Arts

    Ross Bleckner has lived and worked part time on the Sagaponack property that was once Truman Capote’s writer’s retreat since 1990 and has been showing regularly since the 1970s. Yet, it has been four years since his last solo show in New York City at Mary Boone, his gallery for almost four decades. It makes the exhibition of works he has made in the past year now on view an event, a chance to reflect on the direction he has taken familiar themes and some new directions in style and subject.

    The Hamptons International Film Festival’s Screenwriters Lab, now in its 13th year, will take place this weekend at the c/o The Maidstone Hotel in East Hampton.

    Sponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the workshop pairs established screenwriters, directors, and producers with those still emerging in the field for individualized mentoring sessions.

Art in Flower in Sag

    The Romany Kramoris Gallery in Sag Harbor is holding its third annual spring flower show today through May 8. The exhibition features floral-inspired paintings, pottery, and blown glass by Muriel Hanson Falborn, Arianne Emmerich, Laura Rozenberg, JoAnne Carter, Maria Orlova, Coco Pekelis, Joyce Brian, Taffi Laing, and Richard Udice. A reception will be held Sunday from 3 to 5 p.m.

New at Drawing Room

    Those who thought the recent film version of “August: Osage County” was shrill might find the current production at the Southampton Cultural Center under Michael Disher’s direction more to their liking.

    Chilling winds didn’t deter some 75 members of the local art community from attending the first public meeting of the East Hampton Arts Council last week at Ashawagh Hall in Springs. The organization, which is co-chaired by Jane Martin and Kate Mueth, aims to serve as a liaison to the Town of East Hampton on issues regarding the performing, literary, and visual arts and to make the arts a more integral part of the community.

    “Second Time Around” is, appropriately, the second album by Black and Sparrow, a duo that shares a 26-year history, in one form or another. Almost two decades after their debut release, Klyph Black and John Sparrow, veterans of the top Long Island band Rumor Has It, returned to the studio to record 10 new original songs. The band will perform these and more at a release party for the album on Saturday at 8 p.m. at the Stephen Talkhouse in Amagansett.

    The Bridgehampton Museum’s Parlor Jazz series resumes Saturday evening at 7:30 with “A Session With Dr. Feelgood,” featuring Sari Kessler, a jazz singer and songwriter whose resumé includes not only a long list of performances and recordings but also a Ph.D. in clinical psychology.

    Ms. Kessler has performed with Phoebe Snow, Tootie Heath, and Gene Bertoncini and recorded or performed with the jazzmen Freddie Bryant, Greg Bandy, Michael Kanan, Howard Alden, Harvie S, Willard Dyson, and Ron Affif, among others.

    Performance is on the menu at the Watermill Center this weekend. Tomorrow evening at 7:30, Jayoung Chung, a resident artist from Korea, and Nixon Beltran, a performer and dancer, will present a 40-minute multimedia work combining movement, sound, drawing, and text. A reception and conversation with the artists will follow the performance. Reservations are free but required, and may be made at watermillcenter.org.

    For those who prefer roots music to jazz or classical, Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor is presenting “Way Out East . . . a Journey in Song” on Saturday at 8 p.m. Nancy Atlas, Caroline Doctorow, and Inda Eaton will collaborate to perform original works from their respective repertoires, including new music and special guests. Tickets, which are $25 in advance, $35 the day of the event, are available at the box office or baystreet.org.

   Classical music will return to the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill tomorrow at 6 p.m. with the first of four Salon Series concerts. Assaff Weisman, a pianist who has appeared at major venues in Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas, will perform works by Beethoven, Schumann, Rachmaninoff, and Messiaen in the inaugural program.

    Future concerts will feature the pianists Daria Rabotkina, on Friday, April 11; Tanya Gabrielian, on April 18, and Ching-Yun Hu, on April 25. Tickets are $20 per concert, $10 for Parrish members, and may be purchased at parrishart.org.

New at Halsey Mckay

    Two new exhibitions will open at Halsey Mckay in East Hampton Saturday with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m. “Still Life With Woodpecker” is an interdisciplinary group show that looks beyond traditional definitions of still life to find new meanings in the specific and ordinary. Participating artists are Sarah Dornner, Paul Gagner, Ugo Rondinone, David B. Smith, Ryan Steadman, Torey Thornton, Lisa Williamson, and Kevin Zucker.

    The weekend’s musical bonanza continues at Guild Hall, where The Met: Live in HD will present Puccini’s “La Bohéme” on Saturday at 1 p.m. The most performed work in the Metropolitan Opera’s history, “La Bohéme” is set in the artistic community of Paris in the 1830s and follows the romance between Rodolfo, a poet, and Mimi, a seamstress who is his neighbor.

    On a windswept and rainy Saturday evening, somewhere on the cusp of March and April, a moody and sometimes sinister show featuring water and the sea might be just the thing to pull one out of a funk, or draw one in more deeply. Either way, “On an Eastern Shore,” featuring the work of Peter Ngo and Ingrid Silva, is a show that remains with you, rain or not.

    The John Drew Theater Lab will present “The April Fool’s Show,” a free staged reading directed by Chloe Dirksen, on Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. The program will include scenes from a range of comic plays, new work, and “a song or two,” according to Guild Hall.

    Alan Ceppos, Peter Connolly, Lydia Franco-Hodges, Josh Gladstone, Kate Mueth, Bobby Peterson on piano, and Liz Joyce of Goat on a Boat Puppet Theatre will perform along with Ms. Dirksen, who lives in Sag Harbor and has appeared at Bay Street Theatre in “The Crucible” and, most recently, “The Diary of Anne Frank.”

