Pioneer at Watermill Center

The Watermill Center will present a special workshop introducing the work of Tadeusz Kantor (1915-1990), a revolutionary Polish visual artist and theater director, on Sunday from noon to 6 p.m. An artistic pioneer and chief influence on Robert Wilson, Kantor gained international acclaim for defying theatrical convention in the 1960s and ’70s.

Bogdan Renczynski, a multi-disciplinary artist and actor trained by Kantor in Krakow, will lead the movement-based seminar. The class will begin with a screening of Kantor’s last production, “Today Is My Birthday,” followed by exercises examining text, action, and performance. Attendance will be limited to 40 participants. The center suggests a $15 donation. Reservations, which are required, can be made at watermillcenter.org.

New at RJD Gallery

“A Curious and Wonderful Bewilderment,” an exhibition of new works by Margo Selski, will be on view at the Richard J. Demato Gallery in Sag Harbor from Saturday through March 15.

Ms. Selski’s paintings draw on the styles of Flemish painting and 19th-century society portraiture. Though they appear mannered, they are in fact autobiographical, drawn from “my own Southern Gothic childhood in small-town, lower-middle-class Kentucky,” according to the artist.

Her technique produces a classical look, but by less-than-classical means. For example, the craquelure, or cracks in the surfaces of the paintings suggesting age, are in fact achieved by a complicated process devised by the artist.

Working Artists at Markel

“#working,” a group exhibition organized by Maeve D’Arcy, a New York artist, is on view at Kathryn Markel Fine Arts through Feb. 25. A reception will take place Saturday from 6 to 9 p.m.

The show includes work by 16 contemporary artists, three of whom, Scott Gibbons, Carly Haffner, and Grant Haffner, are from the East End.

The exhibition explores what it means to be a working artist in today’s art world. According to Ms. D’Arcy, “The title references the relevance of social media and branding oneself within the art world and suggests that the process of making work and presenting/showing it to an audience is a multifaceted task.”

The gallery is open Fridays through Sundays from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Perle Fine in New York

The Berry Campbell Gallery in Chelsea will hold an opening tonight from 6 to 8 of an exhibition of work by Perle Fine, an Abstract Expressionist painter who lived in Springs from 1954 until her death in 1988. The show will remain on view through March 14.

While in her teens, Fine moved from Boston to New York to take classes at the Art Students League. She subsequently studied with Hans Hofmann who, along with Piet Mondrian, influenced her work during the 1940s. She was a friend of Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, and Franz Kline, among others, and was one of the first female members of the Club.

It was Krasner who suggested she move to Springs, after which her work changed. On a visit to her Red Dirt Road studio, de Kooning observed that her abstract forms reflected the trees and landscape around her.

In addition to 22 paintings, the exhibition will include works on paper from the 1940s through the 1970s, and several paintings from the “Cool Series” of 1961-63, which reflected the rise of Color Field painting and a widespread move away from the angst of the 1950s.

Reception at Vered

Vered Gallery in East Hampton will hold a reception Saturday from 6 to 9 p.m. to celebrate the opening of “Bert Stern: Marilyn in the Hamptons” and the closing of Haim Mizrahi’s “Hope in the Shield of David.” The Stern exhibition will include photographs from his 1962 sessions with Marilyn Monroe, including “Blue Eyes,” at 72 by 72 inches his largest photograph.

“From the Archive,” an exhibition of photographs by Gosta Peterson, a renowned fashion photographer, is on view at the Turn Gallery in Manhattan through March 22. The show includes groundbreaking black-and-white photographs from 1960 through 1980, among them his New York Times photographs of Twiggy, the iconic English model, and his “Fashion of the Times” cover photo of Naomi Sims, the first African-American to appear on the cover of an American magazine.

“From the Archive” also includes both famous and never-before-seen works from Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, Mademoiselle, Cosmopolitan, Esquire, and GQ, among others.

Mr. Peterson was born in Sweden in 1923 and arrived in New York City in 1948. He worked as an illustrator for Lord & Taylor until, having been given a camera as a gift, he taught himself photography. He began shooting for Mademoiselle in 1958 and never looked back.

