Faculty and this summer’s young artists at the Perlman Music Camp on Shelter Island will present a concert of chamber music masterworks tomorrow at 7 p.m. at the Southampton Cultural Center and on Saturday at the same time at the Jewish Center of the Hamptons in East Hampton. 

Itzhak Perlman, the renowned violinist, will be among the performers, who include Joel Krosnick, Merry Peckham, Roger Tapping, Don Weilerstein, and Vivian Hornik Weilerstein. Brahms, Dvorak, Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, and Shostakovich are on the program. Patrick Romano will conduct the camp’s chorus. 

Tickets for each concert are $25. V.I.P. seats at the cultural center are $50, and limited pew seating is available at the Jewish Center, which has suggested calling 212-877-5045 to inquire about availability.

“We’re waiting for Wenzel,” the actor announced to the crowd at Guild Hall, seconds before the opening night of the play “Angry Young Man.” He was helping as an usher and must have read my name from the back of my assigned seat while I made a last-second dash to the lavatory. “Wenzel,” he let everyone know, “went for a tinkle.”

It was funny; I can take a little fun made at my expense. And anyway, to be incensed by this sort of playfulness is no way to begin to watch “Angry Young Man,” the zany, frenetic British play by Ben Woolf.

The title brings to mind (perhaps purposely) the famous “angry young men” series of British plays from the early 1960s. This cycle usually meant someone like Richard Burton or Richard Harris starring as a day laborer rebelling against his stifling lower-middle-class life via alcohol and violence. Mr. Woolf’s play, written just 10 years ago, has a decidedly modern twist, telling the story of Youssef, a surgeon from the Middle East who comes to London with the idea of starting a new life. That things don’t go anything like he planned hardly needs a spoiler alert. 

It is a terrifically performed play, as each of the four players — two women and two men — intermittently narrate and dramatize Youssef’s journey through a hostile London. Nazli Sarpkaya, Rami Margron, and Max Samuels all take turns playing him, sometimes within seconds of each other. Each finds a new way to present Youssef that somehow, despite the gender and race differences, makes perfect sense.

Meanwhile, Christopher Daftsios (my bathroom inquisitor) plays a kind of Harpo Marx character, talking little but interjecting himself into every scene with hyperphysicality and impersonating, by turns, dogs, bus drivers, stone statues, and even rain, as he douses his fellow actors with a water bottle. Directed by Stephen Hamilton, these splenetic goings-on are performed with stopwatch timing, and the machine-gun-fast dialogue is employed with nary a misplaced syllable. This is the same cast that performed “Angry Young Man” off Broadway, and at this point their chemistry seems almost innate.

Where “Angry Young Man” is less successful is in the narrative itself, which isn’t as absorbing as it should be. Certainly there is a timeliness to Mr. Woolf’s drama, given the wave of nationalism that has swept across America and Western Europe. But the satire of Youssef’s misadventures in London is so broad at times that its targets seem like paper tigers, innocuous cartoons hardly worth our contempt. There is a disingenuous taxi driver who takes Youssef for all his money. There is a racist police captain. There is a crass yuppie businessman and his vapid girlfriend, the latter of whom, for some reason, Youssef is enamored with. With characters this stereotypical, it’s hard for a satire to draw any real blood. 

As the social commentary falls short, what’s left here is comedy, which is carried off with exhaustive inventiveness and energy. There are plenty of laughs in “Angry Young Man,” including one hilarious sequence when the actors, in their usual frenzy, “accidentally” knock down the curtains at the back of the stage. Everything stops, and the actors look at the audience, stunned and ashamed, until a disembodied voice tells them to “keep going.” The joke is on us. 

It’s only by the very end of “Angry Young Man” that you feel the actors’ weariness in keeping this leaky boat afloat. The actors sit together on the end of the stage completely spent, having for 80 minutes tried to whip middling material into something engaging. For the most part, they have succeeded. 

Although an evening with “Angry Young Man” (which runs through June 18) may not tell us much about the immigrant experience or the English class system, it is an impressive showcase for four hugely talented actors. Like a multigender Marx brothers, they keep the audience laughing along with a subject not usually suited to comedy.

Just don’t be late to your seat.

