For hardy theatergoers and others seeking a novel way to spend a winter afternoon, the Neo-Political Cowgirls will present their current production “Zima!” on Saturday at Montauk County Park.

An interactive winter journey, the performance combines mystery, poetry, theater, and exploration. Participants will be given clues while watching vignettes as they move through town and try to solve the given mystery. Groups will leave the park every 15 minutes starting at 1 p.m. for the hourlong walk, with the final group setting out at 2:15. Hot cocoa and music will be available at Third House.

Tickets are $8, $5 for those 12 and under, and are available at brownpapertickets.com.

For Black History Month

“A Brief History,” an exhibition organized by Dexter Wimberly in celebration of Black History Month, will open with a reception on Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m. at RJD Gallery in Bridgehampton and remain on view through March 18.

The show will feature work by Jules Arthur, Margaret Bowland, Sylvia Maier, Fahamu Pecou, Phillip Thomas, and Alain Vaes, all of whom address issues of African-American identity and culture in works that stretch the boundaries of figuration in different directions.

Mr. Wimberly, the executive director of Aljira, a center for contemporary art in Newark, has organized exhibitions at museums and galleries around the world, among them the Museum of Arts and Design in Manhattan, the California African-American Museum in Los Angeles, and Koki Arts in Tokyo.

Romany Kramoris Honored

Romany Kramoris, who has operated her glass studio in Sag Harbor for the past 43 years, has received a scholarship from Urban Glass in Brooklyn, one of the leading glass art facilities in the country, to study advanced painted and stained-glass assemblage. Taught by Glenn Carter, the workshop investigates the historical medium of stained glass with a contemporary approach.

Ms. Kramoris, who owns the eponymous gallery in Sag Harbor, has received commissions from Temple Adas Israel, Christ Episcopal Church, and St. Andrew’s Catholic Church in that village and Incarnation Lutheran Church in Bridgehampton, among many others. She earned an international award from the Corning Museum in 1992 for excellence in contemporary use and design of stained glass.

This year’s Sundance Film Festival is underway in Park City, Utah, through Jan. 28, and while the Hamptons International Film Festival is represented there by Anne Chaisson, the festival’s executive director, and David Nugent, its director of programming, its participation can also be seen through three of the films being screened this week.

Started 18 years ago, HIFF’s Screenwriters Lab has helped usher many films to completion. Those at Sundance this year who have benefited from the advice and friendship provided by lab mentors include Christina Choe, Isold Uggadottir, and Cathy Yan.

Both Ms. Chaisson and Mr. Nugent applauded the inclusion of the films at Sundance and said they saw the films’ successes as an achievement for HIFF as well. “We’re always looking for artists who tell compelling stories that are unique, and certainly each of these three were,” Mr. Nugent said. “Two of them are international projects, which is exciting to us, and supporting female filmmakers and writers is very important to us as well.”

Ms. Choe, who was at the 2014 Screenwriters Lab, discussed the screenplay for her first feature film, “Nancy,” with her assigned mentor, Susan Stover, who has produced films such as “High Art,” “Happy Accidents,” and “Laurel Canyon.” Ms. Choe at that point had made several short films that had been shown at Sundance and other festivals, such as South by Southwest, the Los Angeles Film Festival, and the Aspen Shorts Fest.

“Nancy,” which stars the current “it girl” at the festival, Andrea Riseborough, centers on a character who likes to blur the lines between fact and fiction in her depiction of herself on the internet. “She creates elaborate lies to get close to people emotionally,” Ms. Choe said just before the festival began on Thursday. “When she sees a news report about a couple whose long-lost daughter disappeared and the picture looks like her, she takes a journey to see if she could be their daughter.”

Back in 2014, Ms. Choe told The Star that her inspiration for the film came from a New Yorker magazine article called “The Imposter” and a general fascination with hoax and imposter stories. She said she wanted a lead character who was “morally ambiguous, a female antihero.” Now, she notes that shooting for the film began around the time of the inauguration of President Donald Trump. With a crew that was 80 percent female and 50 percent people of color, “it was an intense time. We pretty much felt like the world was ending.” But the themes of the past year — how everyone is coming to terms with having to navigate between truth and fiction — has made her film that much timelier.

