Arts

    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.

    The Met: Live in HD returns to Guild Hall Saturday at 1 p.m. with Massenet’s opera “Werther.” The production, conducted by Alain Altinoglu, stars Jonas Kaufmann in the title role of the tragic romance and Sophie Koch as Charlotte. Victoria Bond, a composer and speaker, will give a 30-minute “Operatif” talk at noon. Tickets are $22, $20 for members, $15 for students.

Group Show at Drawing Room

    A group exhibition of paintings, drawings, sculpture, and printed editions will open tomorrow at the Drawing Room in East Hampton and remain on view through April 6.

    Work by Caio Fonseca, Christine Hiebert, Sharon Horvath, Robert Jakob, Mel Kendrick, Diane Mayo, Adrian Nivola, Alan Shields, and Donald Sultan will “highlight the rich potential each artist has mined for his or her inventive use of materials,” according to the gallery.

Five at Ashawagh

    HITFest, the Hamptons Independent Theatre Festival, has that its Summer Shakespeare program will return to Mulford Farm in East Hampton.

    Josh Perl, the founder of HITFest, said, “We will be performing for three glorious weeks under the stars from Aug. 7 through Aug. 24.” While titles have not yet been chosen, the production team returns from last season. John Landes and Peter Zablotsky will produce, Peter-Tolin Baker will serve as production designer, Richard Horwich will be the dramaturge, Kathryn Lerner the community liaison, and Mr. Perl will direct.

    The bluesy harmonica of Job Potter has long been heard at local open mike events and jam sessions, like the Sunday afternoon ones outside the Springs General Store.

    Auditions will be held on March 23 and 24 from 6 to 8 p.m. for the Hampton Theatre Company’s production of “God of Carnage,” an award-winning play. The available roles are Mi­chael Novak, a successful but unsophisticated wholesaler, and Veronica Novak, a socially conscious writer.

    “August: Osage County,” Tracy Letts’s Pulit­zer Prize-winning drama, will have its Long Island premiere at the South­ampton Cultural Center next Thursday at 7:30 p.m. The Center Stage presentation will continue through April 6.

    The play, which won five Tony Awards and was made into an Oscar-nominated film, is set in Oklahoma, where a seriously dysfunctional family gathers in the wake of the disappearance of its patriarch, a once-famous poet.

    The Bridgehampton Museum’s Parlor Jazz series continues tomorrow evening at 7:30 with “My Charmed Life,” featuring Greg Galavotti, a singer-songwriter-guitarist, in a program of old standards and original songs. He will be accompanied by Jane Hastay on piano, Peter Martin Weiss on bass, and Richie Scotto on saxophone.

    The concert, hosted by Ms. Hastay and Mr. Weiss, will be held in the museum’s archives building. Tickets are $25, $15 for members, and are available at bhmuseum.org.

    The Hampton Theatre Company is presenting Larry Shue’s comedy “The Foreigner” from next Thursday through March 30 at the Quogue Community Hall. The play is set at a backwoods fishing lodge in Georgia, where Froggy LeSeuer, a British munitions expert, brings his pathologically shy friend, Charlie. Confusion and comedy ensue when Froggy, to explain Charlie’s reticence, tells the other guests that his friend is from an exotic foreign country and neither speaks nor understands English.

    Film enthusiasts who missed Christian Scheider’s recent programs devoted to the films of Jacques Tati will have another opportunity Wednesday at 5 p.m., when Tati’s “Traffic” will be screened at the John Jermain Memorial Library in Sag Harbor.

    Mr. Scheider, an actor and filmmaker, will introduce the program and lead a guided discussion after the screening that will focus on the French auteur and comedian’s cinematic critique of the repercussions of modernization. The screening is free, but limited to 14 people. Preregistration is required.

    Bay Street Theatre is holding auditions on Saturday for its 2014 Mainstage productions “Conviction,” “Travesties,” and “My Life as a Musical” and for Literature Live’s fall production of “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Equity principal auditions will take place from 10 a.m. to noon and from 1 to 3 p.m. at the theater.