In addition to their home in New York, Mr. Peterson and his wife, Pat Peterson, a former fashion editor for Mademoiselle and The New York Times, have owned a house on Windmill Lane in Amagansett since 1958. A Star feature in 2002 described the house as distinguished by, among other things, its front yard, where Mr. Peterson experimented, planting Queen Anne’s lace one year, wildflowers another, even sorghum grass, which he let grow to eight feet.

The exhibition open­ed on Jan. 24, with friends and family, including his children Annika Peterson, who is the director of Turn Gallery, and Jan Peterson, in attendance.

“Snow Orchid,” a play by Joe Pintauro, is enjoying a limited engagement at the Lion Theater in Manhattan through Feb. 28. A photographer and novelist as well as an acclaimed playwright, Mr. Pintauro lives in Sag Harbor.

Set in Brooklyn in 1964, the play stars Robert Cuccioli as Rocco Lazarra, who is returning home after having suffered a nervous breakdown. His wife, Filumena (Angelina Fiordellisi), refuses to leave their house and longs for her native Sicily.

One of their sons, Sebbie (Stephen Plunkett), longs to escape his complicated relationship with his mother, who knows he is gay but denies it, while his younger brother, Blaise (David McElwee), tries to earn the love Filumena has never shown him. 

The family fears Rocco’s temperament and instability will once again throw their lives into chaos. As secrets are revealed, everyone is forced to re-examine their relationships, anxieties, and dreams.

The current production is a new version of Mr. Pintauro’s play, which was originally presented by the Circle Repertory Company in 1982. Tickets can be purchased at snoworchidtheplay.com.

Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor has kept South Fork residents both warm and entertained through the winter of 2015 with an active calendar of musical events that will continue through the coldest and quietest months. On Saturday at 8 p.m., the venue will vary the entertainment being offered with the fifth All Star Comedy Show, hosted by Joseph Vecsey.

Returning to Bay Street is a homecoming of sorts for the New York-based comedian and writer. He has been a lifelong visitor and resident of Shelter Island and attended both the Hampton Day School and the Bridgehampton School before graduating from Archbishop Molloy High School in Queens.

He promises a night of laughter delivered by Jeffrey Joseph, Nathan Macintosh, and Dino Vigo, along with the host. He is also host of “The Call Back,” a podcast about the art and business of comedy, with many episodes featuring interviews with other comedians and writers.

Mr. Joseph is “the veteran of the group,” who has appeared on “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno” and Comedy Central, Mr. Vecsey said, and in films including “Scrooged,” “Roxanne,” and “Made in America.” Mr. Joseph is “one of funniest and most relaxed comedians,” Mr. Vecsey said. “One of the most intelligent, too.”

Mr. Macintosh, who is from Canada, has performed at comedy festivals in Montreal, Boston, and Halifax, Nova Scotia, and appeared on “Gotham Comedy LIVE” and numerous other television programs. Mr. Vigo, who has previously performed at Bay Street, has appeared on the BET network and is “one of the funniest guys I’ve met,” Mr. Vecsey said.

Mr. Vecsey has performed throughout the Northeast and as far from home as Bermuda. He was writing comedy scripts while a student in the film department at Brooklyn College when he agreed to write material for a friend, Kenny Garcia, who was considering performing at an open mike at the New York Comedy Club. “When the night came, he said I should go up, too,” Mr. Vecsey remembered. “We both went up, and it went fairly well. We got juiced by it, and we kept doing it.”

The comedian and actor Chris Rock was a big influence on his work, Mr. Vecsey said, along with performers on HBO’s “Def Comedy Jam” and those who both act and write, including Adam Sandler and the Wayans brothers, Marlon and Shawn. “My comedy is more about personal experience,” he said, including past and present relationships. “Some observational stuff, but more my experiences, growing up, being a bit of a germophobe. I definitely talk about whomever I’m dating a lot. The scripts I write and sketches I shoot are a little more exaggerated, a little more over the top, and usually a little raunchier than stand-up.”