At the time of the lab, only Ms. Riseborough was attached to the script as the star. She has roles in three other movies at this year’s festival. “I really believed she was the only one who could do it,” Ms. Choe said. “She has extraordinary range in her abilities.” She added that Ms. Riseborough’s notice before and during the festival has made her as happy as the recognition for her film has. “You can’t control those things, and it’s nice that that’s happening for her as well.”

The cast eventually grew to include Steve Buscemi, Ann Dowd, and John Leguizamo. “This version of the film got made with the best team I could have hoped for. The financing was challenging and it took a lot of time, but I knew Andrea would be the guiding light.”

The ability to premiere the film at Sundance was unexpected and meaningful, because Ms. Choe put the film’s music and sound together at the Sundance Institute — “they were really supportive during the postproduction process” — and it’s “kind of what American filmmakers aspire to.” She was pleased that the cast and crew could celebrate their contributions and hard work there, she said. It is also a market festival where many films find distributors, something she said she would welcome.

She is grateful for the insight and support she received and continues to receive from HIFF. “They gave me the encouragement to keep doing what I’m doing and follow that gut instinct.” And she has stayed in touch with Mr. Nugent and Ms. Stover. The lab “was such a collaborative thing. . . . It’s nice to have the support as things are coming together so you don’t feel completely alone in the process, which can be arduous.”

Ms. Uggadottir’s film, “And Breathe Normally,” is about the bond that develops between a struggling Icelandic mother and a refugee from Guinea-Bissau in West Africa as their lives collide at an airport in Iceland.

“Dead Pigs,” the film by Ms. Yan, adapts the true story of how the lives of a pig farmer, a saloon owner, a busboy, an architect, and a disenchanted rich girl converged as a group of dead pigs floated down a river toward the rapidly modernizing city of Shanghai. 

All three films, which are competing at the festival, will continue to be screened through the end of next week.

In Process

Three different projects will make themselves available for public preview during Saturday’s In Process event at the Watermill Center.

Iva Radivojevic, who is from Serbia and based in Brooklyn, is at the center to work on “Aleph.” The film project is a game-like journey through 10 countries and offers hints to a solution to a puzzle that lies at the heart of an “unimaginable universe.”

Boris Willis’s practice is also game and technology derived, but he bases it in performance, having worked with various dance companies and created video art for the stage. In addition, the students of the Hayground Residency will demonstrate what they have been working on this month. This initiative, which began last year, invites students ages 12 to 14 to engage in performance-based projects. 

In Process will run from 2 to 4 p.m., with an optional tour of the center and grounds from 1 to 2. The event is free, but reservations are required.

Ebb and Flow

As we gaze out upon the frozen bays and ponds this winter, we may hunger for the unconstricted movement of spring’s thaw. The White Room Gallery in Bridgehampton has anticipated that yearning for flow with a show dedicated to motion. It opens tomorrow.

“Flow” will include art about movement, but also moving art, both literally and figuratively. “Fluidity, not rigidity” is the rule of the curators, Andrea McCafferty and Kat O’Neill. Among the many artists with work on view will be Kenneth Walsh, Sally Breen, Mary Antzak, Erling Hope, and Ms. O’Neill. 

A reception will be held on Saturday from 5 to 7 p.m., and the show will remain on view through Feb. 11.

South by Southwest

This month’s featured artist at the Golden Eagle in East Hampton is Kirsten Benfield. Originally from New Zealand in the Southern Hemisphere, she has lived on the South Fork for the past couple of decades, and recently moved to Springs. She works in oil, watercolor, and photography, and her subjects include landscapes, abstracts, figures, and still life. A reception will be held on Saturday from 4 to 6 p.m.

Also that day, Jane Weissman, an artist, historian, and curator, will give a talk from 5 to 7 p.m. and show her own photographs of the American Southwest from a trip she took in June of last year. Following in the footsteps of artists who took inspiration from that landscape, she will share her images of Walter De Maria’s “Lightning Field,” Michael Heizer’s “Double Negative,” and Nancy Holt’s “Sun Tunnels,” among others.

The Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill is bringing back last year’s Story Circle and People’s State of the Union tomorrow at 6 p.m. The free event, presented by an artist collective called the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture, invites participants to share their stories in circles made up of friends and neighbors and discuss the current state of affairs in our country. The goal is to listen to and learn from the various voices that make up our communities and bring them together. Those 15 and older have been invited to participate, and no preparation is necessary.

