Arts

    “Dr. Du Bois and Miss Ovington,” a new play by Clare Coss now showing in New York at the Castillo Theater, thrusts its audience into the 1915 struggle within the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People: Should the N.A.A.C.P. be a philanthropic organization run by whites for the betterment of blacks, or should it be run by blacks with white support?

    Sawyer Avery, who is directing as well as playing the lead in Tuesday night’s staged reading of Neil Simon’s “Biloxi Blues” at Guild Hall’s John Drew Theater, has a gravitas about him unusual for a 21-year-old. He loves sitting in cramped coffeehouses, talking theater and art. He attends two to three plays a week in New York. After sitting down Saturday morning at Jack’s Stir Brew Coffee on West 10th Street in New York, he was on his way to go museum-hopping with his girlfriend, starting at the Museum of Modern Art.

Busy Day at Watermill

    The Watermill Center has scheduled a full afternoon of activities Saturday, including an exhibition of new work by Jose Carlos Casado at 3 and a dance-theater work-in-progress by Jack Ferver at 4. Both artists are currently in residence at the center.

    A conversation with Rick Liss, a painter and filmmaker from Amagansett, involves poking around in the dusty corners of history, specifically the cultural history of the East End and New York City over the past 60 years. Some artifacts have disappeared; Mr. Liss lost 30 years of work when Hurricane Sandy flooded his loft building in the South Street Seaport area in 2012.

    The Lounge, a new music series featuring singers and instrumentalists, will open tomorrow at 6 p.m. at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill with Edith and Bennett. Edith Gawler and Bennett Konesni are musicians and scholars of work songs who play old-time fiddle and banjo music, Swedish dance tunes, and farmers ballads and hollers. Ms. Gawler and Mr. Konesni divide their time between Shelter Island and Belfast, Me.

    “Coretta: Promise to the Dream,” a one-woman show by Tina Andrews that dramatizes the life of Coretta Scott King, will have its world premiere on Friday, Feb. 7, at 8 p.m. at Center Stage at the Southampton Cultural Center. Ms. Andrews, an actress, writer, and director who has worked extensively in film, theater, and television, began researching the project in 2003. She developed a relationship with Mrs. King, the widow of the slain civil rights leader the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and recorded more than 120 hours of interviews with her in the family home in Atlanta.

    The East Hampton Historical Society’s winter lecture series starts on Friday, Jan. 31, at 7 p.m. The series, “In Their Own Words: Voices From East Hampton’s Past,” will begin with “Frozen in Hudson’s Bay: William King’s Log of the Whaling Barque Concordia, 1864-1865.” Richard Barons, executive director of the society, will narrate and Ken Collum, a trustee, will be the voice of William King.

    There were some disappointed patrons at Sunday evening’s screening of “Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present” at the Watermill Center who mistakenly thought the artist herself was going to be there. Instead the center, which had clearly announced this in its listings, hosted a panel discussion after the screening with three of the performers who participated in the 2010 exhibition of the same title at the Museum of Modern Art.

    The LongHouse Reserve’s winter benefit, to be held on Feb. 14 at the Museum of Arts and Design in Manhattan, will feature a performance of “Ballads and Stories” by Bill T. Jones and Dancers. The Valentine’s Day event will begin with a reception at 6 p.m., followed by the performance at 7 and dinner at 8:30 at Adelaide de Menil’s duplex in the Gainsborough Studios building on Central Park South.

    The Perlman Music Program has scheduled three concerts by alumni at the Clark Arts Center on its Shelter Island campus. Wanzhen Li, a violinist, will inaugurate the series on Saturday at 7:30 p.m., accompanied on piano by Michael Bukhman. Future performers are Gabriela Martinez, piano, on March 29 and Areta Zhulla, violin, on May 10.

    Tickets are $25, free for guests 18 and younger, and include a reception for the artist after each performance. More information and tickets are available from perlmanmusicprogram.org.

    Setting up a season is the most important responsibility of a theater’s artistic director. Josh Gladstone, the artistic director of the John Drew Theater at Guild Hall, in conjunction with its board of directors, is halfway home to completing this year’s two-show season.

Gesture Jam at Parrish

    The Parrish Art Museum is hosting Gesture Jam, a hybrid figure-drawing class and social event, tomorrow at 6 p.m. Multiple models will pose with props and costumes, while the cafe will offer drinks for purchase and D.J. Mister Lama will spin tunes from his wide-ranging collection. The evening was conceived by Andrea Cote, a multimedia artist whose performances and installations have been presented at the Neuberger Museum, the Delaware Art Museum, and the Dumbo Arts Festival, as well as at various venues on the East End.

    A viewer doesn’t need to know Elizabeth Huey’s complicated relationship with psychology to sense something not quite right in the superficially sunny images on the walls at Harper’s Books in East Hampton.

    Sunday’s matinee performance of “Sex: What She’s Really Thinking,” by Ilene Beckerman and Michael Disher, was packed, and an appreciative audience filled the Southampton Cultural Center with laughter throughout the show.

