nixon’s weird syncopated cadences and his fascinating mix of grandness and vanity, as well as the self-serving evasiveness. 

Despite the 20-year age difference between the actor now and Nixon in 1974, there is an almost disturbing resemblance between the two when Mr. Yulin’s Nixon-like face is projected on screens behind the live interview taking place onstage. We watch as Nixon, the master stonewaller, is confronted into telling the truth.

Own your actions out loud, Frost tells Nixon, whose face appears contorted by agony, “or you’re going to be haunted for the rest of your life.” We all know from history what Nixon will say, but still, at that moment, we collectively wonder if he’ll actually confess.

In real life, Nixon took a fee of $600,000 for the interviews and 20 percent of the profits, though the playwright omits any mention of the latter. Many have since pointed out that it was completely in Nixon’s interest to offer more than just a polite exercise in parrying.

So, the play stands as a reminder of accountability and truth and the way that our perceptions, more so today than ever before, are influenced by media images. The video projections repeatedly demonstrate what Nixon so prophetically observed: “Television and the close-up create their own set of meanings.”

Through masterful sleight of hand, the account of David Frost’s post-Watergate television interviews may not always be faithful to fact. But then, neither was Richard Nixon.

The fourth annual Southampton Jewish Film Festival, a program of seven films, most accompanied by guest speakers, will open on Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. at the Southampton Arts Center with “Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness,” a portrait of the writer, whose stories became the basis of the Broadway musical “Fiddler on the Roof.” The evening’s speaker will be Kenneth Kaufman, the author’s great-grandson. 

The festival will continue on Tuesday evenings through Aug. 21. The complete schedule can be found at southamptonjewishfilmfestival.com. Tickets are $15 and available at brownpapertickets.com.

In Sag Harbor, Temple Adas Israel is hosting Erev Seret (Movie Night), a series of free screenings with themes drawing on Jewish and Israeli culture and history. Next up is “1945,” a Hungarian film about two Orthodox Jewish men who return to their village in Hungary soon after the end of World War II only to encounter suspicion and fear of their motives. Now in limited release, “1945,” which has been shown in numerous festivals in the United States and abroad, will be shown on Wednesday evening at 7.

Upstairs Art Fair

The second iteration of the Upstairs Art Fair will take place tomorrow through Sunday on the top floor at 11 Indian Wells Highway in Amagansett. The fair is organized by Harper Levine of Harper's Books in East Hampton and Bill Powers, the founder of half gallery in Manhattan, as an alternative to the big tent art fairs that until this summer have been common to the Hamptons.

The fair, which is free and open to the public, is a mix of New York City and East End galleries: Ceysson & Benetiere, Eric Firestone, half gallery, Halsey McKay, Harper’s Books, Magenta Plains, New Release, Nicelle Beauchene, Nino Mier, Rachel Uffner, Rental Gallery, the Fireplace Project, yours mine & ours, and 56 Henry.

A preview will take place tomorrow from 4 to 6 p.m., with an opening to follow between 6 and 8. The fair will be open Saturday and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Naama Tsabar at Fireplace 

A solo show of work by Naama Tsabar will be on view at the Fireplace Project in Springs from tomorrow through Aug. 5, with a reception set for Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m.

A former member of a punk band, Ms. Tsabar fuses elements from visual art and music in her multimedia installations and performances. Her 2015 installation at the Museum of Art and Design, for example, combined speakers, amplifiers, piano strings, and microphones to create a gallery-sized instrument that viewers could play by pulling the piano strings.

Two at Studio 11

Studio 11 at the Red Horse Plaza in East Hampton will open an exhibition of work by Steven Miller and Ronald in ’t Hout with a reception on Saturday from 5 to 7 p.m. The show will continue through Aug. 5.

While much of Mr. Miller’s earlier steel sculpture assumed totemic shapes and scale, his recent work uses that material to create simple forms in three dimensions that take their cues from Russian Constructivism and de Stijl.

A Dutch artist and architect living in France, Mr. Hout is showing tempera paintings on canvas and wooden panels that can stand on their own or be arranged in a variety of formal combinations.

Marc Dalessio at Grenning

A solo show of paintings by Marc Dalessio will open at Greening Gallery with a reception Saturday from 6:30 to 8 p.m. and remain on view through July 30. A plein air painter based primarily in Florence, Mr. Dalessio recently spent several weeks on the East End painting local scenes ranging from Main Street in Sag Harbor to Indian Wells Beach in Amagansett to the East Hampton Jitney stop.

The show will also include works created on his frequent travels, including a sweeping view of Big Sur, and a selection of still life paintings from Mr. Dalessio’s studio.

Five at White Room

“Captivate,” an exhibition of work by five artists, is on view at the White Room Gallery in Bridgehampton from today through July 29, with a reception set for Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m. The show will include abstract paintings by Linda Sirow, Brian Craig, and Martha McAleer, mixed-media work by Kat O’Neill, and sculpture by Dennis Leri.

