Our Fabulous Variety Show, an East End troupe of actors whose theatrical performances help raise money for nonprofit groups, will present “Neverlanded,” an original and contemporary take on J.M. Barrie’s “Peter Pan,” in four performances at Guild Hall this weekend.

The story centers on Peter and Wendy, who run Neverland Incorporated, a conglomerate that manufactures Pixie Elixir, which keeps one from growing up. Perhaps taking a cue from a current presidential candidate, they have built a wall to keep out Captain Hook and his band of pirates.

Conceived, created, directed, and produced by the troupe’s founders, Anita Boyer and Kasia Klimiuk, “Neverlanded” features the company’s largest cast to date. Comedy, drama, inventive dance numbers, and musical stylings led by Amanda Jones, the musical director, are designed to entertain audiences of all ages.

Performances will take place tomorrow at 7:30 p.m., Saturday at 2 and 7:30, and Sunday at 2. In addition, the company will present “Neverland After Hours,” which will include Broadway show tunes, comic monologues, and musicians, dancers, and actors, on Sunday evening at 7.

Tickets for “Neverlanded” are $15 to $55 and can be purchased at ourfabulousvarietyshow.org. For “Neverland After Hours,” the tariff ranges from $20 to $35, with student tickets priced at $10. 

The weekend’s programs will benefit Southampton Fresh Air Home, a residential camp facility that accommodates severely as well as mildly and moderately physically challenged children at recreational summer camps in South­ampton.

The East Hampton Historical Society has announced an extended run of its exhibition “Living Well Is the Best Revenge: A Jazz Age Fable of Sara and Gerald Murphy.” The show will continue through Oct. 30, and two tours, led by the society’s director, Richard Barons, will take place, the first on Saturday at 10 a.m., the second on Oct. 29, also at 10. Laura Donnelly, the Murphys’ granddaughter and a food writer for The Star, will participate in the Oct. 29 tour.

The Clinton Academy Museum on Main Street is open Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sundays from noon until 5. There is no admission charge, but donations are welcomed.

Guild Hall’s JDTLab will present “Revisiting Steve,” a free evening of cabaret celebrating the musical theater career of Stephen Sondheim, on Tuesday at 7:30.

Valerie diLorenzo, an actress and cabaret singer who appears regularly at venues in New York City and on the East End, will perform selections from Sondheim shows, among them “Gypsy,” “Into the Woods,” “Sweeney Todd,” “A Little Night Music,” and “Follies.”

Ms. diLorenzo has brought her one-woman shows to such Gotham cabaret haunts as the Laurie Beechman Theatre, the Metropolitan Room, the Triad, Judy’s, Tatou, Don’t Tell Mama, the Duplex, and the Tunnel. She will be accompanied by Barry Levitt, her longtime collaborator.

A free concert by the classical pianist Quynh Nguyen will take place Sunday at 3:30 p.m. at the Montauk Library. Ms. Nguyen studied at the Hanoi Conservatory of Music and the Gnessin Institute in Moscow before graduating from the Juilliard School and Mannes College of Music and earning a Doctor of Musical Arts at the CUNY Graduate Center. She has performed throughout the United States, Asia, and Europe. The program will include compositions by Mozart, Schubert, and Chopin.

“Break Out!,” a new two-woman play written and performed by Maggie Bloomfield and Susan Dingle, will be presented at the Southampton Cultural Center on Saturday evening at 7.

Based on poems from “The Hollywood Dreamcatcher” by Ms. Dingle and “Broadway, Booze, and a Song of Life” by Ms. Bloomfield, the women tell, in poetry and prose, stories of their youthful misadventures that reflect on their histories, friendships, and how they found their voices in sobriety. Tickets to the show, which is directed by Andrew Botsford and Rosemary Cline, are $20. A reception will follow the performance.

The East End Arts School is now offering music lessons for children and adults of all ages and levels at two locations: its main campus in Riverhead and its new satellite campus at the Bridgehampton Child Care and Recreational Center. Classes are given in one-on-one and group settings in voice, piano, guitar, and band and orchestral instruments. More information is available at eastendarts.org/school/.

“Archaeology From Egypt to Your Own Backyard,” a talk by Stephen Harvey, an Egyptologist and director of the Ahmose and Tetisheri Project at Abydos, Egypt, will take place Sunday at 4 p.m. in the Havens Barn at the Shelter Island Historical Society.

