STONINGTON – A father-daughter artistic duo will team up tonight in Stonington for an art exhibit and performance protesting the Iraq war.

Paintings by Robert Shetterly will be displayed at the G Watson Gallery and an excerpt from a work-in-progress directed by Caitlin Shetterly will be performed at the Stonington Opera House. The event will begin at 7 p.m. at the gallery, where Robert Shetterly will discuss his work. Then, the audience will walk to the Opera House for the performance.

Two actors will perform a selection from the first act of Tony Kushner’s unfinished play, “Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall Be Unhappy.” The event is produced by the Winter Harbor Theatre Company.

Caitlin Shetterly, 28, and her childhood friend Tessy Leblanc, 28, recently formed the Portland-based company and Pond Road Productions, a multi-media division that will produce radio, film and Internet projects. Their mission is to produce works that are “emotionally, politically and socially daring.”

“We are producing theater to challenge people,” said Caitlin Shetterly in a phone interview Monday. “We’re having a talk-back session afterwards so people can talk about their reactions to the paintings and the piece and the war. We started with this piece because we were concerned about the war and how to create a way to discuss it in a meaningful way.”

Kushner has successfully mixed politics and art for more than a decade. His hit plays include the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Angels in America” and “Home/Kabul,” a pre-9-11 piece that deals with the Taliban and the treatment of women in Afghanistan.

The New York-based playwright said in a March interview with a Lafayette, Ind., newspaper that by tackling fresh political topics, he runs the risk that his plays will lose their relevancy later. To combat that, Kushner tries to create characters who are complex and identifiable with audience members.

He published a scene from his work in progress in The Nation earlier this year and made it available free to anyone who wanted to perform it. In the two-person scene, Laura Bush arrives in heaven to give one of her book readings to a group of dead Iraqi children. Their angel Scurria explains to her how each child died, then turns to the First Lady and tells the children that Mrs. Bush has come to explain “why you had to die.”

The piece directed by Caitlin Shetterly was first performed in Portland in April. Two performances at the St. Lawrence Arts Center were sold out. She said Monday that Kushner’s play “dovetailed nicely” with her father’s most recent series of paintings.

So far, the Brooksville painter has completed 20 portraits, including recent paintings of a bearded Abraham Lincoln, W.E.B. DuBois, the early 20th century African-American intellectual and civil rights leader, and Dorothea Lange, a pioneering photographer who chronicled the life of Japanese-Americans interned during World War II.

They are part of a series of 50 paintings that Robert Shetterly is working on that portray Americans who tell the truth. When they are finished, he plans to donate the collection to a library or museum.

Like Kushner, the 56-year-old artist struggled to find a way to express his views about the political climate in America following the Sept. 11 attacks and the war with Iraq. When he started the portrait series, like the playwright, he was dissatisfied with the country’s leadership. Instead of satirizing current national leaders as Kushner did, Shetterly turned to America’s past.

“America has had a lot of great and courageous leaders in every realm – politics, culture, religion,” he said in an interview earlier this year. “There are people who have dared to tell the truth. My own anger about being lied to, I was transferring it from me to these people who had been great truth-tellers and letting it come through them.”

While there is no charge for the Stonington event, donations to support future productions of the Winter Harbor Theatre Company will be accepted. Caitlin Shetterly said that each performance of the production costs about $800 and added that fund-raising efforts are ongoing.

Tonight’s event will begin at 7 p.m. at the G Watson Gallery in Stonington. Robert Shetterly’s portrait series will be on display at the St. Lawrence Arts Center, Portland, June 23-July 31. Donations can be sent to Winter Harbor Theatre, 60 Mellon St., Portland, 04101.