How the lives of a retired, well-to-do real estate investor and an accomplished jazz-musician-turned-painter briefly converged, and how that meeting dramatically invigorated the painter’s career, tell a story about African-American art and Sag Harbor’s African-American community.

E.T. Williams Jr. told the story to a visitor on a sunny afternoon at his family compound in Sag Harbor. Now 79, Mr. Williams has been coming to Sag Harbor since he was a child. His father bought the modest house next to Mr. Williams’s own in 1933. 

Over the years, Mr. Williams bought a number of houses on contiguous properties. His late mother’s cottage now belongs to his younger daughter, Eden. Another belonged to his late sister, Joanne Williams Carter, who was head of the Eastville Community Historical Society and a member of the village’s historical review board. 

Mr. Williams said that his was the third African-American family of free ancestry to own the house. The first was the Hempsteads, the second the Trotts. The original structure dates from 1830. Noting the property’s history, Mr. Williams pointed to a tree in the backyard beneath which Langston Hughes wrote poetry in 1952. 

Claude Lawrence lived in Sag Harbor from 1994 to 1998 and again from 2001 to 2006. Born in Chicago in 1944, he took up the tenor saxophone while in high school and played clubs around Chicago until moving to New York City in 1964. 

His career as a jazz musician spanned the next 25 years. While in New York, he also moved within the art scene and met the black artists Fred Brown, Lorenzo Pace, Jack Whitten, and Joe Overstreet. He lived for a time in the same building as Jean-Michel Basquiat. 

Mr. Lawrence had been an avid artist as a child and, in the late 1980s, he again began to paint and draw, his musical background finding expression in acrylic paint on paper. “I look to create work that has balance, energy, and lyricism,” he has said. “I improvise, meaning the conscious or unconscious channeling of influence. Energy is the main component.”

In 1989 he embarked on a peripatetic existence during which he lived in Massachusetts, Los Angeles, Mexico, and various points in between. He continued to paint wherever he touched down. Though self-taught as a painter, he became knowledgeable about modern and contemporary art through visits to museums, galleries, and studios.  

Mr. Williams and his wife, Auldlyn, have collected African-American art for more than 50 years. Their holdings include works by Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, Thornton Dial, Hale Woodruff, and many others. 

After a successful career as a banker, Mr. Williams made his fortune in the mid-1980s with the conversion of Fordham Hill, a Bronx apartment complex with more than 1,000 units, into the largest privately financed, tenant-sponsored cooperative housing development in the history of New York City. 

“Most blacks don’t have the opportunity to buy a co-op as an insider,” Mr. Williams said at the time. “Through tenant sponsored co-ops, you create home ownership and you create a community.” Thirty percent of the original owners were black.

He retired from real estate in 1992. Since then he has served on the boards of the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Schomburg Society of Black Art and Culture, the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund, and many other nonprofits.

He not only continued to collect art, he also took up the cause of black artists he believed in, among them Hale Woodruff, Thornton Dial, and Mr. Lawrence. He met the latter when the painter lived in Sag Harbor, and he bought one of his paintings for his winter home in Naples, Fla.

Some years later, Mr. Williams learned from Martha Seigler, a Sag Harbor resident and patron of Mr. Lawrence, that the painter had returned to Chicago. Ms. Seigler had all of his work in storage and asked if Mr. Williams could contact the painter about its disposition.

In order to gauge interest in the work, Mr. Williams moved several large paintings into his house and invited Terrie Sultan and Alicia Longwell from the Parrish Art Museum to see them. They asked if he would donate three to the museum, and Dale Mason Cochran, the widow of the attorney Johnnie Cochran, wanted to buy several pieces for her Sag Harbor house. 

At that point he contacted Mr. Lawrence for permission to dispose of a few works before returning the rest to the artist. Mr. Lawrence had other ideas. “I’m dying,” he told Mr. Williams. “I have lesions on my spine, and what I want most of all is a legacy, which I don’t have. Maybe you can give me the legacy.” As a result, Mr. Williams bought the entire collection. 