This weekend at Guild Hall, the screen will be alive with opera and classic and international films. Saturday’s offerings will be Puccini’s opera “Tosca” and “The Divine Order.” On Sunday, the Sag Harbor Cinema Arts Center will present “Casablanca,” with a talk by Isabella Rossellini.

The Met: Live in HD will simulcast “Tosca” on Saturday at 1 p.m. Eagerly anticipated after a controversial reinterpretation staged in 2009, this new production by David McVicar was called “scrupulously inoffensive” by The New York Times. Those experiencing the opera via the screen will have the added benefit of seeing up close its sumptuous sets, including re-creations of Roman frescoes and decoration that includes 77 rolls of gold leaf. 

Although the cast’s leads, including Sonya Yoncheva, Vittorio Grigolo, Zeljko Lucic, and Patrick Carfizzi, are replacements for others who canceled, they are receiving positive reviews. Andris Nelsons conducts. Tickets are $22, $20 for museum members, and $15 for students.

On Saturday evening at 6, Guild Hall and the Hamptons International Film Festival will continue Now Showing, a joint winter film series, with “The Divine Order,” a Swiss film with German subtitles. In it, the time is 1971, when women still could not vote in Switzerland. Described as an uplifting and crowd-pleasing film, it shows what happens when a woman is pushed past her limit and leads a villagewide strike for suffrage. Tickets are $15, $12 for Guild Hall and HIFF members.

On Sunday, fresh off its 75th anniversary in 2017, the American classic “Casablanca,” starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, will be screened at 7 p.m. Part of the Sag Harbor Cinema Arts Center’s American Values series, the film will be introduced and discussed by Ms. Rossellini, Bergman’s daughter. The screening is free, but registration through the center’s website has been encouraged.

Welcome to the epic emotional universe of the sisters Magrath, also known as Beth Henley’s 1978 kitchen sink tragicomedy, “Crimes of the Heart,” playing at Center Stage Theatre at the Southampton Cultural Center through Sunday.

The sisters are the spine of this southern gothic tale set in lil’ ol’ Hazelhurst, Miss., with more than a touch of Eudora Welty between the lines. 

Lenny is the eldest and drably sensible. As yet unmarried, her life and prospects seem stymied by, of all things, a shriveled ovary. She has spent her life burdened by big-sister duties, which have made her increasingly bitter, particularly as she has been the sole caregiver for their elderly grandfather.

Middle sister Meg is the wild child who gallivanted off to Hollywood to make it as a singer, but returns home after a short stint in a psychiatric ward.

And then there’s the youngest, Babe, all saccharine smiles and doe-eyed, but having “a bad day,” because she’s gone and shot her brute of a husband, as she didn’t much like his looks.

And all of this darkened by a tragic history: Their father deserted their mother, who committed suicide and took the pet cat with her.

A comedy, you ask? Oh yes. This small-town soap opera, which won the playwright a Pulitzer in 1981, offers a unique brand of melancholic humor, where suicide attempts are supposed to be funny and the goal is to have you laughing at death and crying at life. Many may recall the endearing 1986 film adaptation in which Sissy Spacek, Jessica Lange, and Diane Keaton perfectly conjured this hurricane of feelings.

The strength of the Southampton production, too, lies with the three female leads. Josephine Wallace, who was noteworthy in Center Stage’s fall production, “Boeing Boeing,” is equally so here as the mousy eldest sister, Lenny. As a neurotic Southerner, she tugs at the heartstrings early on when, alone in the family kitchen, she celebrates her 30th birthday (the ages from page to stage in Southampton require a suspension of disbelief), crying to herself as she blows out a birthday candle that she has been trying to stick into a cookie. 

Bonnie Grice, the award-winning WPPB broadcaster, captivatingly dominates the stage as the middle sister, Meg (ahem, a 26-year-old), broke and beautiful and all gravelly voiced, a gorgeous lush growl that wreaks of whiskey and sex. 

Age-appropriate Tina Marie Realmuto completes the trio as the youngest sibling, Babe. Ms. Realmuto does a fine job with a character who is supposed to be wide eyed and innocent but often appears slightly slow in the head. Were Southern women really that backward in the 1970s?

