How many summer-stock theaters can boast that George Bernard Shaw and Noel Coward gave premieres there? Or that Gene Kelly, Stephen Sondheim, and Liza Minnelli performed there early in their stage careers? The one that can is an old red barn in Connecticut, the former site of a rural tannery.

Richard Somerset-Ward, former head of music and arts programming for the British Broadcasting Corporation, spoke Tuesday in Midtown at a reception for the book “An American Theatre: The Story of Westport Country Playhouse” (Yale University Press). Also giving remarks was Joanne Woodward, the playhouse’s artistic director, who wrote the foreword to the book with her husband, Paul Newman.

In 1931 Lawrence and Armina Langner founded the theater. Its interior was designed to look like the puppet theater Langner had owned as a young boy. Over the years, figures from Helen Hayes and Olivia de Havilland to Groucho Marx and Tyrone Power have graced its stage.

Mr. Somerset-Ward regaled the audience with anecdotes from the theater’s storied history.

Reading the account of Melinda Dickinson, an apprentice at the theater in the summer of 1970, Mr. Somerset-Ward told a humorous story about actor George Gobel, who was then performing in Woody Allen’s “Play It Again, Sam.” In the middle of one performance the curtain had to be lowered due to unexpected circumstances.

“George Gobel had found the raccoon family that used to live under the building, right off the ironing nook in the greenroom. There was a popcorn machine downstairs, and they loved popcorn, so everyone fed them. I came in one afternoon and found Mr. Gobel in the ironing nook, dipping pieces of popcorn into a glass of Scotch and feeding them to the mother and three babies, who were lined up on the ironing board, begging. Later on, during the performance, the now drunk raccoons snuck past Lindsay Law, the stage manager, filed onstage in a little line, and went straight for Mr. Gobel.”

The audience laughed at another story he told, which had been recounted to him by Sharon Giese, who was general manager of the playhouse from 1974 to 1979: “I joined the Playhouse staff as the bookkeeper in 1972. A native of Chicago, I waved goodbye to my parents and drove to Westport in my used Chevy Nova. Somewhere along the road, one of the tires received a cut in it, not fatal to the drive, but it sure looked like it needed to be fixed before I drove much further. My mother had worked at J.C. Penney’s for years, and I had been used to buying many things from Penney’s, including tires. I looked in the Westport phone book to find the location of the local Penney’s. It was on Green’s Farms Road. I asked a member of the Playhouse staff where it was. She wanted to know why I wanted to go there. ‘To buy a tire at Penney’s’ ‘But we don’t have a J.C. Penney in Westport,’ she said. ‘Oh, but you do,’ and I showed her the entry in the phone book. A puzzled silence – then, ‘Yes, I see, but that’s not a store, Sharon, that’s Mr. J.C. Penney’s home!'”

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EMMA LAZARUS, BLOGGER? Poet Emma Lazarus is best known – and usually only known – for her poem “The New Colossus.” Its stirring words “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” are engraved on a plaque at the Statue of Liberty. But Yale emeritus professor John Hollander and Princeton English professor Esther Schor attempted to fill out a fuller picture of Lazarus, a fifth generation New Yorker who was praised by Emerson, Turgenev, and Browning, and who died at age 38 in 1887. They delivered the Joy Ungerleider Lecture on Tuesday at the New York Public Library, which was titled “In the Shadow of Liberty.”

Lazarus, an advocate for causes both Jewish and secular, corresponded with reformer Henry George and had discussions with British craftsman and writer William Morris. “John and I both think she was a pianist,” said Ms. Schor. Lazarus wrote three sonnets to Chopin, and Lazarus’s father left pianos in his will.

Ms. Schor said Lazarus’s sexuality was a subject of speculation, as she had written poems involving love of women and men.

In a wide-ranging discussion, Ms. Schor mentioned Lazarus’s journalis tic writing, which included a series of open letters called “Epistles to the Hebrews,” offering her views on Jewish matters. Ms. Schor said, to audience amusement, “I like to think of ‘Epistles to the Hebrews’ as her blog.”

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PUBLISHING MOMENTS Pat Conroy, the acclaimed novelist, served as master of ceremonies Tuesday at the UJA- Federation Publishing Division Dinner at the Grand Hyatt.

Speaking in praise of honoree Stephen Rubin, the president and publisher of the Doubleday Broadway Publishing Group, was John Grisham, the master of the legal thriller (all 18 published by Doubleday). Mr. Grisham described a good publisher as “a reader, an editor, a scout, a negotiator, a confidant, and perhaps most importantly a handler of fragile egos.” He also engaged in some collegial rivalry with “Da Vinci Code” author Dan Brown (also published by Doubleday) about the lonely summits of best-seller writing. He joked about the embarrassingly homicidal urge “to choke Harry Potter.”

Daisy Maryles, the executive editor of Publishers Weekly, received the Harry Scherman Lifetime Service Award for her 40-year run at the industry’s foremost trade publication. A daughter of Hungarian Holocaust survivors, she grew up on the Lower East Side. She said that, in June 1965, she thought she had gotten a summer job, not realizing it was the beginning of a lifelong romance with books.

Mr. Conroy closed out the evening with a poignant tale of his mother, who read “The Diary of Anne Frank” to a young Mr. Conroy and his sister. She told her children about the concentration camps and finally added, “I want to raise a family that will hide Jews.” His young sister, taken by that morally stirring remark, rang the doorbell of their Jewish neighbor the very next day and announced, “We will hide you.” The baffled neighbor replied loudly in a Yiddish inflected accent, “Vaat?”