Arts

Ralph Gibson on Film

The Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill will screen “Ralph Gibson: Photographer/Book Artist,” a Checkerboard Film Foundation production, tomorrow at 6 p.m.

Known for his distinctive graphic style, Mr. Gibson, who was born in Los Angeles in 1939, studied photography in the Navy and at the San Francisco Art Institute before working as an assistant for Dorothea Lange, the noted Farm Security Administration photographer, and Robert Frank, a photographer and filmmaker best known for his 1958 book, “The Americans.”

No curtain separates audience from stage in “Bluebirds,” a new play by Joe Brondo that opened last weekend at Guild Hall and will run through Sunday. The audience enters the theater to the sound of music and a brightly lit set of well-worn living room furniture placed downstage. A digital clock says it’s 12:01. After a few minutes, a man bursts through the door and runs full speed off stage left. He is followed by a woman, who turns off the theater lights with a switch on the living room wall and cuts the music with a remote aimed at the audience. A toilet flushes offstage.

Art Donovan, an artist and designer from Southampton, will discuss his book, “The Art of Steampunk,” now in its second edition, on Saturday at 1 p.m. at the East Hampton Library.

The aesthetic of Steampunk, which first found expression in science fiction and fantasy literature, draws from the technology of the Victorian era. Steampunk artists use gears, goggles, gauges, brass tubing, leather, watch parts, and, in some cases, steam power to create mechanical objects ranging from jewelry to lamps to motorcycles that are fanciful but often functional.

For the seventh consecutive year, Canio’s Cultural Cafe and the John Jermain Memorial Library will co-host the African-American Read-In, sponsored by the Black Caucus of the National Council of Teachers of English, on Saturday at 5 p.m. at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor.

Members of the public have been invited to read short excerpts from a favorite piece of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, oral history, or family history, though it is not necessary to read in order to attend. Light refreshments will be served.

The John Drew Theater Lab will present a free staged reading of Roger Rueff’s 1992 play, “Hospitality Suite,” on Tuesday at 7:30 p.m.

Set in a small hotel room in Wichita during a business convention, the story focuses on two salesmen and a research scientist for a firm that manufactures industrial lubricants. While waiting for a meeting with a C.E.O. they hope will save their company, they air their conflicting ideas about character, salesmanship, honesty, religion, and love, with less than harmonious results.

For those unable to make it to the Big Easy this weekend, Gene Casey and the Lone Sharks and the HooDoo Loungers will headline a Mardi Gras party at Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor on Saturday at 8 p.m.

Since Mr. Casey formed the Lone Sharks after moving to the East End in 1988, the band’s roots-drenched rock has been a staple of the local music scene and beyond. The band did 150 shows last year, mostly on Long Island but also in Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York City.

The more classically inclined might opt for “La Clarinette Francaise: An Evening in Paris,” a free concert of romantic works by Franck, Devienne, Messager, Poulenc, and Ravel, on Saturday at 7:30 p.m. at the Montauk Library.

Southampton Town is celebrating its 375th birthday with a yearlong series of lectures, exhibitions, walking tours, parties, and dinners at locations throughout the town, beginning today at 3 p.m. with a screening of “The Manors of Long Island” at the Rogers Memorial Library. Next Thursday at 3 p.m., also at the library, Georgette Grier-Key, director and curator of the Eastville Community Historical Society, will discuss the influence of African-Americans locally and in the larger society.

Amateur theatrics on the East End will be the subject of the East Hampton Historical Society’s second free winter lecture at the Clinton Academy Museum on Friday, Feb. 27, at 7 p.m. Hugh King, the village historian, and Barbara Borsack, the village’s deputy mayor, will present “Stagestruck: We’ve Got a Barn, Let’s Put on a Show.”

Searching for Janeway

Carol Janeway (1913-1989), a ceramicist whose work was widely exhibited and purchased by major museums including the Museum of Modern Art and the Cooper-Hewitt, is the subject of a monograph by Victoria Jenssen, a writer from Nova Scotia.

“A Tale to Tell,” a workshop with Helene Patarot, a French actress in residence at the Watermill Center through March 7, will take place Saturday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Students will combine acting, writing, and directing as they develop stories using elements from their own lives, such as family photographs, diaries and letters, clothes, and other items with personal meaning.

“From the Archive,” an exhibition of photographs by Gosta Peterson, a renowned fashion photographer, is on view at the Turn Gallery in Manhattan through March 22. The show includes groundbreaking black-and-white photographs from 1960 through 1980, among them his New York Times photographs of Twiggy, the iconic English model, and his “Fashion of the Times” cover photo of Naomi Sims, the first African-American to appear on the cover of an American magazine.

The local action of the 2015 campaign of One Billion Rising, a mass demonstration launched three years ago to end violence against women, will take place tomorrow from 5 to 7 p.m. at Dodds and Eder Home in Sag Harbor.

Kate Mueth and the Neo-Political Cowgirls, an East End company of women dedicated to creating dance theater that explores the female voice, has organized the event, which will include a flash mob dance, poetic readings, and performances by Skylar Day, Lynn Blue, the East Hampton High School Key Club, and Escola de Samba BOOM.

It wasn’t all that long ago that the art world cognoscenti and mere tourists would walk the streets of SoHo, then Chelsea, and even more recently the Lower East Side, with “Gallery Guide” booklets clutched to their chests. Now, it’s more likely that they are looking at their phones, parsing the disparate information and endorsements available online for their favorite galleries and artists.

“Snow Orchid,” a play by Joe Pintauro, is enjoying a limited engagement at the Lion Theater in Manhattan through Feb. 28. A photographer and novelist as well as an acclaimed playwright, Mr. Pintauro lives in Sag Harbor.