Then there’s the girls’ antipathetic cousin Chick Boyle, played with daffy humor by Kristin Whiting, who gets the loudest laughs. If there’s a way to play this larger-than-life tacky Southern ditz, other than to leap into caricature, we will never know. Ms. Whiting dives right into a crowd-pleasing bit of physical comedy in the opening scene, squeezing herself, like sausage meat, into a pair of too-small pantyhose. From there, there’s no reeling it in.

Joan Lyons, a regular on this stage as well as behind the scenes, directs “Crimes of the Heart” and offers up a mix of broad strokes and more nuanced scenes where things just seem to unfold. Kudos also to Ms. Lyons, who is credited with the set design, an excellent formica-covered 1970s kitchen that also doubles as a loony bin.

If you haven’t already noticed, male characters play a secondary role in “Crimes.” There’s slow-witted Doc Porter, who is still pining over sexy Meg, who dumped him before running off to Hollywood. Mark Strecker gives a quietly touching performance as the irresistible old beau. Deyo Trowbridge is the only other man and this baby-faced East Hampton High School graduate does a terrific job as Barnette Lloyd, a young lawyer who has taken on Babe’s attempted murder case for his own infatuated but vindictive reasons. 

There are a few crucial moments when heightened naturalism rather than cringey slapstick could have turned this production into a superb one: When Lenny lunges for her condescending cousin Chick and chases her around the kitchen, broom in hand, it should have been less Benny Hill and more a geyser that finally blew; when Meg decides to rekindle old feelings with Doc, the scene should have been more poignant, with much more at stake. Likewise, too, when Babe struggles with her mother’s dark tendencies and contemplates suicide. These are the moments that are supposed to be hilarious but tart, rather than succumbing to the outlandish and producing a play much funnier than it is endearing. 

Well, look at it this way: The Southampton production will make you laugh even if you should probably be crying.

Ms. Lyons said she became interested in staging “Crimes of the Heart” several years ago but had to wait until the rights became available. The delay was almost fortuitous. In today’s female-centric swirl, a play full of colorful characters for women to mine is a wonderful thing. But having background male characters like an abusive husband with a bullet in his liver, a mean old granddaddy with “blood vessels popping in the brain,” an under-age black lover, and even the family horse — a stallion — felled by lightning, is all too devilishly pleasing.

“Crimes of the Heart” will run tonight and tomorrow at 7 p.m., Saturday at 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2:30 p.m. at the Southampton Cultural Center at 25 Pond Lane. Tickets cost $25, $15 for students.

Ladd Brothers on Shields

The Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill will have a seated gallery talk by the artists Steven and William Ladd, who are represented in the museum’s permanent collection, about the work of Alan Shields, who lived and worked on Shelter Island from the 1970s until his death in 2005, tomorrow at 6 p.m.

Part of the ongoing Artist to Artist series, the talk will take place at “Alan Shields: Common Threads,” an exhibition of 13 works drawn from the museum’s holdings that illuminate Shields’s career-long use of yarn, thread, rickrack, machine stitching, beads, and other materials to expand the possibilities of painting and sculpture.

The Ladd brothers, too, use nontraditional materials, and their work was presented simultaneously with that of Shields in two 2014 exhibitions at the museum. Tickets are $12, free for members and students, and the museum has strongly encouraged advance reservations.

“Color and Light”

“Color and Light,” an exhibition of work by Janet Jennings, Anne Raymond, and Phyllis Hammond, is on view at Suffolk Community College’s Lyceum Gallery in the Montaukett Learning Resource Center on the college’s eastern campus in Riverhead through March 3. 

The paintings of Ms. Jennings and Ms. Raymond, both of whom live in East Hampton, reflect their interest in the reflection of light on water and the changes in atmosphere in the winter sky. Both artists tread a path between pure abstraction and reference to particular places.

Ms. Hammond, who lives in Springs, creates curvilinear sculptures of brightly painted aluminum that derive from spontaneously doodled pencil drawings. A reception will be held on Feb. 21 from 4 to 6 p.m.