Dr. Harvey will discuss his current investigation of the last pyramids built by Egyptian royalty, at the ancient site of Abydos, as well as his discoveries from his own Shelter Island backyard — pottery, glass, and other items related to the 18th and 19th-century lives of Samuel Havens and his descendants. Tickets are $8.

The Parrish Art Museum and BOMB magazine are presenting a free reading at Marders in Bridgehampton on Saturday afternoon at 5. Hosted by Betsy Sussler, the magazine’s editor, the program will feature Candace Bushnell, Jacqueline Weld Drake, Gregory Hedberg, and Charline Spektor.

“Richard Pousette-Dart: The Centennial” has just opened and will be on view through Oct. 15 at the Pace Gallery in Manhattan. It is an opportunity to recall the art and career of Pousette-Dart, who died in 1992 at the age of 76. He was one of 18 artists who became known as “the Irascibles” when they came together to sign a letter of protest to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, rejecting as too conservative the museum’s exhibition “American Painting Today — 1950.” The protesters posed for what became an iconic photograph, appearing in Life magazine. This image canonized Pousette-Dart as an Abstract Expressionist of the first generation. 

Yet Pousette-Dart stood apart from many of the other painters who came to be known as Abstract Expressionists. For example, he did not frequent the Cedar Tavern, where Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and others mingled and got drunk and into fights. Pousette-Dart, I learned, was a pacifist, a vegetarian before it was fashionable, and a conscientious objector during World War II. As early as high school in 1935, he published an essay urging the end of militarism in education and doing away with war.

Some veterans of the combat at the Cedar Tavern, such as Pollock or de Kooning, decamped to East Hampton, where they fostered a community of Abstract Expressionists. Pousette-Dart and his wife, however, retreated, in 1951, northwest across the Hudson, eventually settling in Suffern, N.Y., less than two dozen miles from Valhalla, the town where he grew up. Both his similarity to the other Abstract Expressionists and his uniqueness stand out at the Pace Gallery.

The current show features a catalog with a brief essay by Martica Sawin, an art historian and longtime friend of the artist, and paintings from the late 1940s to the early 1980s. Among them, my favorite is “Blue Image” (1950), a vertical canvas stained with thin blue pigment under an overlay of black lines, some of which outline characteristic Pousette-Dart forms. He sometimes cut out similar shapes in brass as wearable objects or small sculptures meant to be held in one’s hands. 

Other pictures, such as “Hieroglyph of Light” (1966-67) or “Soft Edges of Time” (1976-82), are the type he made by using paint right out of the tube and piling it on to create a very thick layer of pigment in different contrasting colors. I recall talking with Richard in his Suffern studio when he would pick up a tube of paint and continue to add on daubs of pigment directly from it. He produced many of these exuberant canvases that seemed to grow organically — like a coral reef, or encrusted like barnacles on a shell in tidal waters. 

Light for Pousette-Dart — as here evident in his wide canvas “Yellow Amorphous,” of 1950 — was as important as it was for Turner or Monet. Like them, as he once told the Guggenheim Foundation in applying for a grant, he, too, was inspired by nature. But instead of painting light based on direct observations of nature, his light was spiritual, as it had been for earlier artists like Rembrandt or Blake, both of whom he admired. 

Bright light to suggest the sacred also features in the work of his friend and contemporary Mark Rothko, who painted many of his classic canvases in an intense palette of yellows, oranges, and reds, evoking for many observers both fire and light. Pousette-Dart’s canvases now on view suggest his mystical thinking, about which I used to hear from him in casual conversation. 

I first met Richard Pousette-Dart while working with Robert Hobbs on a show called “Abstract Expressionism: The Formative Years,” which opened in Ithaca on March 30, 1978, at Cornell University’s Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, where Robert was curator. After a stop at a venue in Tokyo, this show came that fall to the Whitney Museum, where I was curator of the Edward Hopper Collection.

I got to work on this show after another curator dropped off the project and the Whitney’s director wanted someone else to collaborate. I had recently written on a number of Abstract Expressionist artists in my dissertation, “Wassily Kandinsky and the American Avant-Garde, 1912-1950.” So when Robert and I divided up the monographic essays, his list included Pousette-Dart, on whom I had not yet written. At the same time, I was curating another show, "Synchronism and American Color Abstraction, 1910-1925," which opened at the Whitney on Jan. 24, 1978. Its book-length catalog was my first book ever, so time was too short to do much further research beyond collaborating on choosing works to be included and writing essays on the Abstract Expressionists whose work I had already researched. 

