PETERBOROUGH, N.H. – In a pink dress and wearing a zinnia in her hair, 10-year-old Montana Schultz walked onto the outdoor stage surrounded by tall, spindly trees to answer the telephone.

“I think that’s for me,” she said in front of 600 people Saturday night, delivering the first line of a onetime-only production of “L’Heure Bleue,” Act I of the Landlines public art project.

The project, the work of 300 local volunteers orchestrated by interdisciplinary artist Anna Schuleit, was the centerpiece of MacDowell Colony’s centennial celebration. As the word “Landlines” implies, telephones figured prominently in the piece, which the Colony commissioned and developed for a year and a half, to celebrate what the Colony calls “the only ‘forbidden’ item in the artist studios.”

Miss Schultz’s phone was unlike any she’d ever answered in this rural, arts-friendly town of 6,000, where she lives and studies acting. It was made of papier-mâché, hung from wires, and three times her size. When she picked it up, she looked like she might topple under weight of the receiver.

But as soon as she spoke into it, in apolished, confidenttone, shemade clear who had command.

“Hello, this is MacDowell,” Miss Schultz said, pausing dramatically before firing off her next lines: “Who’s calling? Do you want to hear a poem? What about ‘100 High Street’?”

A moment later, poet Major Jackson of Bennington, Vt., and Miss Schultz were standing at microphones reading a 100-line poem they had assembled from 100 books by 100 poets who have been residentsoftheColony. Thetitleoftheir effort, “100 High Street,” refers to MacDowell’s street address.

“Do what you can”/”Summer will have its flies”/”Mystery is the cause of everything” were lines they read individually before their performance reached a crescendo of overlapping voices. It was a powerful, moving start to an hour-long performance composed of twelve vignettes highlighting the retreat’s history and artistic output. The scenes, all of which began with the ringing of a telephone on stage, were created and performed by pairs of colonists and local children selected after rigorous auditions.

A novelist, Martha Southgate of Brooklyn, and a tenor saxophonist, Nellson Perry,16,ofPeterborough, presented a piece about novelist James Baldwin’s time at the Colony. Mr. Perry, who spent the summer at Litchfield Jazz Camp in Connecticut, played a low, jazzy blues line while Ms. Southgate told of Baldwin’s experience as the only African American in residence there. “He came here even though he was afraid of the woods,” she said.

Marian MacDowell started the retreat in 1907 on land she’d bought and built cabins on so that artists, who included her husband, Edward, a well-known American pianist and composer, would have a quiet place to work; unfortunately, Mr. MacDowell died the next year and is buried at the Colony. One piece recalled Mr. MacDowell’s campaign to raise money after the devastating Hurricane of 1938 crushed the roofs of two studios.

“I’m traveling around the country asking everyone to donate $1,” Tory Eichler, 10, of Peterborough, said acting the part of Mrs. MacDowell. “The MacDowell dream means too much to be snuffed out by a hurricane.”

The founder of the New York theatercompanyLoneWolfTribe, puppeteer Kevin Augustine of Brooklyn, performed a comic scene with Chris Commander, 13, of Antrim, N.Y., that imagined composer Leo Smit trying to finish a piece in his studio in 1954. Mr. Commander literally helps catch the note the composer needs to finish the piece — it is floating above his head in a bubble.

Mara Zrzavy, 13, of Peterborough, was the star of a short horrorfilm-style piece in which the previous occupants of her studio return as ghosts to haunt her. When she pulls out her cellular phone to call for help, it has no reception.

When the performance of Act I concluded, the applause was loud and long, but the crowd quickly dispersed because “Landlines” was far from over. There was a centennial cake to try in the Amphitheater — actually 100 cakes made by local bakers — and there were 100 “tree phones” scattered around the 450-acre campus that started ringing.

In Act I, the answering of phones was a device to launch written and rehearsed vignettes; Act II explored the telephone’s actual use as a means of communication, and was a more spontaneous, chaotic, hard-to-describe work of art.

The technology driving this portion of the event was for the most part old-fashioned telephone wire, miles of it, donated by Verizon and strung through trees or placed on the ground by local volunteers under the direction of an electrical engineer turned public art project participant, George Bossarte of Cambridge, Mass. The wiring all ran through a window into a barn and was connected to two switchboards brought out of retirement for the occasion by a former telephone operator who collects switchboards, Chris Ricciotti of Rockland, Mass.

The high-tech part was the intake of calls from past residents of the Colony through digital T1 lines. These were unscrambled into 72 POTS (plain old telephone signal) lines that rang at the switchboard, where operators connected them to the phones attached to trees.

The artist who conceived the project, Ms. Schuleit, wore her hair in braids done by six girls from Peterborough: a hairstyle she chose to evoke the complex system of telephone lines she’d managed to assemble.

“This is the most exciting coming together of various elements of a publicartprojectI’veeverseen,”she said as four operators struggled to keep up with the incoming calls.

A sculptor currently at the Colony, Melissa Stern of Manhattan, had a long talk with a poet named Joy who called from Times Square.

“She was reading a poem to me, and then boom, the line went dead. It was kind of poetic in itself,” Ms. Stern said.

The editor of Yankee Magazine, Jamie Trowbridge, who was at the Colony, talked with a playwright in New York, Julia Pearlstein, about a play she wrote while in residence.

Mr. Ricciotti operated the switchboard for three hours straight, navigating a maze of wires and chords and flashing lights.

“There were amazing conversations,” he said just after connecting the last call for the night, from a dialer in the barn to one by tree #10. Sometimes he connected a bunch of calls together, creating party lines.

Although there were glitches — people in the woods quickly figured out it was best to pick up a phone and wait for a connection, rather than waiting for it to ring — hundreds of conversations took place.

By Sunday afternoon, when Act II of “Landlines” resumed for a final three hours, the kinks had been worked out. Participants at MacDowell were able to find the phones more easily in daylight.

“Artists are just like everyone else. They have interesting and fascinating things to share,” Mr. Ricciotti said.

agordon@nysun.com