Since 2013, largely thanks to the collector’s efforts, the painter’s work has entered the collections of more than 20 important museums, among them the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Mr. Lawrence is now in remission and living in Oakland with a new girlfriend. Last year his work was featured in “Modern Heroics: 75 Years of African-American Expressionism” at the Newark Museum. The painter attended the opening and played the alto saxophone there.

While Mr. Lawrence’s paintings range from abstract to quirkily figurative, they are linked by his expressive use of paint and an “art brut” quality. His art also reflects his background as a jazz musician. In an extended essay on his work, the art historian Andrianna Campbell wrote, “At once harmonious and cacophonous, like an [ensemble] warming up during practice, Lawrence’s all-over compositions sometimes yield moments of recognizable figuration.”

Mr. Lawrence is reportedly reclusive, and reluctant to say too much about his work. One painting in Mr. Williams’s house, and only one, calls to mind the work of Basquiat. “What can you tell me about this picture?” Mr. Williams asked the artist, mindful of Mr. Lawrence’s acknowledgement of Basquiat’s influence. “He said, ‘Charlie Parker,’ and nothing else.” The word “Yard” scrawled at the top of the painting is an homage to Parker’s “Yardbird Suite.”

Summer at Art Barge

With a press release titled “Make America Paint Again,” the Art Barge on Napeague has announced its summer programs. Classes, many of which begin in mid-June and continue through the summer, include painting, watercolor, pastel, ceramics, encaustic, photography, sculpture, collage, and writing. 

This year’s iteration of “Artists Speak,” an annual series featuring conversations with noted artists, will include David Salle and Donald Lipski, with a third speaker to be announced.

The Barge Gallery will open later this month with an exhibition devoted to Victor D’Amico’s founding of the department of education at the Museum of Modern Art. Two on-site exhibitions will be organized in collaboration with the independent curators Karen Flatow and Simi Johnston.

The Art Barge’s website is the source for more information, including class schedules.

“Botanic Verses”

“Botanic Verses,” an exhibition of paintings by Dominique Rousserie, will open at Tripoli Gallery in Southampton with a reception on Saturday from 7 to 9 p.m. and continue through July 10.

The show will feature new paintings of plant species gathered from the artist’s world travels and reflects his lifelong exploration of nature. Each work depicts a specific plant and its ability to captivate people through its psychotropic or medicinal properties. 

Two Shows at Ashawagh

Tonight from 5 to 8, Ashawagh Hall in Springs will be the site of a one-night celebration of scenic art and Buddhist-inspired paintings by Lois Watts, an East Hampton artist with burdensome medical expenses. Nancy Atlas and Inda Eaton will perform, food and wine will be available, and both silent and Chinese auctions will be held. Tickets are $20 at the door.

“Our Art, Our Vision,” a show of work by 15 female artists of the East End, will be on view at Ashawagh Hall in Springs on Saturday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday from 10 to 4. A reception will be held from 5 to 8 on Saturday.

The eclectic show will feature work in a variety of mediums by Phyllis Chillingworth, Anahi De Canio, Katherine Hammond, Phyllis Hammond, Tracy Harris, Lori Horowitz, Teresa Lawler, Cynthia Loewen, Lynn Martell, Mary Milne, Christine Newman, Alyssa Peek, Alyce Peifer, Lieve Thiers, and Pamela Vossen.

Ms. Horowitz will demonstrate how she creates her sculpture on Saturday at 2 p.m., and a panel of participating artists will be held on Sunday at 2. A percentage of all sales will be donated to the Springs Food Pantry.

Clay Art Guild Tour

The Clay Art Guild of the Hamptons will host the annual Back Roads Studio Tour on Saturday and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. each day. The free tour will include 15 ceramics studios and 23 artists from Hampton Bays to Montauk.

A complete list of participating artists and a tour map can be found at backroadsclaystudiotour.com. Several artists will only open their studios on Saturday.

Louise Crandell at Studio 11

Studio 11, located in the Red Horse Plaza in East Hampton, will open a solo exhibition of paintings by Louise Crandell with a reception Saturday from 5 to 7 p.m. The show will run through July 9.

Ms. Crandell, who lives in New York City and East Marion, will show a dozen works from her “Heaven on Earth” series. Working with oil and wax on linen, she creates haunting, almost ephemeral abstract canvases.