Performing solo before an expectant audience can be unnerving; candid discussion of personal experience can be downright hazardous. Talking about an ex-girlfriend on “The Call Back,” Mr. Vecsey said, resulted in her roommate threatening to set him on fire. “Some people get annoyed here and there,” he observed.

Mr. Vecsey is nothing if not self-assured. “I can’t imagine people wouldn’t want to come to an affordable show with four really good comedians. Everyone is well established, everyone is super-funny. People should come out and support the show.” He paused. “How arrogant is that? ‘I can’t imagine anyone having anything else to do.’ ”

Tickets to the All Star Comedy Show cost $20 and are available at baystreet.org or by calling the Bay Street Theater box office.

The Drawing Room and its partners, Emily Goldstein and Victoria Munroe, celebrate a decade in East Hampton with a surprisingly cohesive salon-style show in its always pleasant but somewhat small gallery space.

There are more than 100 works by 37 artists packed into the exhibition, but it never feels crowded or clunky. There are weaker moments in the downstairs rooms, but only because the upstairs is so bracingly good. These are artists with long associations with the gallery as well as more recent friends. It is nice to see some of the Drawing Room’s classic archival pieces, which never get old or tired, mixed in with the new.

For this show, the gallery truly feels like a classic salon, with artwork everywhere and maps to make out the individual works by artists. Among them are John Alexander, Stephen Antonakos, Polly Apfelbaum, Antonio Asis, Alice Aycock, Jennifer Bartlett, Mary Ellen Bartley, Adam Bartos, Robert Dash, Linda Etcoff, Caio Fonseca, Carol Gove, Robert Harms, Sue Heatley, Loekie Heintzberger, Christopher Hewat, Christine Hiebert, Chuck Holtzman, Sharon Horvath, Robert Jakob, Mel Kendrick, Laurie Lambrecht, Rex Lau, Vincent Longo, Diane Mayo, Olivia Munroe, Adrian Nivola, Jean Pagliuso, Dan Rizzie, Clifford Ross, Toni Ross, Rolph Scarlett, Raja Ram Sharma, James Siena, Donald Sultan, Jane Wilson, and Jack Youngerman.

The gallery regularly turns the front room into a delightful focal point for its exhibitions. Although it always presents the new and familiar in ways that are fresh and lively, here, the staff had a particular challenge: taking the eclectic collection and placing the works in ways that make visual sense. What developed is fascinating and educational as well as visually satisfying, and even quite beautiful.

The 10 years have proven the Drawing Room to be remarkably consistent in terms of its aesthetics, even if the works span centuries. The historical works are mixed liberally with the contemporary ones, and it is in these groupings that their geometric purity and classicizing tendencies emerge. But not all is precise and rigid, many other works are idiosyncratic and fantastical, and their fluidity softens the harder edges.

On one wall, Ms. Aycock’s fanciful “Project for a Fountain” drawings are paired with 19th-century drawings of industrial designs for floorboards, roof trusses, gardens, a utopian dome, a candelabra, and even a tongue-in-cheek set of four drawings of a proposed perch for a parrot. Added into the mix are Mr. Holtzman’s mechanically inspired drawings, Ms. Hiebert’s drawings made in and from nature, and Mr. Nivola’s wire sculpture, which contribute a similar sense of folly. Grounding it all is a drawing of a Greek temple facade made by Theodore Olivier in 1840, looking sober and massive.

On an opposite wall, Ms. Apfelbaum’s “Empress Twist 11,” a colorful and complicated woodblock monoprint is placed with Mr. Antonakos’s drafts for neon light projects, Mr. Asis’s blocky geometric gouaches, and Mr. Lau’s free-form linear explorations of similar geometric shapes in oil on wood.

A long table holds ceramics by Ms. Mayo, brass sculptures by Mr. Hewat that are often inspired by Scrabble, and Mr. Kendrick’s very “Blue Crate,” a tabletop version of something the sculptor is known for making on a much more massive scale. Here, its size does not diminish its power or dominance.

