Arts

Optical Illusions

    The Halsey Mckay Gallery in East Hampton is showing “Ether Scrims, Dark Rooms, and Calculative Planes,” work by Michael DeLucia, Bryan Graf, and Kate Shepherd. The three artists use “virtual and analog interventions in photography, painting, and sculpture” to explore geometry, pattern, and computation. The work is characterized by optical illusions resulting from placing multidimensional forms onto the flat planes of photography. The show is on view through Sept. 8.

Surface at Ashawagh

   The problem with acting in the theater, as opposed to film and television, is the live audience, Emily Mortimer said recently at the modest Amagansett farmhouse she and her husband, Alessandro Nivola, bought five years ago. “Everyone in the audience has paid for a ticket and suspended their disbelief; they’re counting on you and you’ve got only one shot. I’m always afraid I will break the illusion by shouting something like ‘Fuck the Queen.’ ”

    Tonight begins another packed weekend at Guild Hall. A stage reading of “The Whisper,” featuring Matthew Broderick, Jane Krakowski, Pamela Adlon, Jennifer Tilly, and Dayle Reyfel reading Eugene Pack’s new work about a girls’ night out weekend, will kick it off at 8. The evening benefits the Felix Organization, whose supporters were adopted as children and now work to enrich the lives of youngsters growing up in the foster care system. Tickets are $30; $28 for members, or, for prime orchestra seating and a V.I.P. reception, $75 and $70 for members.

   There is a cat-like air about Lemon Andersen. Quiet, reflective, yet always aware. It is an air he developed growing up in the street and one he will take to the John Drew Theater at Guild Hall next Thursday, as he performs his one-man show, “County of Kings,” at 8 p.m.

    “County of Kings” is a story of recognition and redemption. Poetry. Truth. It begins and ends with Millie, Mr. Anderson’s mother, Puerto Rican, a junkie, sometimes recovering, sometimes not, but always loving her son to the day she died of AIDS.

   Scott Schwartz has been named artistic director of the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor. Mr. Schwartz is a graduate of Harvard University and a member of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society. He was the director of “Golda’s Balcony,” the longest running one-woman show in Broadway history, and directed the off-Broadway musical “Bat Boy: The Musical” at the Union Square Theatre.

    His work has received several awards and award nominations. Other productions have included “tick, tick . . . Boom,” “Kafka’s The Castle,” “Rooms: A Rock Romance,” and “Murder for Two.”

    The Bay Street Theatre has saved its best for last, as it completes its excellent three-show main stage 2013 season with a hilarious production of “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” playing through Sept. 2.

    This production of “Forum,” directed and choreographed by Marcia Milgrom Dodge, takes no prisoners. You will laugh until you beg for mercy, and then you will laugh some more.

   The Parrish Art Museum will present “Atlantic Vibrations,” 14 short surf movies filmed from Montauk to Westhampton, tomorrow at 6 p.m.

    Michael Halsband, a filmmaker and photographer, and Mike Solomon, an artist known for surf-related themes in his work, served as jurors for the selection of the films. Those contributing to the event include Danny DiMauro and Tin Ojeda, James Kapsipis, Calvin Knowlton, Benjamin Potter, Brendan Regan, Ingrid Silva, Chris Stewart, and Christopher Thomas.

QF Gallery’s Tete-a-Tete

    Mickalene Thomas will serve as curator for the next QF Gallery show, opening on Saturday in East Hampton. The show features work by Derrick Adams, Zachary Fabri, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Deana Lawson, Nicole Miller, Zanele Muholi, Wangechi Mutu, Hannah Price, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Malick Sidibe, Xaviera Simmons, Mickalene Thomas, and Hank Willis Thomas. It includes video and photography from Africa and the United States.

    The curator is interested in the different ways gender plays a role in how black artists present themselves in performance.

   The East End Hospice will once again hold its Box Art Auction on Sept. 7 at the Ross School, but it will also offer a preview of the boxes, as has become tradition, at Hoie Hall in St. Luke’s Church in East Hampton on Wednesday and next Thursday.

   Sophie Chahinian can easily relate to many of the artists she profiles.

   Specifically, the creative process and its tendency to drudge up the fear of the unknown, the fear of execution, and the fear of failure.

    Earlier this summer, Ms. Chahinian decided that enough was enough. After several false starts, she finally threw caution to the wind and plowed forward on a project that’s been years in the making.

    Nile Rodgers, who has produced and co-written some of the music industry’s biggest hits including those by Madonna, David Bowie, Duran Duran, and Diana Ross, plans to bring East Enders of all ages together for a dance party at Martha Clara Vineyard on Monday night. The event will serve as the inaugural concert for All for the East End, a not-for-profit that seeks to support the other East End nonprofits.

   Tomorrow’s  “New York City Ballet On and Offstage” is sold out, but there are plenty of other diversions at Guild Hall this week to keep audiences occupied.

    Saturday night brings “An Evening with Laurie Anderson” at 8 p.m.  The performance artist and musician will bring her unique style of music and storytelling to the theater with tickets starting at $40 for balcony up to $100 for prime orchestra and a reception with Ms. Anderson.

   Paula Poundstone will get to her performance at the Bay Street Theatre on Monday much the way she usually does. “I arrive on an airplane and I remember that it’s a long drive in from where I fly,” the comedian said, speaking from her home in Los Angeles. “I take a quick nap, eat dinner, take a shower, and go to work.”

