Arts

Artists on Inspiration

    “Unmasking the Muse: Inspiration in the Arts,” a panel discussion with Laurie Anderson, Andrea Cote, and Maria Maciak moderated by Marion Wolberg Weiss, will take place Saturday at 5:30 p.m. at the Pollock-Krasner House in Springs.

    Ms. Anderson, who has a house in Springs, is an internationally renowned experimental performance artist, composer, and musician whose work has extended the boundaries of performance for four decades.

To be a vital regional theater in America, the person in charge must be willing to take chances, to mine the theatrical landscape for new works he or she believes in. Scott Schwartz, the new artistic director at the Bay Street Theatre, has done just that, and has come up with a diamond in the rough in “Conviction,” a play by Carey Crim, with Mr. Schwartz directing. It received its world premiere on Saturday night.

“Occasional Music for Early Winds and Plucked Strings,” a free concert by William Feasley and Sarah Weiner, will take place at the Montauk Library Saturday evening at 7:30.

Mr. Feasley, the first guitarist to be awarded the Peabody Conservatory’s Artist Diploma, will play the theorbo, a long-necked string instrument, and a 19th-century guitar, in addition to the classical guitar. Ms. Weiner, who has performed both modern and classical music with ensembles around the country, will play baroque oboe and recorder.

The Perlman Music Program is active on the East End again this summer, with several events happening during the next week. This weekend, Itzhak Perlman, Merry Peckham, Paul Katz, Roger Tapping, Don Weilerstein, and Vivian Hornik Weilerstein will join forces with young musicians to play chamber music masterpieces.

The Parrish Art Museum’s “Sounds of Summer” live music series will continue tomorrow at 6 p.m. with “The Next Level Band,” a five-piece steel drum reggae group that features the vocals of La Dawn Parris and the guitar and steel-drum playing of her husband, Tyrone Parris. The band, which performs regularly throughout the tristate area, plays reggae favorites as well as original arrangements of classics.

The concert will be held outside on the terrace. Tickets are $10, free for members.

On Saturday morning at 11, Guild Hall will host “Rothko Revisited: A Panel Discussion.” The talk will be presented in conjunction with “Red,” the two-person drama about the Abstract Expressionist painter Mark Rothko, currently playing in the John Drew Theater through June 8. Donald Blinken, former president of the Rothko Foundation; Stephen Hamilton, director of the production; Ben Heller, an art collector, and Christophe de Menil will make up the panel. Seating will be on stage.

William King

At Duck Creek Farm

The John Little Society will host an installation of three outdoor sculptures by William King, the noted East Hampton artist, at Duck Creek Farm in Springs from June 29 through the month of July.

The society, created to bring contemporary art to East Hampton, is seeking donations in support of arts programming at the historic farm, which was bought by Little, an Abstract Expressionist painter, in 1948 and purchased by the Town of East Hampton in 2006.

The Barnes Landing Association will hold its 13th annual Writers and Artists Showcase, in memory of Anna Mirabai Lytton, on Saturday from 2 to 3:30 p.m., at its meetinghouse in Springs. The event features the writing, artwork, and performance art of members of the community.

Andrea Cote is a multimedia artist whose work includes photography, prints, paintings, sculptures, performances, and installations. “I do work that invites people to participate, that’s very public, but then I also have work that’s very private, done in the studio,” she said last week.

“God of Carnage‚” by Yasmina Reza, opened at the Hampton Theatre Company in Quogue last week, the end of a standout season of productions that managed to be both funny and provocative at the same time.

The East Hampton Historical Society will hold an opening reception for its newest exhibit, “Craig Claiborne and Pierre Franey: Cookbook Revolutionaries in East Hampton,” tomorrow from 5 to 7 p.m. at Clinton Academy.

The legendary Judson Dance Theater will be the subject of a talk by Judy Hussie-Taylor on Saturday at 4 p.m. at the Watermill Center. Between 1962 and 1966, hundreds of choreographers, visual artists, poets, musicians, and filmmakers experimented with modes of performance at the Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square in Greenwich Village.

The Parhelion Trio, an all-female ensemble from New York City, will give a concert at the Levitas Center for the Arts at the Southampton Cultural Center on Saturday at 7 p.m. The trio is made up of Sarah Carrier (flute), Ashleé Miller (clarinet), and Andrea Christie (piano), and is dedicated to playing original compositions as well as reinterpreted classical pieces. The trio aims to create innovative music programs that appeal to all audiences.

Schnabels at Fireplace Project

The Fireplace Project in Springs will open its 2014 season tomorrow with “Picture of Lola,” an exhibition of self-portraits by Lola Montes Schnabel and portraits of Lola by Julian Schnabel, her father, that will remain on view through June 23. Father and daughter have never before exhibited together.

If you love gripping theater in an intimate setting that challenges you to think, stop reading right now and call the box office of the John Drew Theater at Guild Hall to make reservations for “Red,” the Tony Award-winning play currently being revived there.

    In addition to its three Main Stage productions, reported on separately, Sag Harbor’s Bay Street Theatre has a busy season of comedy events planned, as well as its annual benefit in July.

