Arts

After a career that took him to such far-off places as Japan, Singapore, and the Dominican Republic, Allen Merrill, who lives in East Hampton, is now letting the world come to him.

    A young girl glides through a museum that has some of the greatest works of art on display. In verse she finds herself reacting to the surroundings. Vincent van Gogh’s “Starry Night” makes her “twirly-whirly, twinkly, sparkly, super swirly.” Edvard Munch’s “Scream” makes her gasp, and a Degas dancer has her up on her tippy toes.

    Rich harmonies and jazz rhythms will combine with moving texts and jazz interpretations of standards from the American songbook in “Frost, Love, and Jazz,” a program by the Choral Society of the Hamptons, on April 7 at 5 p.m. at the East Hampton Presbyterian Church.

    Jennifer Scott Miceli, head of the music department at the C.W. Post campus of Long Island University, will serve as guest conductor. Ms. Miceli directs the Long Island Sound Vocal Jazz Ensemble, among other groups.

    “As the Eye Is Formed,” a survey of recent developments in moving-image art, will be screened at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill tomorrow at 6 p.m. Peter Campus, a practitioner of video art, selected the 14 artists in the exhibition, which is co-presented with the Hamptons International Film Festival. Mr. Campus will introduce the screening.

    The Claque, an arts and performance conglomerate based in New York City, will present a reading and workshop for its third annual play series, “The Quick and the Dirties: Pump Up the Play,” tomorrow from 7 to 8:30 p.m. at the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor.

    The workshop production is designed to turn good plays into great ones, according to the Claque, and focuses on plays that are beyond the point of developmental readings but not yet ready for full production. The “Quick and Dirties” allow for experimentation and discovery to help a play realize its full potential.

   Waving an arm toward the historic Sylvester Manor House on Shelter Island last week, Dr. Stephen Mrozowski, a professor of archaeology, spoke of the charred corncobs he’d found buried there alongside clamshells, the remains of 17th-century Indian clambakes — just an appetizer in the banquet of his findings during excavations from 1998 through 2006.

To Fool the Eye

    Todd Norsten will be featured in the solo show “This Isn’t How It Looks” at Glenn Horowitz Bookseller in East Hampton beginning Saturday with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m.

    According to the gallery, Mr. Norsten expends a lot of energy making it look like he didn’t in his minimalist and text-based paintings. The gallery will show 25 works from 2010 to 2013, many of which feature “meticulous trompe l’oeil depictions of mundane materials like Scotch and blue painter’s tape . . . with bits of dust, fingerprints, and ragged edges.”

   Medicine Show Theatre Company will present two plays by John Jonas Gruen, a longtime resident of Water Mill, on April 9 and 10 at 7:30 p.m. at its theater at 549 West 52nd Street in Manhattan.

    “Ballbreaker” is about an impossibly irritating woman whose sole interest in the man who cares for her seems to be his sexual prowess, according to the company. When he decides to withhold his sexual favors, all hell breaks loose.

    The Bay Street Theatre has announced its 2013 Mainstage season and a local audition date for the productions of “Lend Me a Tenor,” “The Mystery of Irma Vep,” and “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.” The theater has also announced a local audition date for Literature Live’s fall production of “The Diary of Anne Frank.”

   From a Nassau County suburb to Ankara to Okinawa to Amagansett, the path of life for Michael Jeffrey Griffith has been anything but dull, and now his story has become the inspiration for a new television series, with Michael S. Chernuchin, part of the creative team of the long-running “Law and Order” series, in charge.

     “Who’d have thunk it?” Mr. Griffith asked on Saturday, sitting in his living room overlooking the Atlantic.

   A furniture store, a trip to Cuba, a legend regarding four wolves — how does one tell and preserve the stories and history of a family aside from the oral tradition? For decades and even centuries, the answer for many households was through the assemblage of quilts.

    The Bennett family has donated two uniquely well-preserved examples of the medium to the East Hampton Historical Society, and they will be included in an exhibition of recent acquisitions planned for late spring and early summer of next year.

Docents Have Their Say

    Visitors to the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center may know them as interpreters and keepers of the legacy of two of the most influential artists of the 20th century who worked in our backyard. But those who know docents outside of that role, know they also like to express themselves in other ways. This weekend, for the first time, all of their creative endeavors will be brought together in a show at Ashawagh Hall that will demonstrate how much their artistic output is shaped by what they do in their day job.

    The Watermill Center’s yearly Berlin Benefit patron trip happens April 16 to 18. Patrons have been invited to join Robert Wilson for the world premiere of “Peter Pan” with the Berliner Ensemble and music by CocoRosie. The benefit will be hosted by Baroness Nina von Maltzahn.

   Clare Coss, a playwright, psychotherapist, and activist, will give a dramatic reading of “Dangerous Territory,” her one-woman play about Mary White Ovington, on Sunday at noon at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of the South Fork in Bridgehampton, following the 10:30 service. Ms. Coss will be accompanied by Chris Epifania, a worship associate, and Peter Martin Weiss, a jazz bassist and guitarist. Blanche Wiesen Cook, a professor of history at John Jay College, will lead a post-reading discussion.

    Guild Hall will screen a National Theatre Live presentation of “People” on Saturday at 8 p.m. in the John Drew Theater. In it, Alan Bennett, the writer, is reunited with Nicholas Hytner, the director, and the actress Frances de la Tour, with whom Mr. Bennett worked on “The History Boys” and “The Habit of Art.”