   After inaugurating a music festival here late last August, an outstanding new chamber music ensemble from New York City will stage the South Fork’s second Salomé Festival, with three very different events to close out the summer classical music season.

   The Southampton Arts Festival will present its opening concert of two Bach concertos tomorrow on the terrace of the Parrish Art Museum. “Double Violin Concerto in D-minor” and “Concerto for Two Violins in D-minor” will be performed by Dmitri Berlinsky and Mikhail Bezverkhny. The concert will begin at 6 and will continue during the sunset.

Modernism at Vered

    Vered Gallery in East Hampton is currently recognizing the centenary of American Modernism with a show featuring the work of some of its earliest practioners. “Celebrating 100 Years of American Modernism 1913-2013” will be on view through Sept. 12.    

    The show includes oil paintings by John Graham, Marsden Hartley, and Milton Avery, works on paper by Oscar Bluemner, Charles Sheeler, and Alvin Langdon Coburn, vintage photography by Coburn, Man Ray, and Alexander Rodchencko, and furniture by Carlo Bugatti.

   It was a world of disconnection through over-connection that Ray Bradbury foresaw in his 1953 short story “The Murderer.” A world in which people’s ears were filled with music as they walked through their days, staying in moment-to-moment communication through their phones with their job, their friends, their lovers, their families. Connected, yet isolated from the world around them.

    Timing is everything in music, dance, and comedy. Marcia Milgrom Dodge, the director-choreographer of “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” running at the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor through Sept. 1, has always had a perfect sense of timing, onstage and off.

    Born in Detroit, she started dancing when she was a child.

    “My mother took me to tap and gymnastics, in Oak Park, Mich., when I was 3 years old,” she said Friday. She continued studying dance until she went away to college.

   The Adventure Bandits Art Club will return to the Nova’s Ark Project in Bridgehampton on Saturday for its second art show there.

   Italian food, Mozart, and Beethoven are on the menu at Guild Hall this week.

    On Sunday at 11 a.m. Florence Fabricant will host the first of a series of discussions called “Stirring the Pot: Conversations With Culinary Celebrities,” this one featuring Lidia Bastianich, the chef, restaurateur, cookbook author, and star of her own public television cooking show.

   Geoff Gehman has a question for you. When was the last time you rode a bike through Wainscott without a giant S.U.V. over your shoulder?

   Surf Movie Night will return to Guild Hall on Tuesday with Jack McCoy’s award-winning “A Deeper Shade of Blue: The Greatest Surfing Story Ever Told.” The film is about the sport’s deepest roots, and its footage is “stunning,” said The New York Times. Mr. McCoy has won many awards for his feature and short films about surfing.

   The Hamptons Theatre Company is holding open auditions for “Other Desert Cities,” a drama by Jon Robin Baitz. The story follows a family gathering at which a controversial memoir threatens to tear the family apart. The auditions will be on Aug. 25 from 2 to 4 p.m., and on Aug. 26 from 6 to 8 p.m., at the Quogue Community Hall on Jessup Avenue.

   The Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival presented a concert called “Captivating Combinations” on July 31 at the Bridgehampton Presbyterian Church, and true to the usual format of this series, each of the four works on the program had a different combination of instruments, offering varying colors, well coupled with the individual character of each composition.

    The program had solid bookends of Beethoven and Ravel, and a poignant Shostakovich trio and less familiar divertimento by the contemporary New York composer John Musto in the middle.

   Great drama is found, most often, not in the lines the actors speak or in the sound and fury they unleash onstage. No, great drama reveals itself in silence, dreaded silence, when those in the audience peer into the souls of the characters onstage and by doing so look truthfully into their own souls, warts and all.

    More than just warts are revealed in Chad Beguelin’s fine new play, “Harbor,” currently playing at 59E59 Theaters in New York.

   The Old Whalers Church in Sag Harbor will have a Sunday recital this week by Walter Klauss, and next week by John Walker, both at 3 p.m.. The musicians will use the church’s historic 1844 Erben pipe organ.

   Davina Dobie, an artist who grew up in Kenya, will present a screening of the National Geographic film “Battle for the Elephants” at Guild Hall on Saturday, with cocktails at 6:30 p.m. and the screening at 7. The film examines the plight of the African elephant and its decimation from an estimated 10 million in 1900 to under a half million today.

   The Hamptons International Film Festival’s Summer Docs series will continue on Monday with “Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me,” which follows the story of the Broadway legend in a documentary by Chiemi Karasawa. Ms. Stritch, now 87, is shown performing her one-woman cabaret act, torturing Alec Baldwin on “30 Rock,” and speaking about her present and past. (See related story).

    Tickets are $22, $20 for Guild Hall members. More details can be found elsewhere in this section.

    Tomorrow, Guild Hall will hold its Summer Gala in conjunction with the opening of the Chuck Close exhibition at the museum. A cocktail party at the show will be followed by drinks, dinner, and dancing at the Bridgehampton estate of Louise and Leonard Riggio. A live art auction will also be part of the festivities.

    Tickets begin at $500 for the exhibition preview and cocktails, and $1,200 for the entire evening and can be purchased through Guild Hall’s special events department.

“Follow your impulses” was the dogma dished by Simon Doonan during a conversation Sunday in one of the many outdoor gathering nooks at his Shelter Island house on Gardiner’s Bay.