Guild Hall’s Busy Week
The Hamptons International Film Festival and Guild Hall will present a screening of “The Searchers,” John Ford’s 1956 western, on Saturday at 7 p.m. Alec Baldwin and David Nugent, the festival’s director, will host the program.
Although it got mixed reviews upon its release and received no Oscar nominations, “The Searchers” is now considered by many, including the American Film Institute, among the 10 best American films of all time.
John Wayne plays Ethan, a Civil War veteran who discovers that Comanches have murdered his brother, sister-in-law, and nephew, destroyed their farm, and kidnapped his niece. Ethan embarks on an obsessive five-year hunt for the tribe that has been likened to Ahab’s quest for Moby-Dick. Ethan is so racist that he plans to kill his niece because she has become “the leavin’s of a Comanche buck.”
In a review written in 2001, Roger Ebert asked, “Is the film intended to endorse their attitudes, or to dramatize and regret them? Today we see it through enlightened eyes, but in 1956 many audiences accepted its harsh view of Indians.” Tickets are $22, $20 for Guild Hall members.
The John Drew Theater Lab will present a free staged reading of “Honor Killing,” a new play by Sarah Bierstock, on Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. The play is a drama about a female American reporter who travels to Pakistan to cover the honor killing of a young Pakistani woman for The New York Times.
Blacklisted from Pakistan, she is deported to Dubai, where she discloses to a male colleague that the gang rape of her sister in the United States impelled her to cover the story. The two struggle with his reaction, and the play explores the treatment of women in both Pakistan and the U.S.
“Honor Killing” is the first play by Ms. Bierstock, an actress who has performed extensively off Broadway, in regional theater, and in film and television, where her recent credits include “Boardwalk Empire” and “The Good Wife.”
Eileen Obser, author of “Only You,” a memoir about growing up in Queens in the late 1950s, will present the next Table Talk on Sunday at 11 a.m. Her talk, “Writing About Your Life,” will focus on various aspects of memoir writing, a subject she has been teaching for more than 20 years. The talk is free and will be followed by coffee and light refreshments.
The John Drew Theater will also be the scene of a free performance by the students of the Speaking Shakespeare workshop on Wednesday at 7 p.m. The program is the culmination of a two-month class taught by Morgan and Tristan Vaughan, who hold master’s degrees from the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Academy for Classical Acting at George Washington University.