    A new series of three Saturday night comedy shows at 8 begins this weekend with an appearance by Paula Poundstone, a regular panelist on the NPR weekly news quiz show “Wait, Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me.” Shows by Ms. Poundstone, who tours nationally and is a repeat visitor to Sag Harbor, are known for their give-and-take with the audience.

    This year, Guild Hall has a packed summer of events with offerings in a variety of formats and genres, including theatrical performance, stand-up comedy, film screenings, live music, and talks on fashion, art, and even food.

    In addition to “Red,” a play by John Logan on Mark Rothko, now in production through June 8, the John Drew Theater will have “Clever Little Lies,” beginning July 16 and running through Aug. 2. The comedy stars Marlo Tho­mas.

    For the fourth consecutive year, the Animal Rescue Fund of the Hamptons is turning its thrift shop in Sagaponack into a designer showhouse for the Memorial Day weekend. Six rooms will be styled by well-known interior designers from New York City and the East End for the event, which will launch with a preview cocktail party Saturday at 5 p.m. The shop will be open on Sunday and Monday from 10 a.m. until 4 p.m.

    Early this month, Inda Eaton, a musician with roots in the West who now lives in Springs, sat on a classroom floor among a circle of fourth-graders in Casper, Wyo., talking about the song they had written with her during the school year, which was slated for an official debut later in the week.

    The Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill will launch Sounds of Summer, the first of two summer music series, with a performance by the HooDoo Loungers tomorrow at 6 p.m. Billed as the East Coast’s New Orleans party band, the group’s repertoire ranges from classic Mardi Gras-style music to its own original tunes.

    The Madoo Conservancy in Saga­ponack will hold a memorial service for Robert Dash, Madoo’s founder, on Sunday at 5 p.m. Several of Mr. Dash’s friends will speak, and Barnsley, his Norwich terrier, will lead visitors around the garden, visiting the “hermit’s hut,” the quincunx gardens, the potager, and the “bridge of the bankrupt painter.”

    The Hamptons International Film Festival will once again present its SummerDocs series of films this season at Guild Hall in East Hampton. Now in its sixth year, the series will premiere on June 21 with “Life Itself,” a film by Steve James, the director of “Hoop Dreams,” about the film critic Roger Ebert.

    Alec Baldwin, who is on the panel selecting the films and serves as the host of the series, will introduce the film and interview Chaz Ebert, Mr. Ebert’s widow, after the screening. The film is scheduled for theatrical release in July.

Dazed and Confused

    The Eric Firestone Gallery in East Hampton will open the summer season on Saturday with “Dazed and Confused,” a group show of contemporary art, which will remain on view through June 15.

    According to the gallery, the work in the show reflects “aesthetic emotion,” which the art critic Roger Fry characterized in 1920 as a positive, pleasurable response to an object.

    The East Hampton Historical Society’s annual trustees’ tag sale will be held Saturday from 9 a.m. until noon on the back lawn of the society’s headquarters, the Osborn-Jackson House on Main Street.

    Items both useful and collectible will include furniture, lighting, household items, folk art, and decorative home accessories. A midcentury Dunbar table, a set of Windsor dining chairs, garden planters, and glassware are among the offerings.

    The tag sale is a benefit for the historical society.

    They came together in a rehearsal studio on 42nd Street in the Broadway district on May 5 to embark on an artistic journey.

    “Conviction,” a drama by Carey Crim that will begin its world premiere run at the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor on Tuesday, was about to receive its first read through, the very first step in what would have to be an intense rehearsal period.

    The exploration of the relationship between artist, viewer, and art itself is at the core of “Red,” the 2010 Tony Award-winning play by John Logan, being revived in a black-box setting on the stage of Guild Hall’s John Drew Theater starting Wednesday.

    Almond Zigmund, an artist who lives in East Hampton and Brooklyn, has a new installation, “Plane Sight,” on view in what seems at first an unlikely location, the Children’s Museum of the Arts in Lower Manhattan. Founded in 1988, the museum occupied a basement space in SoHo that offered kids multiple hands-on art opportunities. Once the museum outgrew that space, it built a new, 10,000-square-foot facility that has enabled it to expand its mission.

    If you were to dismiss the floral studies of Linda Etcoff and the knitted pieces of Laurie Lambrecht as mere women’s work, you would not only be incorrect but would miss out on two worthy exhibitions at the Drawing Room gallery in East Hampton.

    A free staged reading of Bertolt Brecht’s 1939 play “A Life of Galileo” will be held at the Montauk Library on Saturday at 7:30 p.m. Directed by Josh Gladstone, artistic director of the John Drew Theater, the reading will take advantage of a new translation that makes the play’s dialogue relevant to contemporary issues of humanism versus fundamentalism.

    “Plimpton! Starring George Plimpton as Himself,” which will have its nationwide broadcast premiere tomorrow at 9 p.m. on PBS and locally on WNET, is a spellbinding film that chronicles the life of a singular man. George Plimpton grew up in a duplex apartment on upper Fifth Avenue, attended St. Bernard’s School, Phillips Exeter Academy, Harvard -— where he was a classmate and close friend of Robert F. Kennedy — and Cambridge University. But even if you know nothing about his background, you have only to hear him speak to know he was a patrician.