By the time that I met Richard, I had already taken an interest in his father, Nathaniel, a painter and an art writer from Minnesota, who, like Edward Hopper, my main focus at the Whitney, had studied with Robert Henri. In 1915, when Richard was just a year old, his father had commissioned illustrations from the struggling Hopper for a magazine published in Minnesota called The Farmer’s Wife. In 1922, Richard’s father, then the art director for the George L. Dyer Company, had visited Hopper’s studio and been unimpressed, dismissing his canvases as in “the Henri tradition.” Even after Hopper was recognized with his first retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art and just as the show left for its Chicago run, Nathaniel Pousette-Dart, in Art of Today in January 1935, disparaged Hopper, writing that he found his “direction and bent when he saw the work of Charles Burchfield.”

His accusation provoked Hopper to dispute the allegation that his work derived from Burchfield, his friend. Hopper’s response turned out to be one of the taciturn artist’s most acute statements ever: “In every artist’s development the germ of the later work is always found in the earlier. The nucleus around which the artist’s intellect builds his work is himself; the central ego, personality, or whatever it may be called, and this changes little from birth to death. What he was once, he always is, with slight modifications. Changing fashions in methods or subject matter alter him little or not at all.”

Hopper’s statement, I suspect, had a profound impact on me, not yet a biographer of artists but fascinated by their early development. I soon learned that Richard, Nathaniel’s son, who was 18 at the time his father accused Hopper of following Burchfield, was already becoming an artist in his own right and had published an essay in his high school magazine called “I have been called a dreamer.” Here, in 1935, years before World War II began in Europe, was the first hint of the developing character that would turn him into an Abstract Expressionist and a conscientious objector.

Richard’s paintings in our 1978 show stood out both for their distinctiveness and for their strength. I enjoyed meeting him and his wife, Evelyn. Some few months after the show closed, Richard called and asked if I would deliver a paper on his work for a conference called “Abstract Expressionism: Idea and Symbol,” organized at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville by the art historian Elizabeth Langhorne. I agreed and made several trips to the Suffern studio.

My investigative instincts and the questions I asked prompted Richard to climb up to his studio’s attic loft and pull down his early, illustrated notebooks, which he had not opened in decades. I was quite excited by what I found, particularly the thought processes behind his early imagery, his unpublished poetry, and his responses to World War II. 

On Oct. 13, 1979, I spoke on “Richard Pousette-Dart’s Painting and Sculpture: Form, Poetry, and Significance.” Richard as well as Lee Krasner also attended the conference and participated in an artists’ panel that was intended to respond to the scholars’ papers. A third participant, Robert Motherwell, had been announced but did not attend. Richard loved my talk and asked me to publish it, which I did in March 1980 in Arts Magazine, as “Richard Pousette-Dart’s Emergence as an Abstract Expressionist.” 

My discoveries in this article stimulated others to take a new look at his art and his development, which has framed subsequent writing about him. In conclusion, I distinguished between Surrealist-inspired Abstract Expressionists and Pousette-Dart, who looked directly at the art of primitive peoples, finding common ground in their spirituality: “Unlike Rothko, Pousette-Dart eventually abandoned his tragic world view and accompanying preoccupation with death in favor of a personal mysticism through which he could view the world in a more optimistic light — a light that would often manifest itself as a presence in his paintings.”

Some who read my 1980 article on Richard found it groundbreaking and may have wondered why I abandoned my research on his art and never again wrote about his work. This strange and abrupt retreat from my discoveries reveals something about that era — and not only in the art world. 

Over the course of my research, which I conducted in my time off from curatorial work at the museum, I had many Saturday lunches in Suffern with Evelyn and Richard. He had shown me his photographs and repeatedly asked me to sit for a portrait, telling me that he liked the shape of my head and neck. Some of his other subjects had been Rothko, John D. Graham, Barnett Newman, Betty Parsons, and Esta Kramer (the art critic Hilton Kramer’s wife).

