John and Sarah Jaffe Turnbull both arrived on the East End in the early 1980s, but they didn’t meet until 15 years ago. “I heard that John taught a karate class for children, so I called him to see where the program was. My son Max started taking classes, and one thing led to another.”

Married for 13 years, each pursues a number of different interests, including ceramics for her and martial arts for him, and both are committed to public service. “We have a good collaboration,” Ms. Turnbull said.

She was born in Connecticut and moved to Burlington, Vt., when she was 9. After living there for 20 years, practicing law as a public defender and an assistant attorney general, she settled in Sag Harbor in 1983, working for the Town of East Hampton on affordable housing and then for the law firm of George Biondo. Her father had summer homes in Montauk for many years.

After two years and the breakup of her first marriage, she was about to move to Washington, D.C., when she met Norman Jaffe, a prolific and influential architect who worked primarily on the East End. “My bags were packed for the move,” she said. “But that changed my life. We got married in the mid-1980s, had Will a few years later, and Max a few years after that. And a few years later, Norman died.” Jaffe drowned in 1993, while swimming in the ocean off Bridgehampton early one morning.

Mr. Turnbull, who retired five years ago after teaching for 30 years in the Southampton School District, was born and raised in a working-class neighborhood in Queens. “When I grew up,” he said, “being a professional was frowned upon. I was the first person in my family to graduate from high school.” Then, with a laugh, he added, “And the first to travel to India.”

In the late 1980s, Mr. Turnbull spent a summer in Calcutta working with the Missionaries of Charity, Mother Theresa’s religious congregation. “That was a great, great experience. I worked in a place called Prem Dan, a home for the sick and dying that housed tuberculosis victims, deformed people, deranged people, and people with skin ailments. My work there for the summer was to bathe and feed the patients. And I was the barber. I shaved and gave haircuts.”

The road from Queens to Calcutta passed through the U.S. Army, City College, Harvard, and Columbia. Mr. Turnbull studied philosophy and filmmaking as an undergraduate, then received a fellowship to the Carpenter Center at Harvard to study and make films. “I soon discovered I didn’t have the level of talent I was satisfied with in order to make films, but I was interested in films and critical theory, so I went to study in the comparative literature department at Columbia.” He earned master’s degrees from both Harvard and Columbia.

While in New York, he worked with Lionel Rogosin, an independent filmmaker who also owned the Bleecker Street Cinema, one of the city’s most important art houses. In 1980, while teaching English at Columbia but in search of an alternative to city life, he too moved to Sag Harbor.

After her husband’s death, Ms. Turnbull did some legal work but also became interested in psychology and social work. She was on the board of the Hampton Day School, which her children attended, and was involved with the founding of the Hayground School in 1996, after which “I didn’t go back to work in any full-time capacity. Then, I just casually became interested in ceramics.”

She studied functional ceramics with Nancy Robbins, whose studio, Round Pond Pottery, is in Sag Harbor. “She is a good teacher and is very knowledgeable about glazes and chemistry.” About four years ago, Ms. Turnbull moved from making vessels to figurative, sculptural work, producing several series of heads, including one of baby heads, in porcelain and stoneware.

“When I started I liked a rough clay look, then I got into Raku, then my palette expanded,” she said. Some of the glazes look so metallic that a juror of a competition in which Ms. Turnbull won a prize thought the piece was bronze.

More recently she has turned to what she calls “structural or architectural pieces, which I think of as forms of a building.” Those works are accumulations of abstract, geometric elements, stacked in complex configurations. At the moment she is experimenting with plaques, reliefs that suggest aerial views of topography and can be hung on a wall.

“Costantino Nivola had plaques that were framed in a way that you could hang them, which was a whole new way to deal with clay art,” she said. Ms. Turnbull’s sister, Katherine Stahl, is married to Pietro Nivola, the sculptor’s son. The structural pieces in Ms. Turnbull’s studio sit on pedestals she inherited from Nivola.

Since 2010, her work has been exhibited in 15 shows, including a solo show at Lear Gallery in Sag Harbor and, most recently, the Long Island Biennial at the Heckscher Museum of Art in Huntington.

Ms. Turnbull currently serves on the boards of the Hayground School, the Hampton Library, and the Clay Art Guild of the Hamptons. Both she and her husband were trained as hospice workers and worked at the East End Hospice summer camp for many years. He now teaches meditation and tai chi to youth in the substance-abuse program of the East End Regional Intervention Court.

An only child, he said his father and uncles were very good boxers, who taught him well enough that he boxed in school, at amateur venues, and while in the Army. “When I got out of the service, that was it, I was finished with boxing, but I missed the training regimen. I had some experience with Asian martial arts in the Army, so I found a karate instructor. And I stuck with it.”

He was being modest. Mr. Turnbull has taught martial arts for more than 30 years and, after teaching in schools and gyms, opened his own dojo in Southampton, the Aikenkai Shotokan Karatedo Federation. He is a seventh-degree black belt in traditional Japanese karate and a member of the international executive board of the World Japan Karate Association.

While he is retired from the school system and she no longer practices law, the Turnbulls can hardly be said to have slowed down. “But I’m not like John,” she said. “I’m more of a sidekick. We were lucky that at a point in our lives all this came together” — “all this” including five grown children, three of his and two of hers, one wheaten terrier, and a French bulldog.

