Arts

The John Drew Theater Lab will present a free reading of “Eastern Standard,” a play by Richard Greenberg, on Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. Peter Connolly will direct the production, with a cast of Chloe Dirksen, Joanna Howard, Kate Mueth, Christian Scheider, Tristan Vaughan, and Mr. Connolly.

Christian McBride and Friends will headline the fourth annual Sag Harbor American Music Festival with a concert and fund-raiser at the Old Whalers Church Friday at 8 p.m.

The Southampton African American Museum will present Raise Your Voice, a four-day festival of films, jazz, and spoken word, beginning next Thursday at 6 p.m. with a screening of “Fruitvale Station” at the Southampton Arts Center.

A program of spoken word and jazz, including performances by Charles Certain and his Certain Moves Jazz Band and the Grammy Award-winning hip-hop artist J. Ivy, will take place Friday, Oct. 3, at 7 p.m. at the Southampton Cultural Center.

Listen, you can sit in your dull Long Island home afraid of the next terrorist strike, or you can get out and engage the world. How about Florence?

Stony Brook Southampton’s M.F.A. program in creative writing and literature is back at it with another writers workshop in Italy, this one from Jan. 13 to 24. The focus in Florence will be on fiction with Susan Scarf Merrell. The author of a new novel, “Shirley,” about that master of the macabre Shirley Jackson, Ms. Merrell is also the fiction editor of The Southampton Review.

The Bach & Forth Chamber Ensemble will launch its third season of performances on Saturday at 7 p.m. at the East Hampton Presbyterian Church. Members of the group are Thomas Bohlert (organ), Terry Keevil (oboe), Linda Di Martino Wetherill (flute), Rebecca Perea (cello), and Trudy Craney (soprano).

Every year there are at least one or two books that seek to capitalize on the “Hamptons style” whether it be food, art, architecture, environs, lifestyle, or decor. They can often be expensive and hollow affairs, produced chiefly for last-minute purchases at BookHampton for a host or hostess gift.

Kabakovs on Film

The Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill will present “Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Enter Here,” Amei Wallach’s acclaimed documentary about the two celebrated Russian émigré artists who now live on the North Fork, tomorrow at 6 p.m. Ms. Wallach and Ms. Kabakov will answer questions after the screening.

Guild Hall will present “The Red Orchestra,” a 2003 documentary about the resistance group that fought against the Third Reich within Germany from 1933 to 1942, on Saturday at 8 p.m. Harris Yulin, an actor with an extensive stage and screen resumé and a home in Bridgehampton, will introduce the film. A discussion will follow with Stefan Roloff, the film’s director and son of one of the group’s survivors.

The Hamptons Take 2 Documentary Film Festival will present a screening of “Anita: Speaking Truth to Power” on Saturday at 4 p.m. at Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor.

The subject of the 77-minute documentary, directed by Freida Lee Mock, is Anita Hill, an attorney and law professor who in 1991 was thrust onto the world stage when she testified before the Senate during its confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas.

This past year, some of recent history’s more creative and flamboyant spirits have discovered and interacted with an eccentric and eclectic monument to the artistic pursuits of one of their own. That the artist was Barney Rosset, known primarily for his championing of literature and film, surprised most. But the artifact he created stunned all.

What they saw was a 12-by-22-foot wall-spanning mural, as ambitious as it is idiosyncratic, and a true emblem of the 20th century, even though it was conceived during the 21st.

It could not have been easy to be an American artist at the turn of the 20th century and the years to follow.

Playing catch-up with the revolutionary movements of European modern art must have been discouraging at the very least to the young artists who tried. Those who did may have been dismissed by unsympathetic audiences or shunned entirely by fellow artists for not pursuing a more nativist vision.

When Tracey Jackson and Paul Williams first met in the 1980s, the last thing either of them thought was that they might join up to address addictive behavior in a self-help recovery book.

For one thing, the popular musician and composer was high, very, very high. “I was at a party in Robert Mitchum’s house doing lines with Mr. Mitchum in his bedroom.” Ms. Jackson came in and complimented Mr. Williams on a recent film. His impaired retort was such that he said, “She went into the bedroom a fan of Paul Williams and came out a fan of Neil Diamond.”

Since its founding 22 years ago, the Hamptons International Film Festival has featured one-on-one conversations conducted by film journalists and magazine editors with actors, directors, and other industry notables. Joel Schumacher and Hilary Swank will be among this year’s guests for the “A Conversation With . . .” programs.

Mr. Schumacher will speak at Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor on Oct. 11 at 11 a.m., when Jess Cagle, editorial director of People and Entertainment Weekly, will present him with the Golden Starfish Lifetime Achievement in Directing Award.

Solow at Whaling Museum

The Sag Harbor Whaling and Historical Museum will open “City Square/Piazza,” an installation by Peter Solow, with a reception Saturday from 5 to 8 p.m. The exhibition will remain on view through Oct. 13.

Mr. Solow, who lives in Sag Harbor, had his first solo show in New York City at the age of 29. In a review, John Russell, art critic of The New York Times, called him “someone to watch.”

Speaking of horticulture, the Madoo Conservancy in Sagaponack will close its garden season with a party on Saturday from 5 to 7 p.m. The opportunity to enjoy a glass of wine and a stroll around the garden will be free for members, $40 for nonmembers. Guests can R.S.V.P. to [email protected].

Drew Petersen, an award-winning classical pianist, will perform a free concert at the Montauk Library on Saturday at 7:30 p.m. The program will include works by Schumann and Brahms.