Many otherwise plugged-in cultural cog­noscenti of the South Fork might be surprised to learn that Philippe de Montebello is this year’s recipient of the Guild Hall Academy of the Arts Lifetime Achievement Award. It is not that the former and longtime Metropolitan Museum of Art director does not deserve it, but rather that few, if any, know he actually spends time here. He would like to keep it that way.

Paper and Canvas

    Ille Arts in Amagansett will reopen Saturday with “Paper and Canvas in Conversation,” an exhibition curated by Denise Gale that will remain on view through April 5. Work by Eugene Brodsky, Don Christensen, Mary Heilmann, Anne Russinof, Arlene Slavin, and Ms. Gale will be included in the show.

    Nevada is coming to Southampton on March 15 when the annual Viva Las Vegas! benefit takes place from 7 to 11 p.m. at Seasons of Southampton. The evening will include music, dancing, an open bar, and an hors d’oeuvres buffet. For those feeling lucky, there will be a Texas hold ’em poker tournament, a Chinese auction, a silent auction, and a 50-50 raffle.

    Guild Hall will present an encore screening of the National Theatre’s London stage production of “War Horse” on Saturday at 7 p.m. Based on the novel by Michael Morpurgo and adapted for the stage by Nick Stafford, “War Horse” is a drama about the harrowing journey of a horse from rural Devon to the battlefields of France during World War I. The production features South Africa’s Handspring Puppet Company’s galloping, full-scale “horses,” whose flanks, hides, and sinews are built of steel, leather, and aircraft cables. Tickets are $18, $16 for members.

    A screening of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 film “Vertigo,” presented by Guild Hall and the Hamptons International Film Festival, drew a full house to the John Drew Theater at Guild Hall in East Hampton on Saturday night.

    Following the screening, the actor Alec Baldwin, who has a house in Amagansett, hosted a brief but equally entertaining forum with David Nugent, the festival’s artistic director.

    The Met: Live in HD will resume at Guild Hall at noon on Saturday with Alexander Borodin’s epic “Prince Igor.” Famous for its Polovtsian dances, the opera is being staged at the Met for the first time in almost 100 years. Dmitri Tcherniakov’s new production is a psychological journey through the mind of its protagonist, played by Ildar Abdrazakov, with the founding of Russia as its backdrop. Tickets to the four-and-a-half-hour program are $22, $20 for members, $15 for students.

    Bay Street Theatre’s new artistic director, Scott Schwartz, has chosen three plays to be performed there this summer, which, he promised last week, will not be your run-of-the-mill summer season.

    “I feel passionately that the audiences at Bay Street Theatre and audiences across the East End want to see fresh, exciting things you can’t see anywhere else,” said Mr. Schwartz. Not one to play it safe, he is filling two of the three slots with new works by authors making their East End debuts; the third play is a revival of a contemporary classic.

    What, you may well ask, could possibly be the connection between a lunar rover and bas-relief sculpture made by folding paper?

    On its face, there does not seem to be one, but once the demands of engineering and architecture are considered, a thread of continuity appears.

    While the founding families of Shelter Island — the Sylvesters, the Havenses, the Nicolls — are well-known cornerstones of the island’s history, the slaves and Native Americans who built and inhabited the island are not as widely recognized. “Race and Ethnicity on Shelter Island: 1652-2000,” a new exhibition at the Shelter Island Historical Society, celebrates their role in the island’s history.

    The East Hampton Historical Society’s winter lecture series, In Their Own Words: Voices From East Hampton’s Past, continues tomorrow at 7 p.m. at Clinton Academy with “The Rustic Manners of Old East Hampton: John Howard Payne’s 1838 Recollections of His Boyhood.”

    “John Howard Payne came to East Hampton sometime between 1832 and 1834,” Hugh King, the director of the Home, Sweet Home Museum, told the village board at its meeting on Friday. “While he was here, he took notes. He wrote a whole article about what East Hampton was like in the 1830s.”

Workshops at the Parrish

    The Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill is offering two new workshops for artists of all skill levels during March. Linda Capello, an artist from Sag Harbor whose work focuses on the figure, will teach life drawing in a four-session series beginning Wednesday from 3 to 5 p.m. and concluding March 26. Participants will draw male and female models through gesture sketches and longer observation. The cost is $120 for four classes, $95 for Parrish members.