One day I posed for him, sitting on a stool in his second-floor studio in the old stone house. He worked slowly and took several shots. To fight off the chill in that studio, I wore a thick Irish wool turtleneck sweater over a thinner turtleneck, obscuring the long neck that Richard had said that he wanted to capture. He did not complain. He took frontal and profile shots. He then had me pose holding up one of his small brass sculptures of a dancing female figure that he made and gave to me. A fern in the background suggests a primitive theme, but he skillfully blurred it, contrasting it to my hands, which were in sharper focus. A lot of what made his black-and-white photographs so distinctive came out in the printing process, which he did himself and which I did not observe. As in his paintings, Richard paid careful attention to light.

Not long after those sittings, when I needed a photograph for the book jacket of my catalog for a 1980 Whitney show, “Edward Hopper: The Art and the Artist,” I asked Richard if he had one that I could use. He sent me one large original black-and-white print of a view of my profile, which I foolishly forwarded to the publisher, who returned it with a small tear. After 1996, when the Metropolitan Museum acquired and showed his large, imposing early canvas, “Symphony Number 1, The Transcendental” (1941-42), which we had featured in our 1978 show, I retrieved the photograph from its envelope, framed it, and put it on display. 

"Symphony Number 1, The Transcendental" is 10 feet wide. Richard told me that Rothko asked him why he painted so large and who would buy such works. It was too big to show at his dealer Marian Willard's gallery. It was not until March 1947 that he was finally able to show this work with Peggy Guggenheim at her New York gallery, Art of This Century. In the catalog for this show, he wrote: "I strive to express the spiritual nature of the universe." 

As much as I admired this painting and other works by Pousette-Dart, during the years following my 1980 article, the Whitney Museum director expressed impatience that I had not yet completed work on the Hopper catalogue raisonné. I had to focus on the demands of that complex project. Meanwhile, I had pages of notes and photocopies from Richard’s notebooks. I expected to pursue my discovery and to write further about his work.

Not long after I left the Whitney, in 1984, Richard asked me to write an essay on his work for a show of his art that the art historian Sam Hunter was organizing for the museum in Fort Lauderdale in 1986. This request was not long after I had declined a publisher’s offer that I serve as an unacknowledged ghostwriter for Hunter’s textbook on American art, but I decided to accept this assignment to work with him in order to honor Richard’s request and pursue my discoveries about his art and life. I heard immediately from the museum, which sent me a contract for a lecture during the show, which I signed and returned. I gave that lecture on April 17, 1986.

As for the essay, I was amazed when Sam Hunter told me that I could not write anything further about my discoveries. He had given my published article and the assignment to write on Richard’s development to his Princeton graduate student Paul Kruty. I took this in without comment, but was rather taken aback. Then, not long afterward, one summer day, Hunter, who was several decades my senior, called me at home with the request, more like a command, that in order to discuss the essay that I would write on Pousette-Dart’s latest work, I should come out to his home in New Jersey and meet with him by his swimming pool. 

The thought of traveling to New Jersey to meet by a swimming pool made me uncomfortable, especially since I had no car and no way to depart once I got dropped off. Thus, I politely declined and suggested that we meet in the city. Hunter soon notified me that he had dropped my essay from the project. It was, however, too late to cancel my lecture. This turn of events so distressed me that I never pursued my discoveries or wrote on Richard’s work again.

With so many stories of women facing similar situations around employment in the news recently, I cannot help but recall how I had to walk away from this situation and then had to suffer in silence. I knew that I could not “play ball” or hang out by a lonely swimming pool in New Jersey. I had in fact invested my very best time, energy, and intellect into researching and framing Richard Pousette-Dart’s artistic development. Hunter disrupted that process, making it untenable for me to continue it, even as he handed off my discoveries to his male graduate student (who became an architectural historian). Mindful of women who still encounter such inappropriate behavior as I endured, I think that it’s time to shine some light on such treatment. 

Another essay in Hunter’s catalog quotes Richard: “Everything is really infinitely good. What is important is to go far enough in whatever you do so that you come to everything; you burst through the particular to the universal.” 

Gail Levin is the guest curator for “Connie Fox and William King: An Artist Couple,” opening at Guild Hall on Oct. 23. She has lived part time on the East End since 1989. 

Columbus Day weekend on the South Fork has come to mean much more than changing leaves and pumpkin picking. It is also a weekend of film, lots and lots of film. The Hamptons International Film Festival will begin on Oct. 6, and by the time it ends on Oct. 10, it will have screened 126 films, both features and shorts, narrative and documentary.

On Tuesday, the festival announced the bulk of its lineup. It includes some of the most anticipated releases of the Academy Awards season as well as smaller, independent films and a selection from 32 countries. They include 8 world premieres, 9 North American premieres, and 20 United States premieres. The full guide is on the festival website.