Set in Brooklyn in 1964, the play stars Robert Cuccioli as Rocco Lazarra, who is returning home after having suffered a nervous breakdown. His wife, Filumena (Angelina Fiordellisi), refuses to leave their house and longs for her native Sicily.

Pioneer at Watermill Center

The Watermill Center will present a special workshop introducing the work of Tadeusz Kantor (1915-1990), a revolutionary Polish visual artist and theater director, on Sunday from noon to 6 p.m. An artistic pioneer and chief influence on Robert Wilson, Kantor gained international acclaim for defying theatrical convention in the 1960s and ’70s.

Joe Brondo, author and co-star of “Bluebirds,” which will open a six-performance engagement at Guild Hall on Friday, Feb. 20, did not grow up dreaming of a life in the theater. An East Hampton native, he was obsessed with computers while in high school. “That was all I did, I was always hunched over my desk,” he recalled. “I was kind of a class clown, but on the weirder end of the spectrum. I wasn’t the super-popular goofball.”

The rafters will start shaking at Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor on Saturday at 8 p.m. when local bands will duke it out with rotating sets of music by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.

Organized by Joe Lauro, filmmaker, musician, and archivist, the performers will include the HooDoo Loungers, Black and Sparrow, Randall Hudson, Mama Lee and Rose, Joe Delia, Inda Eaton, and Sarah Conway, with other musicians expected to show up. Two bands will be onstage at all times, rotating sets of the best dance music by the Beatles and the Stones.

Christine Morro, a writer, photographer, and printmaker, will teach “Drawing With Natural Materials,” a class for adults and children age 8 and older, on Feb. 14 at 11 a.m. at the South Fork Natural History Museum in Bridgehampton.

The class, which is for both beginning and experienced artists, will examine the direct nature of drawing, approaching it through an exploration of mark-making, using local grasses, stems, and branches as well as traditional brushes.

There is a $15 materials fee, and the class is limited to 10 participants.

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.

Living Pictures

The Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill will present “The Fish Juggler,” a free program of tableaux vivants, living pictures, created by the East End Special Players, a group of learning-disabled actors, on Saturday from 2:30 to 3 p.m. Tableau vivant is a style of theater initially popularized in the court of King Louis XIV.

The Drawing Room and its partners, Emily Goldstein and Victoria Munroe, celebrate a decade in East Hampton with a surprisingly cohesive salon-style show in its always pleasant but somewhat small gallery space.

As cookie-cutter mansions spread across the East End, the Architectural Sessions, a series of panels and presentations organized by the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill and A.I.A. Peconic, continues to provide fascinating perspectives on architecture’s many possibilities. Friday’s program, “Pro Bono: Architects Who Serve Humanity,” focused on two unique projects, one in Rwanda, the other in Brooklyn, that are, in different ways, about creating something of value for their communities.

Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor has kept South Fork residents both warm and entertained through the winter of 2015 with an active calendar of musical events that will continue through the coldest and quietest months. On Saturday at 8 p.m., the venue will vary the entertainment being offered with the fifth All Star Comedy Show, hosted by Joseph Vecsey.

Guild Hall will show the Met: Live in HD’s simulcast of “Les Contes d’Hoffmann,” an opera by Jacques Offenbach, on Saturday at 1 p.m. First performed in 1881, four months after Offenbach’s death, the opera is based on three short stories by E.T.A. Hoffmann, who is the opera’s protagonist.

The prologue shows Hoffman and his fellow students in Luther’s Inn at Nuremberg. He is persuaded to tell of his three love encounters, which form the three succeeding acts. The opera ends as it began, with an epilogue set in the tavern.

Lichtenstein Film

The Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill will screen “Roy Lichtenstein: Tokyo Brushstrokes,” a 1995 film that documents the creative process, from concept to fabrication and installation, of one of the artist’s most important public sculptures, tomorrow at 6 p.m.

Lichtenstein became intrigued by a brushstroke he saw in a cartoon and started his “brushstroke paintings” in 1965. In the 1980s, he began work on the monumental sculptures, which became public works in Paris, Barcelona, and, in 1994, Tokyo.

“Mom, It’s MY Wedding!” is the latest collaboration between Ilene Beckerman and Michael Disher at the Southampton Cultural Center, following last year’s “Sex: What She’s Really Thinking!” In a striking similarity to that show, new ideas are not at the forefront of this script. Surprising poignancy lurks between the jokes, however, and audience members — those who have been brides, have daughters who have been wedded off, or have simply wandered into the theater by mistake — will find themselves reaching for the tissues between giggles.

The second production in the Hampton Theatre Company’s seasonal lineup proves to be as different as can be from the first. “Harvey” was a classic comedy, a tale of fuzzy humanity and warmth. “Time Stands Still,” another powerful work by the Pulitzer Prize-winner Donald Margulies, is a commentary on war, relationships, and the tragically intellectual.

An arts calendar listing last week for Fergus MacRoich’s appearance at the East Hampton Library with his book “Fried Chicken, Jesus and Chocolate” said he was “involved in the civil rights movement,” when according to the back of the book he “joined the Medical Corps and was sent to Selma, Alabama, during the civil rights movement.”

UPDATE: The following program has been canceled as of Jan. 23.

The East Hampton Presbyterian Church is offering film enthusiasts an opportunity to journey into the cinematic past with a screening of “Our Hospitality,” a 1923 film starring Buster Keaton that will be accompanied by Bernie Anderson on the church’s organ, on Saturday at 7 p.m.