“Lyrics and Form”

“Lyrics and Form,” a group exhibition, is now on view at Mark Borghi Fine Art in Bridgehampton. The show includes work by John Chamberlain, Willem de Kooning, Sam Francis, 

Helen Frankenthaler, Sam Gilliam, Keith Haring, Hans Hofmann, Kenneth Noland, Alex Katz, Hedda Sterne, Rudolf Stingel, Sean Scully, and Andy Warhol. 

New at Keyes Art

Keyes Art in East Hampton will open “Indispensable” with a reception Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m. The show, which will run through Aug. 4, will include work by John Chamberlain, best known for his crushed car sculpture, Nathan Slate Joseph, who creates abstract compositions of galvanized steel, and David Slivka, a member of the New York School who worked in a broad range of mediums.

The gallery’s current exhibition, “About the Light,” which features paintings by Willem de Kooning, Mary Abbott, Lester Johnson, and Darius Yektai, will continue through July 29.

In Agawam Park

“Art in the Park,” a show of photography, painting, sculpture, and mixed-media work by members of the Southampton Artists Association, will be on view in Agawam Park in Southampton Saturday and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

If the word of mouth hasn’t reached your ears yet, there is an exhibition in East Hampton that incorporates the best of virtual reality in visual art today, taking it to a place that automatically sets the bar higher and redefines its possibilities as an artistic medium.

Laurie Anderson’s “Aloft” and “Chalkroom,” which are being offered this summer at sites as diverse as North Adams, Mass., and Tasmania, in addition to Guild Hall, were created with Hsin-Chien Huang, a Taiwanese artist she first met in the early 1990s. “Chalkroom” won the premiere award for best VR experience at the Venice Film Festival last year.

It was Mr. Huang’s idea to collaborate on the project, she told The Sydney Morning Herald: “I don’t really like the bright, flat, and brittle gaming world.” She wanted something “dustier, weirder, and more like being in your own mind.” The result was “Chalkroom.”

“Chalkroom” offers several choices of experiences, different rooms, and opportunities to fly. “Aloft” is more straightforward. As you’re seated on a plane, it breaks apart and you are free to float in the atmosphere as objects loom toward and around you. 

In the past few years, some less commercial art fairs have hosted galleries that presented VR pieces, marked by that super-bright gamelike quality Ms. Anderson described. One piece at last year’s Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial exhibition attracted attention for its violent subject matter. Jordan Wolfson’s “Real Violence” created a street scene in which a virtual beating takes place. The world of Ms. Anderson and Mr. Huang, however, is truly one of their own invention.

Taken out of context, each VR experience can stand on its own. Guild Hall could have presented them that way as well, a summer sideshow to another entirely different exhibition. Instead, Christina Strassfield, the director of the museum and its chief curator, devotes the other main gallery to large-format drawings from Ms. Anderson’s series “Lolabelle in the Bardo,” inspired by the death of her dog in 2012 and her dedication to the practices of Buddhism. There is also a video viewing room where patrons can lounge on giant beanbags or sit on benches along the back wall while a selection of her video work is played. Included is “Heart of a Dog,” a feature-length meditation that explores love and loss through an expressionistic tableau of her own musings, facts and figures, artwork, and more Buddhist teachings. 

When considered in this milieu, the VR pieces seem more akin to reflections on the afterlife. With “Aloft,” it is hard not to think of the crash of TWA Flight 800 (which took place some two decades ago just 35 miles away in the water off East Moriches) as the walls of the aircraft begin to dissolve. The crash caused many to wonder what it felt like to be suspended in the sky before falling into the sea. This piece offers a chance to contemplate that experience anew in a far less terrifying way. In “Chalkroom,” the user chooses the experience, but the otherworldliness of the rooms conjures a post-death landscape, perhaps an in-between state not unlike the Bardo. 

Her charcoal drawings, each 11 by 14 feet, with their explanatory text accompaniment, could be a large-format adult picture book. They are immersive and larger than life in many instances. In “June 5,” Lolabelle’s giant rat terrier face looms over the space. Other drawings, each titled with a date after the dog’s death, depict various stages of her passage through the Bardo.

Anyone who has lost a significant other, best friend, close relative, or treasured pet (or all of the above) will come away from these experiences, particularly the “Heart of a Dog” film, woozy and somewhat untethered. Encountering them all in the same afternoon can be overwhelming, but worth the disquiet that might result. Ms. Anderson is a mesmerizing guide and tracker in these worlds she has created. She speaks to a part of the brain that seems deeper than waking consciousness. Those who follow her will be richer for the experience and perhaps subtly transformed by these series of worlds, even after they re-emerge into the bright light of a summer day.

After taking a while to catch on, there are now often waits for the VR experiences, which can be reserved through Guild Hall’s website for specific time slots. It is well worth reserving and going before the exhibition closes on July 22.