    The Watermill Center’s screening of “Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present,” originally announced for Dec. 14 but canceled because of a snowstorm, has been rescheduled for Sunday at 4 p.m. The feature-length documentary film takes us from the artist’s preparation for her 2010 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art through the three months of its duration.

    Harvey Weinstein, the film producer and co-founder with his brother, Bob, of the Weinstein Company and Miramax Films, has purchased the rights to “A Speck in the Sea,” Paul Tough’s New York Times Magazine story about the rescue at sea of John Aldridge, a Montauk lobsterman who fell overboard during the night in shark-filled waters 40 miles south of Long Island.

    The Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival has a new executive director. Michael Lawrence, who has served for the past six and a half years as director of artistic planning and initiatives of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, will begin his tenure on Monday.

    “Dr. Du Bois and Miss Ovington,” a new play by Clare Coss, will have its world premiere tomorrow at 7:30 p.m. at the Castillo Theatre in New York City. The play captures the two founders of the N.A.A.C.P. — W.E.B. Du Bois and Mary White Ovington — at a moment of crisis in 1915, when Du Bois submits his letter of resignation.

    Seeking to provide a haven for performing artists of all stripes, Josh Gladstone, the artistic director of Guild Hall’s John Drew Theater, along with Jennifer Brondo, the theater’s general manager, is launching an ambitious, yet relatively inexpensive, campaign to provide space, time, and yes, even some money to such artists.

    Prentiss Dunn, a noted musicologist who has taught at the Vienna campus of Webster University since 2001, will return to the Hampton Library in Bridgehampton for his annual lecture series. Mr. Dunn will speak on five consecutive Sundays at 2 p.m., starting this weekend. According to the library, “Prentiss has a few tricks up his sleeve. These lectures are not to be missed.”

    Christian Scheider, an actor and filmmaker from Sag Harbor, is hosting three screenings of films by Jacques Tati at the John Jermain Memorial Library in that village starting Wednesday at 5 p.m. with “The Big Day.” Tati, who died in 1982 at the age of 75, was a French comic actor, writer, and director whose recurring character was Mr. Hulot, a self-effacing man at odds with modern society.

New at the Drawing Room

    An exhibition of drawings by Christine Hiebert and sculpture by Diane Mayo opens tomorrow at the Drawing Room in East Hampton, where it will remain on view through March 10. Ms. Hiebert has investigated the art of drawing for 25 years, using traditional and nontraditional tools to create works ranging in size from a sheet of paper to rotunda wall installations in museums. The 10 drawings in this exhibition reveal the range of her experimentation over the last 20 years.

    If it was anyone else, it might be considered a garage sale, a large collection of mostly unrelated objects put out on display perhaps because the owner is redecorating or raising money for another purpose.

    Gérald Sibleyras's  “Le Vent des Peupliers” (“The Wind in the Poplars”), adapted for the English stage by Tom Stoppard as “Heroes,” is the second offering this year at the Hampton Theatre Company in Quogue, and quite an offering it is, too.

    Guild Hall’s free winter film series, presented in partnership with the East Hampton Library, is screening “Teddy Bear,” a Danish film about a lonely, 38-year-old bodybuilder’s quest for love, on Sunday at 4:30 p.m. in the John Drew Theater.

    A free screening of “Shored Up,” an 84-minute documentary by Ben Kalina about coastal development, sea level rise, and the science and policy debates surrounding these issues, will be held at the Westhampton Beach Library tonight at 7.

    While the film focuses on Long Beach Island in New Jersey and the Outer Banks in North Carolina, it poses questions relevant to any coastline community and includes footage captured after Superstorm Sandy. The program replaces the regular monthly meeting of the Southampton Citizen Advisory Committee (West) and is open to the public.

    Rick Darke, a designer, author, and photographer, will give an illustrated talk on “The Accidental Landscape: Celebrating the Collision of Culture and Ecology,” on Sunday at 2 p.m. at the Horticultural Alliance of the Hamptons in Bridgehampton.

    Mr. Darke’s projects include parks, transportation corridors, corporate and collegiate campuses, conservation developments, and botanic gardens. His newest book, “The Living Landscape: Designing for Beauty and Biodiversity in Home Gardens,” will be published this year.

    This weekend’s musical menu at the Rogers Memorial Library in Southampton ranges from blues and jazz to classical. Rhonda Denet, a vocalist, and the Silver Fox Trio will perform a selection of jazz standards and soul classics that pay tribute to Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, Nancy Wilson, and others, tomorrow evening at 7.

Leander Arnold, a mason from Springs, found a message in a bottle while working at the Thomas Moran House restoration on Main Street — a note commemorating the laying of the cornerstone for the artist’s studio.

No Vacation for Grenning

    The Grenning Gallery in Sag Harbor is inaugurating its first warehouse sale, complete with cookies and coffee, on Saturday morning at 10. The sale, which will be held in the gallery Fridays through Mondays this month and next, includes paintings, small sketches, works on paper, and a large selection of handmade frames.