One favorite passage in the show happens in the wall between the upstairs galleries. There, a 19th-century watercolor drawing of a pear is placed with a Bartos photograph of an artist’s studio, and Mr. Sultan’s drawing of a dead bird, clearly spelled out for the viewer in handwriting as well, just to be sure there was no misunderstanding that the bird might just be sleeping. The vignette is a perfect mediation of still life and all that it can mean and has meant historically. It’s one of the few groupings that is hung in the Drawing Room’s more traditionally airy style, unstacked with a decent amount of eyewash between works, and it is very striking.

A wall on the back gallery that takes up the theme of water mixes a small Wilson drawing with miniature photographs from Mr. Ross, and drawings by Ms. Horvath, Mr. Dash, and Mr. Sharma. Mr. Ross’s photographs of trees printed on wood veneer on a neighboring wall add to the joy of discovery and rediscovery here.

We could go on like this throughout the gallery, but it would take up too much space and time. The real accomplishment here is visual and that should be seen to be experienced and to make one’s own discoveries. The show is on view through the end of February

Living Pictures

The Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill will present “The Fish Juggler,” a free program of tableaux vivants, living pictures, created by the East End Special Players, a group of learning-disabled actors, on Saturday from 2:30 to 3 p.m. Tableau vivant is a style of theater initially popularized in the court of King Louis XIV.

The actors will pose against a backdrop of paintings by Gabrielle Raacke, an East Hampton artist and producer of the program. The group will also perform a skit, honed and written after several weeks of improvisation workshops held on Saturdays at the Bridgehampton Community Center.

Next Thursday at noon, Cara Conk­lin-Wingfield, the museum’s director of education, will present “Learning Visually, an illustrated talk that will use works from the permanent collection to explore what can be learned from looking at art. The talk will take place in the Lichtenstein Theater, and lunch will be available for purchase from the Golden Pear Cafe. Tickets are $10, free for members, students, and children.

“Love Is . . . ?” is a program of 16-millimeter school films about romance, love, and marriage assembled by A/V Geeks that will be presented at the Parrish on Friday, Feb. 13, at 6 p.m. The person behind A/V Geeks, Skip Elsheimer of Raleigh, N.C., has been collecting old educational films for 20 years and showing them around the country.

The Valentine’s Day edition will feature 1950s and ’60s movies about courtship that answer such questions as “How Do I Know It’s Love?” “Are You Ready for Marriage?” and “Who’s Boss?” Tickets are $10, free for members, students, and children.

The Hamptons International Film Festival and Guild Hall will present a screening of “The Searchers,” John Ford’s 1956 western, on Saturday at 7 p.m. Alec Baldwin and David Nugent, the festival’s director, will host the program.

Although it got mixed reviews upon its release and received no Oscar nominations, “The Searchers” is now considered by many, including the American Film Institute, among the 10 best American films of all time.

John Wayne plays Ethan, a Civil War veteran who discovers that Comanches have murdered his brother, sister-in-law, and nephew, destroyed their farm, and kidnapped his niece. Ethan embarks on an obsessive five-year hunt for the tribe that has been likened to Ahab’s quest for Moby-Dick. Ethan is so racist that he plans to kill his niece because she has become “the leavin’s of a Comanche buck.”

In a review written in 2001, Roger Ebert asked, “Is the film intended to endorse their attitudes, or to dramatize and regret them? Today we see it through enlightened eyes, but in 1956 many audiences accepted its harsh view of Indians.” Tickets are $22, $20 for Guild Hall members.

The John Drew Theater Lab will present a free staged reading of “Honor Killing,” a new play by Sarah Bierstock, on Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. The play is a drama about a female American reporter who travels to Pakistan to cover the honor killing of a young Pakistani woman for The New York Times.

Blacklisted from Pakistan, she is deported to Dubai, where she discloses to a male colleague that the gang rape of her sister in the United States impelled her to cover the story. The two struggle with his reaction, and the play explores the treatment of women in both Pakistan and the U.S.