Six at Kramoris

Romany Kramoris Gallery in Sag Harbor will present a group exhibition from today through July 6, with a reception set for Saturday from 5 to 6:30 p.m.

While the show does not have a theme, four of the six artists — Jorge Silveira, William Skrips, Stephen Palmer, and George Wazenegger —work with wood and other found materials to create three-dimensional works. 

Lianne Alcon’s paintings contrast perception and expression. Eleanora Kupencow will show steel sculptures and paintings.

Call for Submissions

RJD Gallery in Bridgehampton has issued a call for submissions for its fifth annual “Women Painting Women” exhibition, which will take place in October. Images of artwork, résumés, biographies, and artists’ statements can be emailed to [email protected] before Aug. 21. More information is available on the gallery’s website.

The South Fork has been a magnet for artists since the 1880s, and perhaps never more so than now. A new exhibition aims a lens, figuratively and literally, at the remarkable size, diversity, and level of today’s artistic community.

 “Face to Face: East End Portraits by Jonathan Morse,” an exhibition organized by Peter Marcelle, will open tomorrow at the Sag Harbor Whaling Museum and remain on view through July 12. Forty-one black-and-white photographs, taken in Mr. Morse’s Sag Harbor studio, capture visual artists, playwrights, architects, and other creative residents. 

The impetus came from a portrait taken by Mr. Morse of Paul Ickovic, a friend and fellow photographer. “He insisted, in his own inimitable way, that I cease work on anything but portraits,” Mr. Morse said. “I began photographing friends, mostly contemporaries, then friends of friends, and so forth. Part of the raison d’être of the collection is the idea that men who have lived a long and creative life of the mind may develop a depth of character that can be read in their faces.”

The project was collaborative. Because digital photography allows the images to be seen immediately, the subjects took part in the selection of images. “Their reaction to the photographs was extremely interesting and helpful.” He also noted that portraits are especially challenging.

Those in the exhibition include the writers Max Blagg and Joe Pintauro, the architects Fred Stelle and Lee Skolnick, the photographers Ralph Gibson and Mr. Ickovic, and, among the 29 visual artists, John Alexander and Joe Zucker.

The exhibition is accompanied by 72-page catalog with an introduction by Eric Ernst, himself a subject, and 58 images. The catalog and the photographs in the exhibition are for sale as a fund-raising effort for the museum.

A book signing and cocktail party will be held on May 28 from 5 to 7 p.m. at Sylvester & Co. in Sag Harbor, and a reception with Mr. Morse and many of the artists will take place at the museum on July 1 from 6 to 8 p.m.

Eric Firestone made a name for himself on the South Fork art scene several years ago with splashy one-off shows that attracted attention and curiosity for their flamboyant and sometimes controversial content. The shows were fun and witty, and had more complexity than a  surface view might have suggested. 

In his first show of the 2017 high season, he takes a more thoughtful and subtle approach. The title “Season Opener” is simply declarative. No “Blam!” No “Whiz Bang!” No “Ka-Pow!” After immersing himself in the history of the South Fork artistic community and unearthing some of its long-forgotten gems, Mr. Firestone is solidifying his place on the continuum of dealers who matter here. 

Names like Miriam Schapiro, Howard Kanovitz, Sydney Butchkes, and Kyle Morris, who were once central to the local art scene, mix with others such as Michael Boyd, Jorge Fick, Ted Kurahara, Tony Robbin, and Mia Fonssagrives Solow who are separated from them by either place or time. 

Mr. Firestone’s commitment to Schapiro (whose varied phases of her career were early incarnations of feminist and digital art) has dovetailed with the art world’s recognition of her pre-eminence in her generation, which began after her death in 2015. 

He has chosen some unusual paintings to exhibit. “The Law,” from 1961, is a hybrid: Geometric abstraction interspersed with snippets of feigned painterly realism, areas that hint at traditional compositional norms without actually conveying a subject. The whole of the exercise is concentrated in the middle third of the canvas, as if this axial plane had a magnetic force field attracting all of the compositional forms. A circle in the middle of this column creates a central void, a white hole of negative space. A precursor to a series she called her “Shrine” paintings, this work is neither quite that, nor in the realm of the Abstract Expressionist paintings of the previous years.