Jeremy Dennis Photos

A solo exhibition of new photographs by Jeremy Dennis, an indigenous artist who lives and works on the Shinnecock Reservation, will open next Thursday at Suffolk Community College’s Flecker Gallery at the Ammerman campus in Selden and remain on view through March 15. A reception will take place from 1 to 3 p.m. next Thursday.

The most fundamental theme of Mr. Dennis’s work is indigenous mythology. His photographs use digital technology to make striking, elaborate, often dreamlike images that recreate Native American stories and legends. Typical of those is “Nothing Happened Here,” a series of images of white people in natural surroundings pierced by multiple arrows. The exhibition is accompanied by a full-color catalog.

At the Drawing Room

The Drawing Room Gallery in East Hampton will present an exhibition of sculpture, painting, drawing, photographs, and prints by gallery artists from tomorrow through March 18. Participating are Stephen Antonakos, Antonio Asis, Mary Ellen Bartley, Sue Heatley, Mel Kendrick, Laurie Lambrecht, Vincent Longo, Aya Miyatake, Dan Rizzie, Alan Shields, and Jack Youngerman.

Political Symbolism

“National Park,” a mixed-media installation by Alex Strada and Tali Keren, is on view at Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City through March 25 as part of the 2017 Socrates Annual exhibition. 

Ms. Strada, an Amagansett native and Ross School graduate who now lives in Brooklyn, and Ms. Keren visited the now-defunct Presidents Park in Virginia, where 43 monumental busts of American presidents are gradually deteriorating. “National Park” consists of a curved billboard-size image of the figures and an audio loop of ambient sounds recorded at the park. A conversation with the businessman who saved the statues from destruction is available online.

The artists also collaborated on “Save the Presidents,” a 13-minute video that details the physical decay of the figures. Both the film and the installation “explore the promise and instability of political representation and mythology, while raising questions about depictions of democracy, whiteness, and gender,” according to the artists. The video is on view in Times Square Arts’ “Midnight Moment” digital art exhibition through Feb. 28.

“Love and Passion”

Karen Mannix Contemporary will open its 13th annual “Love and Passion” exhibition, this one titled “Size Does Matter,” at Kathryn Markel Fine Arts in Bridgehampton with a reception on Saturday from 5 to 8 p.m. The show will be on view Saturday and Sunday and Feb. 10 and 11 from 1 to 5 p.m., with an erotic trunk show of lingerie, toys, massage oils, and edibles set to take place on Feb. 10.

Improvisational comedy, the cornerstone of American comedy, is coming to Bay Street for four one-day shows beginning Saturday and continuing on Feb. 17 and March 3 and 17. 

Since Viola Spolin, the idealistic teacher who developed improvisational games in the 1940s that actors and comedians would study for generations, the art of improv comedy has become arguably as important as stand-up in theaters across the country. 

The venerable Second City club opened in Chicago in 1959 — founded by Ms. Spolin’s son, Paul Sills — and since then this small comedy theater has become the most influential and prolific in the world, with such alumni as Bill Murray, Mike Myers, John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, Steve Carell, Stephen Colbert, and Tina Fey, in fact, almost every writer and performer ever to grace the stage of “Saturday Night Live.”

Now, Rob Reese, a teacher from Second City and a veteran improviser, is bringing this unpredictable style of live entertainment to Sag Harbor. Mr. Reese, a self-described “improv dork” who has performed around the world, has formed the Stowaways — a group of the New York area’s talented young actors, musicians, and comedians who share a love for the classic and modern improv comedy forms. 

The Stowaways will feature five or six performers in what the Bay Street website describes as “a crew of hilarious, irreverent, goofballs who simply refuse to utilize a script.”

“If the audience has seen ‘Whose Line Is It Anyway?’ ” said Mr. Reese, referring to the iconic television show, originally British, on which a panel of improvisers perform zany jokes and songs hatched on the spot following an audience prompt, “then they’ll understand the basic premise of these shows.”

But spontaneity and television regulations can make for strange bedfellows, often leaving televised improv feeling stilted and forced. It is an art form that truly belongs onstage.

The Bay Street shows will involve some audience participation, admitted Mr. Reeves. “But only to get the comedians started,” he said, “nothing that will embarrass anyone or put them on the spot.”