    Peter Campus will discuss his video art as part of the Parrish Art Museum’s “The Artist’s View” series of gallery talks, tomorrow at 6 p.m.

    The talk, in the American Views gallery, will focus on the theme of landscape in the museum’s collection. Mr. Campus’s piece “Passage at Bellport Harbor” is a pixilated view of coastal Long Island. A professor at New York University and a resident of East Patchogue, he is considered one of the more seminal and influential practitioners of the video medium.

    All have been invited to dance and party at the Erin Go Mardi Gras Party at Sag Harbor’s Bay Street Theatre on Saturday at 8 p.m., which aims to combine Mardi Gras with the fun of St. Patrick’s Day.

    Joe Lauro’s Hoodoo Loungers and Gene Casey and the Lone Sharks will perform.

    Tickets are $15 in advance and can be purchased at the box office or online at baystreet.org. Tickets at the door will be $25. Attendees have been asked to wear their best St. Patrick’s Day green or Mardi Gras finery.

   Pale of feature and hair and slender of form, Scott Bluedorn does not look like a ringleader or potent cultural force, but then looks can be deceiving. On a recent winter evening, he passed around a plastic container with the fruits of one of his latest projects — worm farming — as he projected slides describing its ideal conditions.

    Guild Hall will present a live high-definition screening of Zandonai’s “Francesca da Rimini” on Saturday at noon. The compelling opera, inspired by an episode from Dante’s “Inferno,” returns in the Metropolitan Opera’s production, last seen in 1986. Eva-Maria Westbroek, a soprano, and Marcello Giordani, a tenor, are the doomed lovers. Marco Armiliato conducts. Running time is approximately four hours. General admission is $22, $20 for members, and $15 for students.

Time Has Come Again

    Guild Hall is now accepting entries for its annual Artist Members Exhibition, to be held from April 27 through June 1.

    This year’s awards judge is Elisabeth Sussman, the curator of photography at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Ms. Sussman was also a curator of the museum’s biennial exhibitions in 1993 and 2012.

    Katherine C.H.E., a local singer, songwriter, and musician, will launch the Hamptons Weekend Preview Show tomorrow from 5 to 7 p.m. at D’Canela restaurant in Amagansett. Musicians, dancers, and other performers will typically present a 10 or 15-minute set that might include information about when and where the audience can experience more.

    The third of four tours through the Bridgehampton Historical Society’s whaling exhibit, “Bridgehampton Whalers — A Farmer’s Life at Sea,” happens next Thursday at noon at the William Corwith House Museum there. Julie Greene, the society’s curator, will lead the tour. The exhibit celebrates men from Bridgehampton and nearby who went to sea to hunt whales and later retired as farmers.

   Life here on the South Fork differs from many similar areas across the country in several ways, one of the most important of which is the level of sophistication in the local art scene. This extends to the performing arts, including theater, even at the nonprofessional level, as is attested to by the Center Stage at Southampton Cultural Center’s current production of “Motherhood Out Loud,” a series of scenes examining modern motherhood in America, directed by the multitalented Michael Disher.

    The Long Island premiere of “The Drawer Boy,” Michael Healey’s play about two farmers whose lives are turned upside down when a young actor comes to visit, will be the third production of the 2012-2013 Hampton Theatre Company season. Opening at the Quogue Community Hall next Thursday, it will run though April 7.

   The winter lecture series at the Madoo Conservancy in Sagaponack will begin Sunday with Charlotte Moss, an interior designer and gardener from East Hampton. Her lecture, “Outside Influences,” will include a slide-illustrated tour of gardens from her worldwide travels as well as her own grounds. She will also sign copies of her book “Charlotte Moss: A Visual Life,” which will be available for purchase for $60, $50 for members.

   Cynthia Daniels has been very busy. When not recording Broadway cast albums in a New York studio, she is mixing those projects at her own MonkMusic Studios in East Hampton or producing a local artist’s recording or hosting recording sessions for the likes of Paul McCartney or Beyoncé.

Ille Returns to Line

    After a midwinter absence, Ille Arts in Amagansett will present “Working the Line,” an exhibition devoted to the role of line in composition and style, beginning Saturday with a reception from 5 to 7 p.m.

   The Art of Song series of Bridgehampton Museum Parlor Jazz concerts will look at the “Songs of Daring Dames” on Saturday at 7:30 p.m. The performance will feature Karen Oberlin, an award-winning and critically acclaimed vocalist, backed by Jane Hastay on piano and Peter Martin Weiss on bass. The songs by and about women are in honor of Women’s History Month.

    The concert will take place at the archives building near the southeast corner of Ocean Road and Montauk Highway. Tickets cost $25 and can be purchased online at bridgehamptonhistoricalsociety.org.

   Brian and Michael LeClerc, brothers who suffer from a genetic disease that causes blindness, have not lost sight of their dream to “make a splash” out here on the East End, they said in an interview on Saturday. Their goal is to “play good, interesting music that makes crowds happy,” Brian said. They play a combination of unique and challenging covers of songs they grew up with, mixed with their own originals.

    Ruth Albert Spencer will return to the Montauk Library to present “Johannes Brahms: His Life, His Loves, His Music,” a free lecture-concert, on Sunday from 3:30 to 5 p.m. Ms. Spencer will perform a number of Brahms’s compositions for solo piano. Lilah Gosman, a soprano and a native of Montauk, and Milos Ripicky, a pianist, will augment the presentation. Previously,  Ms. Spencer spoke at the library about Mendelssohn, Mozart, and Chopin.