“Lady Gengi’s Maze” is from 1972, when Schapiro was well into “Femage,” her use of collage to explore traditional signifiers of femininity. In this piece, she places the digitally derived hard-edge abstraction from her earlier work as a border in the lower third of the painting, and a jumble of three facsimiles of collaged works in the upper third, tumbling down from above. With a vertical plane of gray and black, and gray stairs in the background, this is one odd painting.

Yet, in their own ways, both these works are captivating. Typically, the art market seeks out and rewards an artist’s most definitive works. The unique and the experimental are ignored, or relegated to the bargain bin. What makes Mr. Firestone such an arresting seller of art is that he is as engaged with the outlier as he is with the epitome, much in the way a scholar would be. He trusts his eye to know when something is worthy of attention.

He works the same charms with Mr. Kanovitz’s paintings, blending his pioneering Photorealism works with a 1956 semi-abstraction. “Four A.M. E.S.T.” captures the manic energy of jazz musicians hitting their groove. With a minimal amount of definition, the artist creates a cast of players, but more significantly, a mood, a beat, a lively syncopation, which he lays down in short, patchy brushstrokes around them. 

The two Photorealism paintings are from 1971. One is from a series that resembles photographs of doorways tacked to a wall. In this tour de force, the shadows cast by the far edges of the photo’s mat, the thumbtack, and the composition itself are all illusory. “Still Life on 18th Street” is more straightforward — realistic, but without a tromp l’ oeil intent. Instead, the painting’s diptych format presents a table on the left with an old lamp and a quadrant of a Crosby, Stills, and Nash album cover. On the left side, an entry hall is painted mostly in gray tones. The glass panes in the door frame a blue sky and clouds.

Mr. Firestone’s astute choices form a thematic suite. The allusion to music highlights Kanovitz’s friendship and allied artistic vision with Larry Rivers, with whom he played trombone in a group called the Upper Bohemia Six. Presumably, the dark figure blowing sax in “Four A.M.” is Rivers, with Kanovitz in the left foreground. 

Sidney Butchkes, who died in 2015, showed regularly on the South Fork, particularly during the years of Elaine Benson’s eponymous Bridgehampton gallery. Mr. Firestone was intrigued by the artist’s obituary, seeing a man who was so esteemed at one time falling into obscurity. The sculptural paintings from the ’60s and ’70s that are the pinnacle of his work are well represented here and look fresh and relevant next to Mr. Boyd’s and Mr. Kurahara’s works, which use the tenets of Minimalist painting to similar effect.

Like Mr. Kurahara, Ms. Solow is one of the few living artists in this show. Living and working in East Hampton, she is represented here by a group of tabletop nickel-plated bronze sculptures. Their appealing reflective glimmer and simple forms seem to refer to the qualities of East End light in a direct but not obvious way.

The other artists in the show bear further exploration, but with space and time constraints, we can be grateful that Mr. Firestone will be providing us regular opportunities to see their work. This show is open through Sunday.

Center Stage at the Southampton Cultural Center will present “Darren Ottati: The Boys of Broadway” tomorrow and Saturday at 7:30 p.m., and Sunday afternoon at 2:30.

Mr. Ottati will lead a quartet of tenors, baritones, and basses in the concert, which will feature songs from “Damn Yankees,” “Guys and Dolls,” “The Civil War,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “On the Town,” “South Pacific,” and more.

David Michael Cress, Tom Rosante, Doug Sabo, and Jack Seabury will join Mr. Ottati onstage. Amanda Jones will direct the Center State Orchestra.

Tickets to the benefit concert are $45, $55 for ringside table seats. Light refreshments and beverages will be served

The Southampton Center for the Arts, in collaboration with the Jam Session, will present a concert by the Peter & Will Anderson Quintet on Saturday evening at 7. The Anderson brothers are virtuosos on clarinet and saxophone. Adam Moezinia on guitar, Claes Brondal on drums, and Marcus McLaurine on bass round out the ensemble.