The Grammy-nominated Eroica Trio will premiere a new work by Bruce Wolosoff, a Shelter Island composer, at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston on Sunday at 1:30 p.m. Titled “The Loom,” the piece was inspired by the paintings of Eric Fischl, who collaborated closely on the project and created a new painting inspired by Mr. Wolosoff’s music. Trios by Beethoven and Smetana will also be on the program.

Three prizewinning Latin American films will be shown at the 11th OLA Film Festival this weekend at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill. Founded by Isabel Sepulveda and presented by the Organizacion Latino-Americana of Eastern Long Island, the festival will kick off tomorrow at 5:30 p.m. with “Pescador,” an Ecuadorean film, which will be followed at 7 p.m. by a performance by Mambo Loco on the museum’s terrace.

Teri Dunn Chace, a writer, editor, and blogger whose work has appeared in major gardening and outdoor living publications, will deliver an illustrated lecture for the Horticultural Alliance of the Hamptons, “Seeing Flowers: Discover the Hidden Life of Flowers,” on Sunday at 2 p.m.

Ms. Chace’s book of the same name, published last year, includes lyrical and illuminating essays, observations, and horticultural lore from the author, and 343 photographs by Robert Llewellyn, a noted macro-photographer.

Walk my way, and a thousand violins begin to play, or it might be the sound of your hello, that music I hear, I get misty, the moment you’re near.

One can almost hear the deeply romantic lyrics as the musician Pat DeRosa plays “Misty,” on a Selmer Mark VI saxophone, in his house in Montauk. Airy, breathy like the human voice, the melody of Errol Garner’s standard is awash in vibrato as it races down the wire and into a telephone receiver, to be heard several miles to the west.

The John Drew Theater Lab will present a free staged reading of “Viva Los Bastarditos,” a new musical by Jake Oliver, Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. The production will be directed by Ethan McSweeny, a Tony Award nominee, and will star Blake DeLong and Alex Morf.

Set in a fictional land known as West Massachusetts, the play pits two villainous landlords against Los Bastarditos, three rock stars who unite to fight the would-be dictators and their army of rent collectors. The play draws upon and repurposes golden-age musicals, vaudeville, bedroom farce, and B-movie westerns.

Emily Cheng at Ille

Ille Arts in Amagansett will present an exhibition of paintings and drawings by Emily Cheng from Saturday through Sept. 30, with an opening reception Saturday from 5 to 7 p.m. Ms. Cheng draws upon the world’s cultural history for images and emblems, sometimes only fragments, which are transformed and recombined, in the artist’s words, “to service an entirely different purpose and context.”

If the precisely formed collage works of Glenn Fischer feel familiar, it is because they have visited the South Fork before, in group shows at the Sara Nightingale Gallery in Water Mill and at the Kathryn Markel Gallery in Bridgehampton. The Bronx-based artist is now flying solo at Nightingale, captivating passers-by looking in from the street and viewers within the gallery.

The publication of “Soft Targets,” Joseph Giannini’s collection of nonfiction stories about surfing, war, and fate, will be celebrated at LTV Studios in Wainscott with a book signing and reception tomorrow from 6 to 8 p.m. Mr. Giannini, an attorney who lives in East Hampton, served in Vietnam from 1967 to 1968 with the First Battalion, Third Marines.

The Biercuk-Luckey garden in Wainscott will be open to the public Saturday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. as part of the Garden Conservancy’s Open Days program.

The four-season woodland garden shelters a collection of rhododendrons, azaleas, kalmia, pieris, understory trees, perennials, bulbs, and tropicals in season. Winding paths and stone walls enhance a sense of depth and elevation change on a mostly flat acre.

A small composition of perennials in saturated reds and purple-blue with a dash of yellow drew my attention throughout August and into September.

New at Drawing Room

Concurrent solo exhibitions of work by Costantino Nivola and Rolph Scarlett will open at the Drawing Room in East Hampton tomorrow and remain on view through Oct. 13.

Nivola, who lived in Springs from 1948 until his death in 1988, developed a lexicon of sculptural form ranging from monumental public commissions to intimately scaled figures and abstractions in relief, bronze, clay, marble, concrete, and sand casts. This exhibition focuses on works in clay of figures at leisure on Louse Point.

Susan Schrott, a textile artist, psychotherapist, and actress, will present a free exhibition-performance at the Amagansett Library on Saturday at 6 p.m. Ms. Schrott’s artwork, much of which celebrates women and individuality, will be on view, while the artist will present “Triple Threat,” a narrative of her path from Brooklyn to the New York stage to the artist’s studio to her private practice. The audience has been advised to expect comedic flair and a song or two.

The Montauk Library will present a free concert by the Zigzag Quartet on Saturday at 7:30 p.m. The musicians — Alexander Wu (piano), Francisco Roldan (guitar), Hilliard Greene (double bass), and Danny Mallon (percussion) — cross musical boundaries from flamenco to jazz to contemporary works composed exclusively for them. The program will include pieces by R. Gnattali, David Tcimpidas, Astor Piazzolla, Leonard Bernstein, Binelli, and Dave Brubeck.

Center Stage at the Southampton Cultural Center will hold open auditions for Kander and Ebb’s “The World Goes ’Round” at 6 p.m. on Sept. 8 and 9 at the center’s Levitas Center for the Arts. Rehearsals will begin immediately after the auditions.

The play will run from Oct. 23 through Nov. 9. More information is available from Michael Disher, the director, at [email protected].