Arts

There are readings — any number of them around here, given the out-of-scale density of scribblers on the South Fork — and then there are readings for which the usually unacknowledged organizer has gone to considerable pains to bring in someone of distinction from somewhere else.

    Anthropologists and archaeologists often say that much can be learned about a culture by its trash. That may be less true today with recycling, or perhaps even more so.

    Anthony W. Robins will discuss the history and significance of Grand Central Terminal at the Montauk Library on Sunday at 3:30 p.m. “Grand Central Terminal: 100 Years of a New York Landmark,” taken from the title of a 2013 book by Mr. Robins, will address the building’s Beaux-Arts design along with its function, use of technology, and role in urban planning.

    The author is an expert on New York City architecture and history and is a New York Council for the Humanities speaker. The illustrated lecture is free.

    Bay Street Theatre is holding its third annual spring benefit, Curtain Up!, at Joe’s Pub in New York City on May 12 from 6 to 8 p.m. The event will honor Bonnie Comley and Stewart Lane, and Pia and Jimmy Zankel, and will be hosted by Scott Schwartz, the theater’s new artistic director.

    “Dance Is Now,” a fund-raising performance by three East End dance companies, will be held Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Southampton Cultural Center. The evening will support a new initiative of the cultural center to emphasize dance performance and education in its programming.

     The participating companies are Danse Arts and Studio 3 of Bridgehampton, and Hamptons Dance Authority of Southampton. The program will feature popular music and performances by several professional and amateur dancers.

    A buffet dinner theater with cabaret-style performances will take place Saturday at 6 p.m. in the Session House of the East Hampton Presbyterian Church.

    Music ranging from original songs to Gershwin will be performed by Barbara Borsack, David Cataletto, Suzanne Nicoletti, Susan Vinski, Richard Barons, Peggy Sherrill, Rick Chapman, Heddie Edwards, Liz and Joe Eckman, and Lisa Ashkenazie.

    The Watermill Center will open its doors Saturday afternoon from 2 to 6 for a variety of activities and programs. Blakeley White-McGuire, a principal dancer with the Martha Graham Dance Company, will lead a free movement workshop for all ages, titled “Cultivating Physical Presence,” at 2. Participants will explore performance through basic movements such as walking, standing, running, and skipping. Comfortable clothing and shoes have been recommended.

    The Hamptons Take 2 Documentary Film Festival will present the East Coast premiere of “Penny & Red: The Life of Secretariat’s Owner” on Sunday at 2:30 p.m. at Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor. The film, directed by John Tweedy and narrated by Diane Lane, tells the story of Penny Chenery and Secretariat, her champion thoroughbred, also known as Big Red, who won racing’s Triple Crown in 1973.

    “The play’s the thing, wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king,” Hamlet tells us in the ultimate Shakespearean tragedy. And players for the play are wanted, according to Morgan Vaughan, who will direct the Round Table Theater Company’s production of “Hamlet” at Guild Hall’s John Drew Theater in East Hampton this fall.

    All parts are open, with the exception of the title character, which will be played by Tristan Vaughan, and Gertrude, to be played by Dianne Benson.

New at Halsey Mckay

    The Halsey Mckay gallery in East Hampton will open a show of paintings by two artists, Ann Pibal and Nathlie Provosty, and a solo exhibition of paintings by Steven Cox on Saturday.

    Both Ms. Pibal and Ms. Provosty, who have homes in Brooklyn, use line, form, and sumptuously worked surfaces to create distinct visual languages.

    Mr. Cox, a Scottish artist having his first solo show in the United States, uses horizontal and vertical repetition of color, pattern, and layering to explore the possibilities of the linear stripe.

    Guild Hall will present an encore screening of the National Theatre Live’s new production of Shakespeare’s “King Lear” on Saturday at 7:30 p.m. The London production, which will be captured on film at its opening today, is directed by Sam Mendes, Academy Award-winning director of “American Beauty,” and stars Simon Russell Beale, England’s “greatest stage actor,” according to Charles Spencer of The Telegraph, in the title role.

    Tickets are $18, $16 for members, and free student rush tickets are available.

    The Met: Live in HD will return to Guild Hall on Saturday at 1 p.m. with Mozart’s “Cosi Fan Tutte.” A two-act opera buffa, or comic opera, “Cosi Fan Tutte” is set in Naples in the 18th century. Don Alfonso wagers two young soldiers that their sweethearts will prove unfaithful if given the chance. The men accept the bet and tell their sweethearts, who are sisters, that they have been called to the front and must leave Naples. Switched identities and comic confusion follow.

    WPPB 88.3 has added three new programs to its schedule. “TED Radio Hour,” based on talks given on the TED stage and hosted by Guy Raz, will be broadcast every Sunday from noon to 1 p.m. Each show is centered on a common theme — the source of happiness, crowd-sourcing innovation, power shifts, inexplicable connections — and injects soundscapes and conversations that bring these ideas to life.

    The Hamptons Independent Theatre Festival will hold auditions for “The Tempest,” its second outdoor Shakespeare production, on May 8, 15, and 22 from 7 to 10 p.m., and May 11 and 18 from 2 to 5 p.m., at the Bridgehampton Community House. All roles are available. HIT Fest organizers are seeking “eager performers with a strong vocal presence who enjoy the outdoors.”

    Bay Street Theatre will present its second annual Steinbeck Festival from next Thursday through May 4, in conjunction with the annual celebration held by the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas, Calif. Three days of films, a waterfront cocktail party, and a “Travels with Charley” dog walk are among the activities that will honor John Steinbeck’s contributions to Sag Harbor, where he lived from 1955 until his death in 1968.