Known for their unique renditions of classic jazz songs and innovative original music, the brothers have performed with the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, Village Vanguard Orchestra, Jimmy Heath Big Band, live on Garrison Keillor’s “Prairie Home Companion,” and are featured on the 2014 Grammy-winning soundtrack of HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire.” 

Tickets are $15, $5 for children under 18. The doors will open at 6:30 for refreshments.

“Rosa Mystica,” a free concert by the vocal duo Kinga Cserjési, soprano, and Deborah Carmichael, mezzo-soprano, will take place at the Montauk Community Church at 5 p.m. on Saturday. Baroque instruments — two violins, a cello, a viola, and continuo — will accompany the singers.

A Stabat Mater by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, motets by Claudio Monteverdi and Heinrich Schutz, and “Quartetto in A minor” by Georg Philipp Telemann are on the program.

If the past few years have been a quiet period for Vija Celmins, then we can now gratefully celebrate its end. It began in February with the Matthew Marks Gallery’s recap of her work since her last show in 2010, and will culminate at the end of next year in a vast retrospective opening at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. And, this spring we can enjoy her prints at the Drawing Room Gallery in East Hampton.

For any other artist so prolific and flexible in her choice of mediums (painting, sculpture, drawings, and prints), a print show might seem second-tier, an also-ran. Ms. Celmins, however, revels in the various techniques of relief and intaglio printing, easing in and out of wood engraving, mezzotint, aquatint, drypoint, and etching as others might change sweaters.

The Drawing Room displays just a dozen of these mostly recent works, a sample of all of these mediums. Those familiar with the artist’s oeuvre will recognize subjects she has addressed tirelessly through the decades — the night sky, a spiderweb, and the infinite sea. 

Her compositions are all horizon-less foreground. Waves and current are recognizable, but could easily be merely texture. The wood engravings of the ocean reveal her intricate slices of the wood’s endgrain, carved over and over again with grace and precision. Close up, their white negative space highlights the linear quality of the medium. From a few feet away, the elements blend in a way that resembles brush strokes. 

Contrasted with the inverse relationship of positive and negative space and the painterly surface of the mezzotints of the same subject matter, her prints become didactic in the most aesthetically pleasing way. The brain and the gut both react to her punch in a slightly woozy, intoxicated way.

Her mezzotints inspired from night skies are marked by rich, deep-dark surfaces, created by roughing up the surface of the printing plate with a tool called a rocker to absorb the ink. By smoothing out dots throughout the composition to be left as blank paper, she produces the stars as necessary contrast. There are several “Dark Sky” images on view. The show also offers etchings and aquatints that create the reverse effect — white expanses with black dots and blips, in one case in the same composition, presented like a diptych.

Her mezzotint spiderwebs are masterworks of the medium, pushing its inherent qualities to their maximum intensity. The dark backgrounds are interrupted only by the finest of lines to form an intricate network. Once again, the webs are all shallow foreground. She jettisons the superfluous to concentrate each composition’s impact. 

The versatility of Ms. Celmins’s process across land, sea, and air is remarkable. By taking the recognizable and creating confusion around that recognition, she forces us to consider the abstract in the real and the real in the abstract. It makes you want to applaud right there in the room, just to express your gratitude for such understated yet complicated magnificence. 

The New York Times noted earlier this year how scarce her work is in the marketplace. Collectors and institutions grab it up as soon as it becomes available. It is in evidence at the Drawing Room as well, where the pieces — artist’s and trial proofs — are clearly from her own collection. Red dots fill the exhibition’s price list, a testament to what fine examples are on view.

The back room of the gallery feels a bit like a scene from a science-fiction movie. Alabaster orbs and organic shapes, with their translucent qualities, look like beautiful pods from another planet. 

Working with stone from all over the world, Aya Miyatake finds unique pieces with hints of rose and gold and pulsating veins of white and gray. The burnished shapes the East Hampton artist coaxes from them are graceful and compact. They resemble natural forms at a point or two removed from Ms. Celmins’s nearby pieces. 

Here the subject appears abstract, with the look and feeling of something recalled or understood to be what the shape hints at it being. The titles, in her native Japanese, that often describe her work as “whale,” “round,” “oblique,” further illuminate or obscure their ultimate meaning.

Both exhibitions remain on view through June 26.