The Parrish Art Museum’s Salon Series of classical music concerts will conclude its fall run with a performance by the Bulgarian-born pianist Nadejda Vlaeva tomorrow at 6 p.m. Among her many awards are first prize in the Liszt Competition in Lucca, Italy, and the Yahama Award for best Brahms interpretation.

The program reflects Ms. Vlaeva’s eastern European roots, with works by the Ukrainian composer Sergei Bortkie­wicz, the Russian-American composer Vladimir Drozdoff, and the Polish-born Franz Liszt. She recently premiered works by Bortkiewicz and Drozdoff at Carnegie Hall and received critical acclaim for her CD of Bortkiewicz’s piano music.

Tickets are $20, $10 for members. A reception will follow the concert.

The Southampton Arts Center is taking Halloween seriously this year. In addition to its Spooktacular Haunted House and its exhibition “Chas Adams: Family and Friends,” both continuing through Monday, the center will screen two creepy classics this weekend.

“Poltergeist,” Tobe Hooper’s horror fantasy about an ordinary California family’s frightening introduction to the supernatural, will be shown tomorrow at 8 p.m. Tickets are $8.

On Saturday at 10 p.m., the center will present its “first annual screening” of the cult classic “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” the 1975 film that not only combined three genres — musical, comedy, and horror — but also spawned the phenomenon of audience members dressing as the characters and performing along with the film. To encourage that, the center will have props available for purchase and will award a prize for best costume. Tickets are $10.

In 2008, when David Mamet debuted “November,” his play about the madness of American politics, he could have hardly foreseen the season of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. But he sure tried. This satire’s central character, Charles Smith, is a sitting president up for re-election, and if that situation is not currently relevant, then nearly everything else in “November” is.

President Smith is a man beset by minority special interest groups, gay rights coalitions, and questions about campaign contributions and the funding of a presidential library, not to mention being torture-happy and on the political take. His popularity score hovers right around Clinton’s and Trump’s recent approval ratings. “What is it that people don’t like about me?” Smith asks his adviser Archer Brown. “That you’re still here,” is the reply.  

A revival of “November” is running at the Hampton Theatre Company in Quogue through Nov. 6, and part of the pleasure of watching this production — if not the very point of it — is hearing the zingers that remind us of our current political mess. There is this, for example: “We can’t build a fence to keep out the illegal immigrants,” states Archer Brown. “Why not?” asks the president. “Because we need the illegal immigrants to build the fence.”

Of course, staging a David Mamet play can be tricky business. With his syncopated language and arch staccato rhythms, Mr. Mamet may be the most singular of American playwrights; revivals of his work have had mixed success. “November,” however, is one of his least idiosyncratic plays, relying more on broad humor and less on stylized dialogue. In fact, there are times when it seems more like an episode of HBO’s series “Veep” than a Mamet play. This makes it low-hanging fruit for restagings, and the deft players of the Hampton Theatre Company dig out nearly all of the comic nuggets in its text. 

President Smith is not only harried and uninformed but spineless, and seems to rely on his adviser for the most basic information (he’s not even certain if his country is at war with Iraq or Iran). Though the election is still ahead, his wife has already made arrangements to remove a couch she loves from the White House, and though he has promised her there will be a presidential library in his name, he has raised only $400,000 so far toward that end. When a representative from the turkey farm lobby enters the Oval Office offering a payola scheme for the “pardoning” of two turkeys, the plot is off and running. 

There are moments in the first half of “November” when the comedy doesn’t quite hit its mark, but this seems more the fault of the text than this faithful production. Mr. Mamet has always been primarily a dramatist with comedic flourishes rather than a writer of flat-out farce, and occasionally there is a lack of snap to the humor. 

But things begin to warm up in the second half, and soon all the jokes are landing, the audience reaching a point of giddy exhilaration as the play coasts from one hilarious absurdity to the next. This has a good deal to do with the appearance of the character Clarice Bernstein, President Smith’s lesbian speechwriter, who tries to pressure her boss into officiating at a civil ceremony for her and her partner (this was before gay marriage) on national television. 

Bernstein is played by Rebecca Edana. As happened in her performance in last year’s “Lost in Yonkers,” the quality of the production seems to rise whenever she’s onstage. Bernstein is a farcical character meant to further taunt the beleaguered president, but Ms. Edana treats her longing to be married with such feeling that it momentarily lifts the play into something beyond mere comedy.  