“Honor Killing” is the first play by Ms. Bierstock, an actress who has performed extensively off Broadway, in regional theater, and in film and television, where her recent credits include “Boardwalk Empire” and “The Good Wife.”

Eileen Obser, author of “Only You,” a memoir about growing up in Queens in the late 1950s, will present the next Table Talk on Sunday at 11 a.m. Her talk, “Writing About Your Life,” will focus on various aspects of memoir writing, a subject she has been teaching for more than 20 years. The talk is free and will be followed by coffee and light refreshments.

The John Drew Theater will also be the scene of a free performance by the students of the Speaking Shakespeare workshop on Wednesday at 7 p.m. The program is the culmination of a two-month class taught by Morgan and Tristan Vaughan, who hold master’s degrees from the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Academy for Classical Acting at George Washington University.

Guild Hall will show the Met: Live in HD’s simulcast of “Les Contes d’Hoffmann,” an opera by Jacques Offenbach, on Saturday at 1 p.m. First performed in 1881, four months after Offenbach’s death, the opera is based on three short stories by E.T.A. Hoffmann, who is the opera’s protagonist.

The prologue shows Hoffman and his fellow students in Luther’s Inn at Nuremberg. He is persuaded to tell of his three love encounters, which form the three succeeding acts. The opera ends as it began, with an epilogue set in the tavern.

Vittorio Grigolo, a tenor, plays the tortured poet and unwitting adventurer of the title, and Hibla Gerzmava, a soprano, sings all three heroines, each an idealized embodiment of some aspect of Hoffmann’s desire. Tickets are $22, $20 for members, $15 for students.

A different musical slant will be provided when the John Drew Theater Lab presents “Songs of the Heart,” a free performance of original compositions by Sheree M.C. Elder, a vocalist whose pieces combine pop, soul, classical, and R&B, on Tuesday at 7:30 p.m.

Ms. Elder, who will be accompanied by Daniel Eugene, a musician and songwriter, and Dereck Rey, a percussionist, has performed frequently on the East End, including at the Southampton Cultural Center, Guild Hall, the Hampton Classic Horse Show, and at libraries in Riverhead, Hampton Bays, and Southampton, among other venues.

Lichtenstein Film

The Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill will screen “Roy Lichtenstein: Tokyo Brushstrokes,” a 1995 film that documents the creative process, from concept to fabrication and installation, of one of the artist’s most important public sculptures, tomorrow at 6 p.m.

Lichtenstein became intrigued by a brushstroke he saw in a cartoon and started his “brushstroke paintings” in 1965. In the 1980s, he began work on the monumental sculptures, which became public works in Paris, Barcelona, and, in 1994, Tokyo.

The film follows Lichtenstein as he selects images, makes models, meets with a Japanese architect and curator, enlarges the drawings, fabricates the sculptures in a foundry, and installs the works in Tokyo. Edgar B. Howard, producer of the film and founder of Checkerboard Film Foundation, will introduce it. The screening will be followed by a discussion between Mr. Howard and Terrie Sultan, the director of the museum. Tickets are $10, free for members, students, and children.

Materials and Methods

Also coming up at the Parrish, Eric Dever, a painter from Water Mill who has exhibited internationally, will teach a four-week class, beginning Friday, Feb. 6, focused on how artists use color, line, and form in both abstract and representational images.

With cues from works on view in the museum, each class will consist of a discussion and guided experimentation with drawing and/or painting mediums. Materials and Methods is open to those 15 and up, and is appropriate for both beginners and more experienced students.

The class will meet at 10 a.m. on Fridays through March 6, with no class on Feb. 20. The fee is $150, $120 for members, and advance reservations have been recommended. Materials will be supplied.

“The Life of a Puppet”

The Watermill Center’s Young Artist Residency Project, or YARP, an after-school arts program conducted in partnership with the Bridgehampton Child Care and Recreation Center, has created “The Life of a Puppet,” a multimedia show of portraiture that opens today with a reception from 5 to 7 p.m. at the Sara Nightingale Gallery in Water Mill.

