Arts

    The Bay Street Theatre’s first play of the summer season is Geraldine Aron’s “My Brilliant Divorce,” starring Polly Draper. This will be the American premiere of the play, which will start in previews on Tuesday and run through June 24.

    The production is directed by Matt McGrath, one of Bay Street’s artistic associates.

    The one-woman show tells the story of Angela, an American living in England whose British husband leaves her. She’s left to cope with a disapproving mother, a shifty attorney, and a bad case of hypochondria.

Jong on E.L. James

    BookHampton will host a provocative discussion with Erica Jong on Saturday at 8 p.m. at the East Hampton store. She will discuss the book “Fifty Shades of Grey” in a talk called “Is This What We’ve Come To?”

    Ms. Jong’s 1973 “Fear of Flying” was one of the first popular erotic novels penned by a woman. She has continued to write in that genre, crafting some of the more graphic sexual descriptions in contemporary fiction.

Lichtenstein Retrospective

    The Art Institute of Chicago on Tuesday will open the largest exhibition to date of Roy Lichtenstein’s work —  more than 160 works, including drawings, paintings, and sculpture, from more than three decades, some of which have never been seen publicly.

    On Saturday, the 74th Guild Hall artist members show opened with scores of works in almost every possible medium, all submitted by South Fork artists.

    Lilly Wei, an independent curator, essayist, and critic who writes for Art in America and ARTnews, determined the winners, among them Mary Ellen Bartley, who took best in show honors for her photograph “A Road Divided.” The distinction entitles Ms. Bartley to a solo show at Guild Hall at a future date.

Show Tunes

    Music for Montauk will close its season of free, top-quality programs with the Gilbert and Sullivan Players of New York’s “I’ve Got a Little Twist,” a selection of favorites from the American musical theater, at the Montauk School on Saturday at 7 p.m.

    David Auxier wrote and directed the show, which weaves in show tunes by Rodgers and Hammerstein, Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, Lerner and Loewe, Meredith Wilson, and Jerry Herman. He also performs, along with a five-person ensemble. Mark York is the arranger and accompanist.

   The Montauk Music Festival, a free live-music showcase, is expected to bring thousands of fans to town from next Thursday through Sunday, May 20. They will be able to choose from 200 performances from 100 bands, sprinkled through 30 Montauk venues both indoors and out.

   There are certain prolific artists whose works always turn up at art fairs or secondary-market galleries. They may be widely popular, but with so much output they risk not always being seen in the best light. Even the best artists have their bad days, or at least their mediocre ones.

The Harnicks Outside

    “The Outdoor Museum” is a group of photographs taken by Margery Harnick and included in a book of the same title with poems by Sheldon Harnick, and a selection of both will be on view at Guild Hall’s Boots Lamb Education Center through July 29.

   July will be full of creative exploration at the Stony Brook Southampton campus. As part of a long-term vision of transforming the campus into a graduate-level facility for the study of various art disciplines, the school will continue and expand upon its summer offerings this year, redesigned and redesignated as Southampton Arts Summer.

    There will be two sessions in each discipline, a five-day session from July 11 to July 15 and a 12-day session from July 18 to July 29. The cost for five days including room and board is $1,655, and $2,595 for the 12-day session.

Work continues apace at the site of the Bull’s Head Inn, soon to be known as the Topping Rose House.

India’s Textiles

    On Saturday at 5 p.m., Yoshiko Iwamoto Wada will give a lecture, “India Unfolds: Seen Through a Textile Artist’s Eyes,” at the LongHouse Reserve in East Hampton.

Guild Hall’s Members Show

    On Saturday from 5 to 6 p.m., Guild Hall will have a free opening reception for its 74th annual artist members exhibition. The show will remain on view through June 9.

    The Bay Street Theatre, which is celebrating the extension of its lease on Long Wharf in Sag Harbor, has announced a 2012 mainstage lineup that includes comedy, a story of local baymen, and a world premiere musical.

   Is it possible that someone born a century ago could have upended the conventions of painting so much that his work is just as relevant to today’s artists as it was some 65 years ago when it was first painted?

    Few can claim such an impact, but one artist who continues to challenge, confound, and set the benchmark for absolute expressive abstraction well after his death is Springs’s own Jackson Pollock. Whether he is ignored, contemplated, aped, mocked, or appropriated, artists who have followed him have had no choice but to react in some way to his work.

    If Anita Sorel has her way, the lines of people waiting to perform on the stage at the Studio Playhouse at LTV Studios in Wainscott will be as long as the lines to sit in the audience.

    “I want every waitress and every plumber and every fireman to perform,” she said in a recent interview.

    A community theater in East Hampton has been a dream of Ms. Sorel’s for years, and has finally become a reality.

    “I used to say that it’s a shame that we’re so close to the city with so many artistic people that there isn’t more theater here year round.”