Andrew Botsford takes on the role of President Smith with sniveling gusto, succeeding in making him likable despite his many abhorrent qualities.  It doesn’t hurt that he has a great straight man in Matthew Conlon, who plays Archer Brown with wicked cynicism. In the play’s last leg, when Archer is trying to explain to his boss the technical nuances of the word “legal,” the performances achieve a jazzy timing that seems to capture the best of Mr. Mamet’s rhythmic demands.  

While President Smith seems at least  partly based on George W. Bush, you don’t need a political affiliation to appreciate “November.” In fact, fans or detractors of either of our current candidates will find plenty of red meat in Smith. When pushing executive legality to its limits (and often beyond), the satire seems directed specifically at Mrs. Clinton, while Smith’s bigotry echoes some of Mr. Trump’s saltier rhetoric. Mr. Mamet is too good a writer to indulge in mere political ideology; with “November” he has nothing less in his sights than the entire American political scene.  

As we wind down from another crazy and exhausting election cycle, it’s hard to think of a better tonic than a night with President Charles Smith and this pleasing Hampton Theatre Company production.   

A simulcast of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni,” part of the Met: Live in HD series, will be shown on Saturday at 1 p.m. at Guild Hall. A pre-opera lecture by the renowned composer and conductor Victoria Bond will take place at noon.

First performed in Prague in 1787, “Don Giovanni” has been a staple of the opera repertory ever since. The story of a libertine and murderer who refuses to repent and is taken alive to Hell was originally a European folktale. The Met’s production features the baritone Simon Keenlyside in the title role, with the other notable Mozartean singers Hibla Gerzmava, Malin Byström, Paul Appleby, and Kwangchul Youn. Tickets are $22, $20 for members, $15 for students.

Ms. Bond will provide insights into “L’Amour de loin,” the first opera by the contemporary Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, which will be simulcast by the Met on Dec. 17 at 1 p.m. Tickets to the talk are $30, $28 for members. Refreshments will be served.

The Parrish Art Museum’s Salon Series of classical music concerts will present a performance by Sybarite5, a string quartet whose eclectic repertory ranges from Mozart to Radiohead, tomorrow at 6 p.m.

The group was the first quintet to win the Concert Artists Guild International Competition and has also received awards from the American Composers Forum, BMI, and Chamber Music America, among many others. Their first album, “Disturb the Silence,” featured music by the Argentine tango composer Astor Pantaleon Piazzolla, and original works written for the quintet. Sybarite5 has performed throughout the United States and abroad.

Tickets are $20, $10 for members. Each program features an opportunity for the audience to engage in a dialogue with the musicians.

A presidential campaign that only grows more nauseating as its climactic moment nears, violence in America’s streets and around the world, and the economic struggles common to so many — given the state of things, the timing is right for soothing sounds evoking simpler times. 

Last month, Katherine C.H.E., a singer-songwriter who lives in Amagansett, released “Campfire Sessions,” an 11-song solo performance complete with the sounds of a campfire and crickets. Two days after its Sept. 15 release, “Campfire Sessions” reached No. 1 on Amazon’s folk chart. It also climbed to No. 2 on its singer-songwriters chart. 

“The campfire vibe,” said the Nashville native, “was the reaction to this year. There have been points — a shooting, then something happened in Syria, the next minute. . . . It’s very discouraging. It felt like a moment to take things back to a simple, less complicated time. Growing up, that’s how I learned about music, sitting around the campfire. It’s my touchstone to a simpler place.” 

Accompanying herself on acoustic guitar, Ms. C.H.E. offers nine original tracks, many of which recall lullabies, with titles including “Be the Peace,” “All I Want to Do Is Kiss You,” “Thank You Song,” and “If I Had One Wish.” 

Two cover songs are also featured: “House of the Rising Sun” and “Wabash Cannonball.” These, she said, also evoke a less complicated time. “ ‘House of the Rising Sun’ was one of the first songs I learned,” she said of the traditional song that is thought to derive from a 16th or 17th-century ballad. “I’ve known ‘Wabash Cannonball’ all my life. My grandfather worked on a couple railroads, and I grew up riding trains with him. I think both songs took me back to a simpler, happier, more carefree moment.” 

The recording and promotion of “Campfire Sessions” have been grassroots, do-it-yourself efforts, the latter achieved not via the machinery of professional marketing and public relations but through word of mouth, social media, and email. It is available in physical form at Innersleeve Records in Amagansett, can be downloaded at Amazon.com and the Apple iTunes Store, and is “streaming everywhere,” Ms. C.H.E. said. 