Koichiro Kurita at Ille

    Koichiro Kurita, a photographer who lives in Southold, will have a solo show at Ille Arts in Amagansett from Saturday through May 10. Mr. Kurita, who was a commercial photographer in Japan, had a life-changing experience when he visited Walden Pond in 1985. “I was inspired by the freedom of the spirit and pursued fine art photography,” he has said.

    The Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill unveiled a monumental sculpture by Roy Lichtenstein on its front lawn on Friday and is about to open the first major museum survey of work by Jennifer Bartlett, whose stylistic and thematic innovations have established her as one of the most important artists of her generation.

    The Hamptons International Film Festival is known primarily for its annual four-day showcase event held in October. Yet for many years, the festival has spread out its calendar to include summer screenings of documentaries and narrative films, projects in the local schools, and a springtime screenwriters lab. The latter brings established professionals to East Hampton to work with writers early in their careers and bring scripts to fruition, with four in recent years making it to production and, in some cases, winning awards.

    Valerie diLorenzo, a New York singer and actress, will perform “Broadway Baby,” a musical revue, at the Southampton Cultural Center on Saturday at 7:30 p.m. She will be accompanied by Barry Levitt, a music director and pianist, and Anthony Santelmo Jr., an actor and cabaret singer.

    Nell Shaw Cohen, a composer, librettist, and multimedia artist who grew up in Sag Harbor and San Francisco, will present “The Coming of Spring,” a one-act operatic monodrama for tenor and chamber ensemble, at the Provincetown Playhouse on MacDougal Street in Manhattan on Tuesday. The performance, which begins at 8:30 p.m., is free and open to the public.

    Ms. Cohen, who is now based in Brooklyn, is the 2013-14 composer-in-residence with the New York University Symphony. Her work frequently explores the intersections of music, nature, and visual art.

    If you look up Sammy’s Beach on the Internet, you are given maps, a lot of real estate listings, and a few photographs of a bay beach, typically with a lot of tire ruts. On Instagram it’s different: arty shots of windblown waves on a rocky shore, abstract amalgamations of jingle shells and seaweed, dramatic sunsets and the like.

    After 60 years of making and exhibiting art, Jack Youngerman shows no sign of slowing down. On a recent wintry morning he led a visitor briskly across hard-packed, slippery snow from his house on Scuttlehole Road in Bridgehampton, where he has lived since 1968, to his studio.

    On Wednesday, the jazz musicians Gil Gutierrez, a guitarist, Bob Stern, a violinist, and Peter Martin Weiss, a bassist, will hold an “open rehearsal” or casual performance of jazz in the Montauk Library.

    The free concert, presented at 7:30 p.m., will include pieces by Piazzolla, Villa Lobos, Vincente Amigo, Jobim, Reinhardt & Grappelli, and original compositions by Mr. Gutierrez, who is a Oaxaca-born guitarist and composer now living in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, an expat retiree haven for many American artists and artistic types.

    Guild Hall will present a recorded concert from the Lucerne Festival, featuring Claudio Abbado conducting Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 (Resurrection) in C minor, on Saturday night. Mr. Abbado, who died this year, was one of the foremost conductors of Mahler.

    This composition is considered one of Mahler’s most emotionally powerful works. It will be preceded by a lecture by Gilbert Kaplan, given in the John Drew theater at 6:45, with the screening at 8.

    The paintings of Matt Vega, on view at Ille Arts in Amagansett, mark a bit of a homecoming for the artist, who received an M.F.A. from Yale in photography, but began his studies in painting at Boston University.

    Just as spring buds bloom into summer flowers, Scott Schwartz, Bay Street Theatre’s artistic director, intends to nurture fledgling plays into potential main-stage productions. In the works is a series of staged readings of new plays, to be held at the Sag Harbor theater every spring, with the first three kicking off the series next weekend.

    The Parrish Art Museum’s Salon series will continue tomorrow at 6 p.m. with the pianist Tanya Gabrielian, a veteran of New York’s Carnegie and Alice Tully Halls, London’s Queen Elizabeth and Wigmore Halls, the Sydney Opera House, and the Salle Cortot in Paris. Her program is called “Dedications.” 

    According to the pianist, “each of the four pieces is dedicated to different sources of inspiration—legacy, location, love, and admiration.” 

New at Dodds and Eder

    Dodds and Eder Home in Sag Harbor, now under new ownership and focused on the work of local artists, is presenting “Memories of Place: Land/Water/Sky,” now through May 10.

    Participating artists are Maria Schon, an abstract painter from Sagaponack; James DeMartis, an East Hampton-based sculptor and metalworker; Casey Dalene, from East Hampton, who creates designs on textiles and fabrics, and John Cino, a wood sculptor from Patchogue.

    A reception will take place on April 26 from 4 to 6 p.m.

    The LongHouse Reserve in East Hampton will open its 2014 season on Saturday from 2 to 5 p.m. with “Rites of Spring,” featuring work by Steve Miller, Fitzhugh Karol, and the installation of “Heroic Man,” a monumental sculpture by Gaston Lachaise.

    The Parrish Art Museum’s third installment of Architectural Sessions, an ongoing series co-presented with A.I.A. Peconic and moderated by the architect Maziar Behrooz, will take place in Water Mill Saturday at noon.

    The program, “Five Minutes Max,” loosely borrows its format from the museum’s popular PechaKucha Night series. Each of 12 East End architects will give a five-minute presentation of 15 images, each of which will remain on the screen for 20 seconds.