The festival has already announced that it will open with "Loving," Jeff Nichols's film about a couple whose Supreme Court case did away with laws against interracial marriage in 1967. It will close with Ewan McGregor's interpretation of "American Pastoral," Philip Roth's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about a charmed family whose world falls apart after a violent crime.

In between, it will screen films such as the much-praised "Manchester by the Sea," Kenneth Lonergan's film about a working-class family in a Massachusetts fishing village; "Strange Weather," starring Holly Hunter as a grieving woman in the Deep South trying to find answers so she can move on with her life, and Mike Mills's "20th Century Women," a drama set in Southern California in the late 1970s. These five films, already generating awards buzz from previous festival screenings, will cost the most at $35 per ticket. 

This year's Spotlight Films will include "Bleed for This," "Burn Your Maps," "Christine," "Julieta," "La La Land," "Lion," "Moonlight," "The Ticket," "Una," and "Wakefield." Tickets for Spotlight films, which have or are likely to have distribution, cost $28. The remaining films are $15 per ticket.

The festival's World Cinema selections represent smaller films from both domestic and foreign sources. The documentary titles are "Davi's Way," "Score: A Musical Documentary," "Supergirl," "Marathon: The Patriots Day Bombing," "Franca: Chaos and Creation," "Santoalla," "Bunker77," "Sour Grapes," "Into the Inferno," "God Knows Where I Am," "Jeremiah Tower: The Last Magnificent," and "Southwest in Salem: The Story of the San Antonio Four."

The narrative films include "All the Beauty," "The Teacher," "Blue Jay," "Goldstone," "Original Bliss," "The Red Turtle," "Don't Call Me Son," "Frantz," "Halal Love (and Sex)," "The Handmaiden," "Lost in Paris," "The Salesman," "Lovesong," "Donald Cried," "I, Daniel Blake," "Paterson," "Toni Erdmann," and "Under the Shadow."

The festival's View From Long Island section will feature "Legs: A Big Issue in a Small Town," which is also a World Cinema selection. It follows the battle between Sag Harbor Village and two homeowners, Ruth Vered and Janet Lehr, after they install a massive Larry Rivers sculpture on the exterior of their house. "The Killing Season," a documentary that will run on the A&E channel, will follow the investigation of the deaths of 10 sex workers whose bodies were found UpIsland on Gilgo Beach. Two short films will be included in this section: "Black Swell" by Jacob Honig stars Richard Kind, and "Prophet of Plas-teek" by Joshua Cohen takes place in Montauk. "God Knows Where I Am," is a documentary produced and directed by two brothers, Todd and Jedd Wider, with Long Island connections.

There will be eight programs of short films in addition to those running before features. They are the Narrative and Documentary Short Film Competitions, New York Women in Film and Television: Women Calling the Shots, Away We Go! Shorts for All Ages, Student Short Films Showcase, Get Off My Cloud, Runs in the Family, and Tilt & Shift. 

This year's Films of Conflict and Resolution section will feature titles such as "Disturbing the Peace," about former soldiers from Israel and Palestine becoming peace activists. Other films include "Fire at Sea," about the European migrant crisis; "I Am Not Your Negro," based on a James Baldwin manuscript, and "Sonita," about an Afghan refugee who dreams of becoming a rapper.

The Compassion, Justice, and Animal Rights section will include "The Ivory Game," about attempts to save African elephants from extinction, and "Unlocking the Cage," a film by Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker of Sag Harbor. It looks at the efforts of an animal rights lawyer trying to establish case law to ensure animals have legal protection.

New this year is a Focus on Norwegian Film showcase for films tied to Norway. They will include "All the Beauty," "Late Summer," "Magnus," and "It's Alright."

"Betting on Zero," the audience favorite from the festival's SummerDocs series, will have an encore screening. Another special screening will take place on Oct. 9 at the Southampton Arts Center, which will show "The Addams Family," the 1991 film, based on the Sagaponack resident Charles Addam's cartoons.

The festival box offices, at Obligato on Main Street in East Hampton and the Southampton Arts Center on Job's Lane, open on Monday, when individual tickets will go on sale. Ticket packages and passes are on sale now at hamptonsfilmfest.org. The official festival guide will be published by The Star and distributed with this Thursday's issue of the paper.