“One of the things people have been saying is it does have a soothing feel to it,” she said, “which makes me happy. That was one of the goals. Even though all the songs aren’t happy, I wanted an overall vibe of simplicity, an antidote to the stress of the real world.” 

After traveling the film festival circuit for the last several months, the documentary “Legs: A Big Issue in a Small Town” arrived on Oct. 10 exactly where it began: in Sag Harbor Village, where Larry Rivers’s 16-foot-tall “Legs” still stands — as either an illegal structure or an artistic sculpture, depending on one’s viewpoint — attached to a house at the corner of Madison and Henry Streets, even as it awaits a State Supreme Court decision on its fate.

For the documentary’s filmmakers, Beatrice Alda and Jennifer Brooke, a couple who live in Sag Harbor themselves, this particular screening of “Legs” was special. Not only was there a full house at the Bay Street Theater, but the doc was part of the Hamptons International Film Festival.

“We’ve been in 20 festivals, and it felt completely different,” Ms. Brooke said. “I guess people knew a little more because they’re local.”

“What the audience laughed at, snickered at, applauded at — all different!” said Ms. Alda.

That very idea, being “local,” is one of the themes explored in the film, which uses the 1969 sculpture to kick off a discussion about larger issues. Through interviews with well-known village figures, among them the newspaper publisher, the mayor, artists, business owners, and many residents, it becomes clear that it may not be enough to own a house and live in it year-round to be considered “local” in Sag Harbor. Roots matter. So does having an opinion about what does and does not belong in the village — or whether that understanding itself is part of the problem. 

Another central theme of the film: the concept of tolerance versus acceptancewhen it comes to issues of equality among people of different races, sexual orientation, economic status, and more.

Ms. Alda and Ms. Brooke began the project by interviewing the current owners of “Legs,” Ruth Vered and Janet Lehr, who still live in the house to which “Legs” is attached. The onetime couple wonder whether they were targets of discrimination or whether their freedom of speech had been hijacked with the attack on the sculpture. Its critics say it is not art but rather an architectural structure that does not conform to the village building code, citing its nearness to the house’s property line.

“Legs” has been the subject of legal action since 2012, when Vered and Ms. Lehr filed suit challenging a Sag Harbor Zoning Board of Appeals decision that the work had to be removed.

The larger issues have been resonating with audiences in the festivals wherever “Legs” goes, the filmmakers say, which they find highly gratifying.

“Making it was hard work, and it was long, but there is a lot of joy in taking it across to different parts of the country and hearing universal themes arise,” Ms. Alda said. “That makes me feel like we made something people can relate to, and we can maybe shed some light on their views of who they are in their town.”

“Everyone seems to have a small town in their experience that gets hung up on seemingly minor issues as a vehicle for acting out their major issues,” Ms. Brooke said. “Everyone’s got a story like this, and that’s because we’re all humans.”

Although the documentary addresses all sides of the controversy — the sculpture’s supporters, the naysayers, and those who couldn’t care less — it tilts heavily to the supportive side. That was just what emerged in the process, the filmmakers said.

They themselves regard “Legs” as a piece of art that should remain where it is. As they made the film, they said, their opinion did not change.

“I would say my view of the town changed,” Ms. Alda said. “Maybe it didn’t change as much as we became enlightened. Our perception really expanded,” meaning, she said, that people’s views about the work did not always correspond to demographics. For example, the filmmakers expected longtime residents and politically conservative people to despise “Legs,” and that newcomers and liberals would love it. That was not universally true, they realized.

From the start of the project, they knew the sculpture itself would only be part of the film.

“We always knew we weren’t making a film about a sole piece of artwork on the side of a house,” Ms. Brooke said. “Beyond ‘Legs,’ we always wanted to find a way to capture what we find incredibly charming about the town. We did always know we were going to explore the village and its inhabitants, which is one of the things that makes it so special.”

Ms. Alda remarked, though, that there would be no documentary if Sag Harbor were without flaws. “I personally don’t shy away from the notion that it’s not perfect,” she said. “I think what it shows is that there are chinks in the armor of perfection. People sometimes disagree and don’t like what is going on in their neighborhood . . . and at the end of the day, you have to figure out how to live together.”

There are some who may only know Denise Gale from her five-year stint as host of “Drinks With Denise” on LTV, where she mixed it up with local chefs and personalities over cocktails and wine. They might not realize that lurking under the tipsy banter and awkward conversational transitions was a serious abstract painter, who pursued her metier first under the tutelage of Peter Plagens in California, and then in New York City before settling in Springs in 2001.  Mr. Plagens, well known for his criticism in The Wall Street Journal and other publications, is also a painter, and an admirer of Ms. Gale, who appeared on a short list of painters he respects in ARTPULSE magazine.