The work of the students, who range in age from 7 to 12, will share the gallery space with a projected video piece and paintings by Jose Carlos Casado, a 2014 Watermill Center resident artist from Spain, and embroidered portraits, photographs, and an edible sculpture by Christa Maiwald, a Springs artist.

The students spent the fall working with Watermill’s resident artists, experimenting with performance on the grounds and looking at the Watermill Collection. They have taken inspiration from sculptural portraits and textiles in the collection to make large-scale puppets that will be used in their spring 2015 collaborative performance.

The YARP program is overseen by Andrea Cote, an artist from Flanders known for installations, performances, and public projects, and Susan Lazarus-Reiman, a North Haven artist who directs the after-school programs at the Bridgehampton Child Care and Recreational Center.

“Mom, It’s MY Wedding!” is the latest collaboration between Ilene Beckerman and Michael Disher at the Southampton Cultural Center, following last year’s “Sex: What She’s Really Thinking!” In a striking similarity to that show, new ideas are not at the forefront of this script. Surprising poignancy lurks between the jokes, however, and audience members — those who have been brides, have daughters who have been wedded off, or have simply wandered into the theater by mistake — will find themselves reaching for the tissues between giggles.

The play, directed by Mr. Disher, is blocked as a staged reading, with the actors clasping binders and occasionally standing or moving around the stage in a choreographed manner. This does not detract from the show, since most of the performers are off-book anyway, and actually adds to the feeling of being at a work-in-progress premiere, allowing a little more leeway in the judgment department.

Also, with the exception of Tom Gregory as Duane the wedding planner, the nine remaining characters are portrayed by approximately two dozen actors over the course of the run, a true ensemble piece where the words hold sway over the evening, rather than the person who utters them.

“Ilene and I wanted to hear many voices speak the words,” Mr. Disher said about the decision to shake up the cast. “So often, with a single cast or actor, we cannot discern if the power of the piece lies upon the page or within the performance. Usually one affects the other, but I wanted to test the variables.”

“Mom, It’s MY Wedding!” features the interactions among four mothers and four daughters who represent Everyman — or, in this case, Everywoman — and chronicle mother-daughter relationships from childhood and teenagerdom through the wedding, honeymoon, and beyond.

Some of the ideas seem hopelessly outdated — sex and marriage advice sometimes lapses into obsolescence with pre-1960s prudishness. Many of the women who have daughters of marriageable age now — especially New York savvy types — remember copies of “Our Bodies, Ourselves” and “Where Do Babies Come From?” being left purposefully-haphazardly on orange shag bedcovers, sometimes with notes saying, “If you have any questions, talk to me.”

Instead of that, the audience is given: “When my daughter told me she was getting married, I knew we had to talk so I told her what I once heard Joan Rivers say, ‘Choose a room to be good in, the kitchen or the bedroom.’ ” And, “My mother’s heartfelt advice? Always have some leftovers in the refrigerator, even if you have to buy them.”

Really?

Having said that, the show is funny. Positively chuckalicious. Mr. Gregory, the constant in all performances, gets some of the best moments as the Type-A sassy wedding planner (is there any other kind?) rattling off wedding costs to an apoplectic father of the bride, who muses, “Was there really a time when all a bride needed was a father with a cow?”

And in and amongst the laughter are the roses in this bridal bouquet — mothers’ reminiscences of cuddles in front of the TV, complete and unconditional love from pigtailed daughters, and in some cases their own unhappy memories of weddings past and dead parents. And in the baby’s breath, a daughter shares her reasons for wanting a perfect wedding: “It’s only one day. And after the wedding, it will all end. I’ll be Cinderella at midnight. It will all be gone. All over. And I’ll resume my life amidst all of the unnoticed and unimpressive.”

This highly stylized compilation of skits and monologues wedded together seems to be what fits best at the Southampton Cultural Center, along with cabaret revues like “The World Goes ’Round,” which was the last offering there. Like a well-planned nuptial menu, “Mom, It’s MY Wedding!” serves up tasty morsels of wit, humor, and sentimentality, with only a few overcooked cornballs in the mix.