The Stowaways troupe will comprise some of New York’s brightest improv stars, among them Sarah Galvin, Winn Kline, Lexi Orphanos, Jake Parisse, and Mr. Reese. “And maybe a few others as well because you just never know what happens with improv,” said Mr. Reese.

The basic premise of improv is that the performers don’t know what will happen in their show until they are onstage. The audience is asked for a word or prompt that the group will use for its freewheeling improvisation. But while the comedy is impromptu and spontaneous, there is a formula at the core of all good improv: the “Yes, and” rule, meaning that performers must accept whatever their scene partners do or say as part of the reality of the scene and then build on it with their own contributions. What this requires is focused attention, and that an improviser must be present in the moment, intuition activated, alert, and ready to play.

In her 2011 best-seller, “Bossy Pants,” Tina Fey, the actress and comedian, illuminates this all-important rule: “The first rule of improvisation is agree,” wrote Ms. Fey. “Always agree and say yes 

[. . .] this means you are required to agree with whatever your partner has created. So if we’re improvising and I say, ‘Freeze, I have a gun,’ and you say, ‘That’s not a gun. It’s your finger,’ our improvised scene has ground to a halt. But if I say, ‘Freeze, I have a gun!’ and you say, ‘The gun I gave you for Christmas! You bastard!’ then we have started a scene because we have agreed that my finger is in fact a Christmas gun.”

Scott Schwartz, the artistic director at Bay Street, came up with the idea to add improv to the creative offerings because of the theater’s long and successful history with comedy, “dating back long before my time,” he said.

“The whole idea for the Stowaways,” he explained, “is to give our audience more comedy; more laughs in the cold winter months and more reasons to come out and have fun.”

What a perfect home Robert Harms’s recent paintings have found at Steven Harvey Fine Arts Projects, adjacent to the pocket park on Forsyth Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The streetfront windows with their western exposure let in abundant natural light, underscoring the translucency of his paint application and the delicate and deliberate use of color. Seeing these paintings under these conditions, it’s hard to imagine viewing them in any environment other than one with strong natural light embellished by the gallery’s own fixtures, not unlike how they would be seen in his studio.

Although known for the past several years for the abstracted views he found around his home and studio on Little Fresh Pond in North Sea, he has been spending more time in New York City of late. The effect on his work is obvious, but has left it no less sublime. 

The source of some pieces in the show, which is titled “Some Trees,” is obvious, such as one, “Washington Square,” that evokes a kind of rainy city murkiness, the sound of taxi tires hitting wet asphalt, and the mellow pink of old brick. At lower right, is that a reference to the Washington Square Arch? It no doubt makes sense and yet the arch is low, more of a tunnel entrance than the grander reality. The work suggests something painted from memory, after his having sat for a long while on a bench contemplating the scene.

It would be easy to say the more somber paintings were all inspired by city vistas, but it seems more complicated than that. Surely “Starfish,” with its saturated blues, aquas, and magentas infused with yellow, came from a Caribbean vacation. A couple of pieces appear to have been influenced by the South Fork as well. But all of these canvases seem grayer, browner, less imbued with light. Even his watercolors in the back room, which are often ebullient, are subdued.

Mr. Harvey noted a hint of Chinese landscape paintings in some of them — beech trees, for instance — and once noted it is impossible not to see.

A few of the paintings have “Plane Tree” or “London Plane Tree” in the title. Catching a glimpse of plane trees in situ in city streets or parks or in viewing reproductions of them, it is much easier to point to them as the subjects and see the paintings not so much as an emotional response, but in some ways a direct representation. The branches and trunks provide the linear elements, the leaves appearing as swaths of green or brown, depending on the season.

The gallery points out that these paintings resemble watercolors, with the oil paint so thinned it looks like a scrim. They also fill most of the canvas, which has been true for much of Mr. Harms’s work over the past couple of years. At one time, his work was dense and intensely marked. Then, he pulled back, a lot, and gave very little to the canvas, leaving the outer limits devoid of anything. This is a potent middle ground, not a compromise but a synthesis. The white space is not gone, it has just been incorporated, even accented with the washes of color.

While the Drawing Room Gallery’s shows of his art here have always been expertly installed, it is instructive to see it in the midst of an urban art enclave. It reminds us that Mr. Harms’s work is not our treasure alone, but something that holds up well across the broader art scene. 

The show will be on view through Jan. 29.