Growing up in St. Louis, Ms. Gale had an early encounter with abstract painting at a de Kooning show at the Kemper Art Museum, at the age of 10. “I thought they were the most magnificent things I had ever seen. It’s not like I was precocious. I really believe it was something in my makeup, something genetic.”

As a child she was always drawing or painting, but her focus on art intensified when her parents separated and she moved with her father to Los Angeles. She took art classes at Los Angeles Valley Junior College, then earned a B.F.A. at California State University at Northridge. One of her teachers was Mr. Plagens. “I asked him where people were making art, and he took me on a studio tour of downtown Pasadena.” Before long, she found a vacant space and connected with the Los Angeles art scene that was flourishing in Pasadena at the time.

Her first solo show came at the age of 26, at the Newspace Gallery in Los Angeles. “I was into smearing paint in layers on canvas on the floor. I would use a squeegee or a piece of wood. My first paintings were just stapled to the walls, but later I had to stretch them because they had so much paint on them.”

Her approach to art hasn’t changed much over the years. “I start with a thin coat of paint. Then I stain it and keep layering, making complete chaos. From that I try to pull out some semblance of what I consider a painting by more layering, changing the value of the color, the shape, the width of the brush. I create the chaos to make it provocative to me, and then I try to make sense out of it. If I’m not absolutely crazy about a painting, I either fix it or ruin it and start over.”

After 13 years on the West Coast she was ready to move east, to New York City, “where the history of paining was.” Richard Armstrong, a friend and curator who is now director of the Guggenheim Museum, told her about a sublet in Little Italy.

Ms. Gale found a tenant for her Los Angeles studio and took off. Mr. Plagens came to visit, bringing his wife, Laurie Fendrich, also a painter, who suggestedshe meet a friend of hers from art school, Jim Merrill. They began dating, but when Ms. Gale’s tenant moved out unexpectedly, she had to return to L.A. “Jim came to visit me and I went to visit him, it was back and forth, and finally he asked me to come to New York and live with him.”

In 1990, they got married and traveled to Romania to adopt their son, Sam. Mr. Merrill, Ms. Gale recalled, was adept at finding and renovating lofts, and found a good one for the family on Greene Street in SoHo. 

They bought a house in Springs in 2001. “I needed to see some nature,” she said, “and Sam loved the freedom that you just don’t feel as a 12-year-old in the city. He was mugged twice by the same kid on the Upper West Side.” Sam, who attended the Springs School for a year and then East Hampton High School, now lives in Albany. His father often stayed in the city, and after several years of increasing separation, Mr. Merrill and Ms. Gale divorced.

“Drinks With Denise” evolved from early feelings of isolation while living here and having to use the house’s basement for a studio, which she found depressing. “I never wanted to go down there. But once the divorce went through, I started to renovate the garage into a studio, and that changed everything for me.”

She did the first show with three friends, Suzanne Bond, Sue Heatley, and Christa Maiwald. “I was really nervous, so we all got tipsy. It was sort of a spoof of ‘The View.’ ” When LTV built a kitchen, Seth Redlus, then the station’s executive director, asked her to use it. She invited chefs from local restaurants, among them Joe Realmuto of Nick and Toni’s and Jason Weiner of Almond, but it wasn’t a cooking show. “They cooked, but mostly we talked.”

Once her studio was finished Ms. Gale gave up the show, after some 100 episodes, to concentrate on painting. Several years ago she became increasingly beset by back pain, which led to two surgeries and changes in her work routine. She used to paint with the canvas on the floor, like Jackson Pollock, but as that became impossible she found she could create large works by making diptychs and triptychs, whose components could be moved more easily and painted while hanging on the wall.

Before the second operation, her friend Geoffrey Nimmer, a landscape designer and yoga instructor, recommended what he called the yogi speedball. “It was strong coffee and three Advil,” she said. “It only worked in the morning, but it gave me three hours without pain.” 

Over the last few years, Ms. Gale has exhibited regularly on the East End, including two solo shows at Ille Arts in Amagansett. That gallery recently mounted an exhibition of Cuban artists, which in turn led to an invitation to Ms. Gale to have a show in Havana next year.