    Fifteen years ago Julie Keyes, an artist, art dealer, art consultant, and real estate agent at Saunders and Associates in Bridgehampton, met Adam Tihany, an internationally renowned interior designer. The introduction, made by Ms. Keyes’s beau, Nathan Slate Joseph, an artist who works out of a barn in Bridgehampton and lives with Ms. Keyes in Sag Harbor and New York, changed her life.

    On a recent chilly night the East Hampton Presbyterian Church loomed dark and uninviting. At 6:45 a man emerged from a car on Main Street, walked around to the side of the building, and unlocked a door. Within seconds the soaring space was awash with light, and Walter Klauss, the guest conductor of the Choral Society of the Hamptons’ upcoming spring concert, doffed his coat and settled into a front pew for a few moments of conversation before rehearsal.

    Fresh from multiple appearances at the annual South by Southwest (SXSW) Conferences and Festivals in Austin, Tex., the Montauk Project marks the unveiling this week of their album “Belly of the Beast” with a Saturday night performance at Pianos on New York’s Lower East Side.

    PechaKucha Night Hamptons will return to the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill tomorrow at 6 p.m. Organized by Andrea Grover, the museum’s curator of special projects, the quarterly programs consist of 10 members of the community, each of whom presents 20 slides at 20 seconds each, for a total of 6 minutes and 40 seconds per presenter.

    The Rogers Memorial Library in Southampton will screen “The Sugar Connection: Holland, Barbados, Shelter Island,” a documentary directed by Gaynell Stone, on Monday at 5:30 p.m. The film follows an eight-year archeological dig at Sylvester Manor on Shelter Island.

Calls for Entries

    A sure sign of spring is Guild Hall’s annual artist members’ exhibition, which will take place from May 3 through June 7. Artists wishing to participate in the 76th iteration of the show have been asked to submit their registration cards by April 18.

    Certain Moves, a five-piece jazz ensemble, will perform a free concert at the Rogers Memorial Library in South­ampton Sunday afternoon at 3. The group, which includes Abdul Zhuri on guitar and vocals, Bill (Bang) Gaines on keys and vocals, Charles Certain on sax and vocals, Randy London on drums and pans, and Wayne Hart on bass and vocals, specializes in smooth jazz and R&B.

    Jazz fans unable to make the Sunday performance can catch the band tomorrow evening from 5 to 8 at the Wolffer Estate Vineyard in Sagaponack.

    All Charlie Baker wants is some peace and quiet — from his humdrum London desk job, his dying wife, and his own demons. But when Froggy LeSueur, an English military type still with the barest whiff of colonialism about him, brings the staid British bore on a three-day job 100 miles south of Atlanta, a mishmash of mushmouth and cultural clashes ensues, with jaw-hurting hilarity.

    Photographs typically need little introduction: what you see is what you see. With Herbert Matter, it is a different story.

    “Beautiful Tree, Severed Roots,” a documentary by Kenny Mann, will be screened tonight at 7 at the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor. The film premiered at the Hamptons Take 2 documentary film festival in December.

    Ms. Mann’s parents were Jewish refugees who fled from Romania to Kenya in 1942. Born four years later, the filmmaker grew up in Kenya and lived there until she graduated from the University of Nairobi in 1968.

    Perry Burns’s East Hampton studio is far from Sarajevo, and even farther from Beirut, but Mr. Burns’s paintings and photographs bridge those cultural distances in unexpected ways. Although he grew up in Connecticut, during a recent conversation Mr. Burns cited a trip to Lebanon at the age of 13 as an important influence on his artistic development.

    The Southampton Historical Museum will celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Pyrrhus Concer on Saturday at the Rogers Mansion with an afternoon of free programs devoted to the man who was born a slave in Southampton in 1814 and died a philanthropist in 1897.

    Concer was a boat-steerer on whaling expeditions and the first African-American to visit Japan. His estate benefited distressed sailors and local schoolchildren. One of Southampton’s most highly regarded citizens in the 19th century, he has been all but forgotten today, according to the museum.

Plein Air at Ashawagh

    The Wednesday Group, an association of artists who meet on Wednesdays to paint en plein air at various East End locations, will show new work at Ashawagh Hall in Springs on Saturday and Sunday, with a reception Saturday from 5 to 8 p.m. Titled “Town and Country,” the exhibition will include New York cityscapes as well as local landscapes.

    The National Theatre Live series at Guild Hall will present the Donmar Warehouse’s production of Shakespeare’s “Coriolanus” on Saturday at 7 p.m. Tom Hiddleston and Mark Gatiss star in the tragedy of political manipulation and revenge, set in Rome.

    The Donmar Warehouse is a theater in London’s West End, where the production was filmed live on Jan. 30. Tickets are $18, $16 for members.

    As a composer, Antonio Vivaldi rather owns spring through the popular co-opting of his violin concerto “La primavera.” So it is appropriate that the Choral Society of the Hamptons welcomes spring with “Viva Vivaldi!” — opting not to offer a cliched response to the arrival of the equinox, but to give a varied program of joyous music by the composer and others to awaken senses dulled and dormant from the long winter.

    The Hamptons Take 2 Documentary Film Festival has issued a call for submissions to its 2014 program, which will be held at Bay Street Theatre Dec. 4 through 7. A discounted rate is offered to filmmakers who submit by April 1. The regular deadline is May 1. Submissions may be made to withoutabox.com/ login/12479.