Beethoven’s Beloved

    Guild Hall and the Hamptons International Film Festival will present “Immortal Beloved,” a film about Beethoven and his mystery love, to whom he wrote a letter just prior to his death. Alec Baldwin will host and will discuss the film with Bob Balaban after the screening.

    In January 2011, Bonnie Rychlak left the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum where she worked for 30 years to pursue her own artistic endeavors. It would prove to be a very short retirement.

    Ms. Rychlak, who still takes on independent curatorial projects and is a visiting assistant professor at Pratt Institute, was also recruited by LongHouse Reserve to organize this year’s outdoor sculpture exhibition, which became “Diversities of Sculpture/Derivations from Nature.” The exhibit opens on Saturday in conjunction with the reserve’s season opening.

    Many people here on the South Fork may subscribe to the old antiques store aphorism that “the only one interested in what your grandmother had was your granddad,” especially when it comes to “brown furniture,” dark handcrafted pieces with a history of more than 150 years or so.

The Academy at Kramoris

    Romany Kramoris in Sag Harbor will present “The Academy,” a group show, beginning today with a reception on Saturday from 4 to 6 p.m.

    Artists included in the show include Joan Tripp, Nancy Achenbach, Richard Udice, and Pingree Louchheim. The title is meant with jest, referring to a larger self-named group of painters the artists are members of on Long Island. Each has a particular style within the larger genre of Realism. The gallery describes the exhibit as a colorful and happy one.

Mourning Is Broken

Primo Levi Tribute

    The Montauk Library will offer a free presentation of “But When We Started Singing . . .” on Saturday at 7:30 p.m.

    Robert Spiotto, the artistic director of community arts programs at Hofstra University, will be the sole performer in this tribute to Primo Levi, an Italian-Jewish author who died in 1987. Levi was a novelist, essayist, and poet who was best known for his recountings of his imprisonment at Auschwitz during World War II. The event will commemorate the 25th anniversary of his death and International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

   On Saturday, the East Hampton Historical Society will present a daylong illustrated seminar on famous and infamous antiques fakes and forgeries with Charles F. Hummel.

   Mr. Hummel, an expert on antiques and American decorative arts, is the author of “With Hammer in Hand: The Dominy Craftsmen of East Hampton.” He has documented the Dominy family as well as the history of East Hampton and is the retired senior director of the Winterthur Museum in Delaware, one of the most important collections of American decorative arts.

   Initially, it might be difficult to reconcile Dan Flavin’s Expressionist tendencies with his use of the quite literally linear form of long, colored fluorescent lightbulbs to express himself for most of his creative life. Yet a new exhibition of his drawings at the Morgan Library demonstrates that his stylistic influences were varied and well outside of the Minimalist milieu with which he is primarily associated.

Therapy in Numbers

    Beginning Saturday, Harper’s Books in East Hampton will present “Group Therapy,” an exhibition of paintings, photographs, and mixed-media works. The artists, who all work on eastern Long Island, include Linda K. Alpern, Mary Ellen Bartley, Philippe Cheng, Peter Dayton, David Diskin, Jameson Ellis, Sunny Khalsa, Laurie Lambrecht, Liliya Lifanova, Steve Miller, Peter Sabbeth, Bastienne Schmidt, Matt Satz, Michael Solomon, Kevin Teare, Ross Watts, and Nick Weber.

   Fred Melamed was 22 in 1978, the first time he played the title role in Anton Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya,” which he is now reprising in an innovative and daring production directed by Stephen Hamilton at the John Drew Theater at Guild Hall for a limited run next month.

    Mr. Melamed had graduated from Hampshire College the previous summer, where, as a freshman, he’d joined the music department.

Concert for Concerts

    Three of the East End’s most popular local bands will perform at Gurney’s Inn on Sunday from 3 to 7 p.m. in the fourth annual Concert for the Concerts to benefit the Montauk Chamber of Commerce’s free Monday night Concerts on the Green series. 

    Gene Casey and the Lone Sharks, Caroline Doctorow and the Steamrollers, and Nancy Atlas with Johnny Blood will entertain for the cause, with a $10 admission fee. A discounted menu will be available for hungry listeners.

   The story of the building known as the E. and C. Bennett Blacksmith Shop at the South­ampton Historical Museum began and ended with a tree.

    The shop building, complete with a functioning forge, was originally built from local oaks in about 1790, moved to the museum from Hampton Road in the 1970s, and was restored in the 1990s. There it stood until Aug. 28

   Sometimes a play needs a grand vision. Sometimes it needs a minimal touch. But sometimes, it needs both. Josh Perl and Peter-Tolin Baker have brought both to bear on a late Tennessee Williams play “In the Bar of a Toyko Hotel,” which opens next Thursday in Bridgehampton.

   The Parrish Art Museum will celebrate Anne Porter’s life and her contributions to the arts and letters of the East End on Saturday at 3 p.m.

   Ms. Porter, a poet who was a National Book Award finalist, was married to Fairfield Porter, an artist with whom she raised a family on South Main Street in Southampton. She died in October, just shy of her 100th birthday.