Arts

At first glance, “Alarms and Excursions,” running now through June 11 at the Hampton Theatre Company in Quogue, seems a light romp about the tribulations of contemporary life. Its playwright, Michael Frayn, also wrote “Noises Off,” the hugely successful comedy of manners from the early 1980s. Like its predecessor, “Alarms and Excursions” has plenty of slapstick humor, but it ultimately aims for bigger targets than mere laughs. This production is a slightly abridged version of the original, first performed in London in 1998. The play is a loosely connected series of vignettes about married British couples. Most of the pieces work beautifully, with one or two being merely good. The first — a kinetic sketch about modern technology — is perhaps the funniest. Two couples meet for drinks in an upper-middle-class home. Once introduced they all decide to turn off their cellphones — they are going to chat, face to face, in the human way of the civilized elite. The host produces a bottle of w

The East End Photographers Group will take over Ashawagh Hall in Springs for a nine-day exhibition from Saturday through June 11. An opening reception with music by Job Potter and Friends will take place Saturday from 5 to 9 p.m. The Nature Conservancy is launching its summer season with “Sacred Balance,” an art exhibition organized by Beth McNeill-Muhs, an independent curator, that will open with a reception June 3 from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. at the Center for Conservation in East Hampton. The show will run through July 14.

“Out of the Question: Reviving the Lost Art of Provocative Conversation” will return to the Southampton Arts Center on June 8 at 7:30 p.m. with “The Business of Art: Passion or Profit?”

Fund-raising momentum is building for the purchase of the Sag Harbor Cinema property. Last week, boldface names such as Billy Joel, Martin Scorsese, and Harvey Weinstein were revealed to have joined the campaign. This week, Andy Cohen, who has a house on Noyac Bay, announced his support as well.

It might seem odd that Ruth Appelhof is currently in Rome, assembling a book proposal on the American artist Lee Krasner. But most everything about the project embraces the improbable and the serendipitous.

The Southampton Cultural Center’s Rising Stars piano series will present a concert by the prize-winning Pianofest artist Vincent Ip on Saturday at 7 p.m.

The closing party for the Southampton Art Center’s exhibition “East End Collected 3,” set for Saturday evening at 7, will feature the music of Mambo Loco.

The Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill will present tomorrow at 6 p.m. a performance by Hopefully Forgiven, whose musical styles, ranging from bluegrass to rock, are familiar to East End music fans.

Scott Schwartz speaks in superlatives — “greatest,” “magnificent,” “world-class,” “thrilling,” “unparalleled,” and that is just in one sentence. Well, not really, but it is tempting to go “over the top” after spending an hour with his infectious enthusiasm.

With a fresh outlook and a new lineup chock-full of luminaries, the Fridays at Five series of author talks at the Hampton Library in Bridgehampton will have a new look and feel this year.

Art Space 98 in East Hampton will reopen tomorrow for the summer season with “In Between,” a show of paintings on glass by the East Hampton artist Gabriele T. Raacke. The exhibition will run through July 3, with a reception on Friday, June 2, from 5 to 7 p.m. The Drawing Room in East Hampton is showing alabaster sculpture by Aya Miyatake and selected prints by Vija Celmins from tomorrow through June 26.

A Hubbard Latham Fordham painting, described in a newspaper article from 1869, was recently found in the attic of the Sag Harbor Historical Society.

The Hampton Theatre Company in Quogue will present “Alarms and Excursions,” Michael Frayn’s 1998 comedy, in a three-week run beginning next Thursday evening at 7.

The Old Whalers Church in Sag Harbor will present the season’s final concert in the Bach, Before and Beyond series on Sunday at 3 p.m.

In Ben Woolf’s play “Angry Young Man,” which will have its American premiere Wednesday at Guild Hall, four actors, two women and two men, play the same character, Youssef, often within the same scene. Those four actors also take turns playing the other 11 characters, who range from an elderly woman with an Irish brogue to a towering thug named Bruno to a young refugee named Gjerg.

The next installment of the off-season series of concerts at the Southampton Arts Center promises to be one of its most musically adventurous.

Gil Gutierrez, a guitar virtuoso on tour from San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, will perform a program of jazz, Latin, and cinema music on Saturday at 7:30 p.m. at the East Hampton Presbyterian Church. The concert, part of the Art of Song series, is presented in collaboration with OLA, the Organizacion Latino-Americana.

National Theatre Live from London will present an encore screening of “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead,” the Tony Award-winning play that made Tom Stoppard an overnight success, on Saturday evening at 7 at Guild Hall.

From Atlantic Terrace to Zum Schneider, there will be music all over “The End” today through Sunday as the Montauk Music Festival returns for its eighth edition. The four-day festival, a financial windfall for the hamlet’s many hotels, restaurants, and bars, brings more than 100 up-and-coming independent artists to venues across town.

Marissa Mulder, a cabaret singer from New York City, will showcase the music of the singer-songwriter Tom Waits on Saturday at 7 p.m. at the Southampton Cultural Center’s Levitas Center for the Arts.

The Watermill Center will present works in progress by four recently arrived resident artists on Saturday from 2 to 4 p.m. as part of its ongoing “In Process” series. A tour of the building and grounds will take place Saturday from 1 to 2 and Wednesday from 2 to 4.

The boat hull and spinnaker Roy Lichtenstein designed for the 1995 America's Cup races will be the subject of an exhibition opening at the Middlebury College Museum of Art on May 26.

“No Boundaries,” a group exhibition at RJD Gallery in Bridgehampton, will open on Saturday with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m. and remain on view through June 20. “Water+Color+Works,” an exhibition of work by nine South Fork artists who share a fondness for the watercolor medium, will be on view at Ashawagh Hall in Springs tomorrow through Sunday. A reception will be held on Saturday from 5 to 8 p.m.

The Salon Series at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill will conclude its current season tomorrow at 6 p.m. with a concert by the pianist Nicholas King, who has performed in concert halls throughout the United States, Canada, Ireland, Spain, Hungary, Austria, France, and Poland.

Valerie diLorenzo, a singer and actor who has performed frequently in New York City, on the East End, and throughout the United States, will host the East End Singers Showcase at the Southampton Arts Center on Saturday at 7 p.m.

Marion Grodin, a frequent headliner at New York City’s top comedy clubs, will host a new All Star Comedy Show at Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor tomorrow at 8 p.m.

The Salon Series at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill will continue tomorrow at 6 p.m. with a performance by Tanya Bannister.

Those of us who missed out on the debut of Bach’s secular cantatas at the Cafe Zimmermann in Leipzig or Edith Piaf at Parisian cabarets can capture that essence at a concert in Southampton.

“Giovanni the Fearless,” a new commedia dell’arte folk opera about actors, young lovers, and ghosts, with music by Mira J. Spektor and book and lyrics by Carolyn Balducci, will have its premiere at the Theater for the New City in Manhattan with an eight-performance run beginning tomorrow at 8 p.m.

Victoria Bond will speak before a broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera's "Der Rosenkavalier" and the JDT Lab will present a reading of "Detroit" this week.