At different points in her career, she became deeply involved with the art communities of Los Angeles and New York, and she has done the same on the East End. It took a few years, but now she has a community and a space she’s almost happy with. “I’d really like to double it,” she said, “just push it out into my front yard.”

Anne Cavolo Tedesco, a classical pianist, will perform a free concert of works by Chopin, Beethoven, Schumann, Bach, Isaac Albéniz, and Brahms on Sunday at 3:30 p.m. at the Montauk Library.

Ms. Tedesco, who has studios in Montauk and Malverne, made her professional debut at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall in 1981. In 2004, she was presented with a St. John’s University Teaching Excellence and Scholarship award for her innovative teaching methods and activities as a concert pianist. An adjunct professor of music at St. John’s, she maintains an active schedule of solo recitals, lectures, and adjudications in the metropolitan area.

Not unlike the small steps that babies take until they become toddlers who can run around on steady footing, the Children’s Literature Fellows program at Stony Brook Southampton has begun to grow up and come into its own.

The now four-year-old program has started to see some of its graduates join the ranks of published authors in the picture book, middle grade, and young adult literature markets. According to its founders, it attracts a higher number of applicants each year — applicants whose credentials are increasingly impressive, leading to a candidate selection process that has become more and more competitive. The program attracts prestigious mentors from the world of children’s publishing, which is said to be one of the fastest-growing genres in the publishing industry today.

The Children’s Literature Fellows program “is sort of a living, breathing thing that has continued to refine itself,” said Emma Walton Hamilton, a picture and chapter book author and Stony Brook faculty member who established the program along with Julie Sheehan, the director of Stony Brook’s creative writing master’s program, and Patricia McCormick, a faculty member and young adult author.

The fellowship program, which is a one-year, graduate-level certificate program completed remotely, was conceived when Ms. Sheehan, Ms. Hamilton, and Ms. McCormick noticed an uptick in the number of master’s candidates who wanted to focus on children’s literature. The master’s program offered a course in that genre, but nothing more intensive to support those students. Another trend, the founders noticed, was a wave of people like librarians, educators, parents, and grandparents who wanted to become children’s authors but who couldn’t take on a full graduate program. 

“We realized we could really fill a void that allowed those people to train and study children’s literature from home but be mentored by the best of the best children’s writers,” Ms. Hamilton said.

Now, four years later, the program counts among its alumni writers like Erika Lewis, a California author whose young adult crossover novel “Game of Shadows” is due out in February; Janas Byrd, a Florida young adult author, and Lauren LeBlanc, who won a Work in Progress award from the Society of Children’s Book Writers.

“I needed to find something that fit in with my life. I am married and have two kids, I worked full time at the same time I was writing, it had to be something I could do where I lived, and it needed to be something that truly felt like a graduate program,” Ms. Lewis said. “I recommend this program for anyone who has been trying to get their work noticed but it isn’t quite resonating. This gives you that feedback and the tools you need to be able to edit and up your game on it, or start something fresh.”

Ms. Hamilton said children’s literature differs from the rest of publishing in that there are often “gatekeepers” involved, meaning librarians, teachers, or parents who help children choose books to read.

“An adult can walk into a library and select a book for themselves based on what they are looking for,” she said. “Children rely on these gatekeepers to put the book in their hands, and that brings with it a whole series of challenges and demands in terms of what the gatekeepers are looking for, and that changes based on a year-to-year or decade-to-decade basis. So we’re not only training our fellows to write well for their target audience, or to write well period, but we’re also training them to understand the specific nuances of children’s publishing to maximize their chances of success.”

The yearlong program entails a series of deadlines accomplished independently, and feedback from mentors who are matched to participants based on strengths and interests. Everyone comes together twice in person — once during the summer and once at the end of the program in the winter — to focus, critique, hone, and celebrate. They complete at least one manuscript. At its conclusion, the students meet in New York City, where they take part in panel discussions and pitch sessions with agents and editors.

For Ms. Hamilton, a critical moment early on was feedback from those industry professionals, who wanted to be invited back the following year to do it all again.

“They said, ‘This is a way for us to know that the person who is pitching to us has the training, has the chops, has had the support and the knowledge to do this,’ ” Ms. Hamilton said. “That was a real eye-opener for us. If the industry is saying to us, ‘We want to meet the people who are coming out of the program,’ then we must be doing something right.”

The deadline to apply for the 2017 fellowship program is Dec. 1. More information can be found online at stonybrook.edu/southampton/mfa/childrens_lit/index.html.

Correction: Lauren LeBlanc was incorrectly identified as Lauren Long in an earlier version of this story.