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.

As cookie-cutter mansions spread across the East End, the Architectural Sessions, a series of panels and presentations organized by the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill and A.I.A. Peconic, continues to provide fascinating perspectives on architecture’s many possibilities. Friday’s program, “Pro Bono: Architects Who Serve Humanity,” focused on two unique projects, one in Rwanda, the other in Brooklyn, that are, in different ways, about creating something of value for their communities.

Maziar Behrooz, whose eponymous firm has offices in East Hampton and New York City, serves as the series’ moderator, in this case hosting Sharon Davis, a New York architect who designed the Women’s Opportunity Center in Kayonza, Rwanda, and Jane Walentas, an artist and philanthropist who lives in Bridgehampton and Brooklyn and personally oversaw and funded the restoration of an antique carousel on the Brooklyn waterfront.

Ms. Davis, who had raised a family, done extensive volunteer work, and toiled for a decade in finance, enrolled in Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture at the age of 42. Soon after graduating in 2006 and opening her own office, a representative from Women for Women International, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping marginalized women, offered her the job of designing the Women’s Opportunity Center, despite the fact that Ms. Davis had not yet built anything.

The center, completed in 2013, serves as an educational and community center that empowers female survivors of war to support themselves and their families. The campus has classrooms, offices, a working farm, storage for tools and equipment, and a marketplace where the women can sell their produce. The classrooms are circular structures with perforated brick walls, each covered by a separate, leaf-shaped canopy that collects rainwater.

Ms. Davis explained that, though bricks were available in Rwanda, they were too expensive. After being disappointed in the quality of the bricks being made by a men’s cooperative, she and Bruce Engel, a member of her firm and project manager of the center, decided the women of the community could form a coop to make their own bricks. During the talk, Mr. Engel appeared quite suddenly via Skype from Rwanda, where it was 2 a.m.

“I didn’t know how to make a brick at all,” said Mr. Engel. “We did a lot of research within the firm. We developed a template on the site and slowly but surely the bricks began coming out well. At first we made 20 a day, then 50, then 100, and eventually 1,500 bricks a day. In all, the 300 women made half a million bricks. It created a new vocational skill.”

Mr. Behrooz observed, “It’s not a building built by ‘experts’ who come into a place, build, and leave. It is really woven into the fabric of the community and has become a sustainable building.”

Ms. Walentas earned a B.F.A. from the Moore College of Art in Philadelphia and went on to a career as an art director in the advertising industry. She returned to school for an M.F.A. from New York University. “I really enjoyed going back to school and getting involved in fine art again. I didn’t think about where I was going with that. And then the carousel project came along.”

The carousel project was the reclamation and restoration of a classic machine with 48 carved horses and two chariots, built in Philadelphia in 1922 and installed in Idora Park in Youngstown, Ohio. In 1983, David Walentas, her husband, included a classic carousel in a park project he was developing and, a year later, he and Ms. Walentas purchased the Youngstown carousel at auction.

Originally, she intended to hire other people to do the restoration. “But I didn’t agree with what the people I interviewed wanted to do. I did a lot of research and then began working on it myself, with one carpenter.” She scraped away 62 years of park paint with an X-acto knife in order to uncover the original palette. Twenty-five years later, she finished the job, but it was only in the final two years that she hired other people from the community to work on it.

The couple engaged Jean Nouvel, a Pritzker Prize-winning architect, to design the pavilion that would house the carousel. Sited between the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges, “it was meant to be an open-air experience, with doors that folded open and a sky-lit canopy above. When Jean came to us with the first plans, the walls were acrylic rather than glass. He explained that with acrylic you could do it without mullions.”

A disagreement arose over the shape of the pavilion. “He showed us a square building. We insisted he make it round. He was ready to walk off the job if we insisted on the round building.” The couple eventually acceded and now admits that the architect was right. The carousel opened to the public in September 2011 in Brooklyn Bridge Park.

Humanitarian Architecture

The Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, in association with A.I.A. Peconic, will present “Pro Bono: Architects Who Serve Humanity,” a discussion focusing on architects who volunteer their time for charitable causes, tomorrow at 6 p.m.

Maziar Behrooz, an East Hampton architect known for work that involves civic, community, and art projects, will moderate a conversation between Sharon Davis, a New York architect, and Jane Walentas, an artist and philanthropist.

Miss Davis, the principal of Sharon Davis Design, is dedicated to designing buildings that change the lives of people and communities. She was commissioned by Women for Women International to design the Women’s Opportunity Center in Kayonza, Rwanda, which serves as an educational and community center to help female survivors of war to support themselves and their families.

Ms. Walentas, who works in New York and on the East End, spearheaded the restoration of Jane’s Carousel in Brooklyn Bridge Park, which opened to the public in 2011, and founded Friends of Jane’s Carousel, which is dedicated to the preservation of the historic landmark.

Tickets are $10, free for members, students, and children.

New Curatorial Grant

The Parrish has also announced a multi-year grant from the Century Arts Foundation to underwrite the position of curator of special projects, which from its inception has been filled by Andrea Grover.

Among the many initiatives developed by Ms. Grover are the Platform series, PechaKucha Night Hamptons, and the Parrish Road Show. She has overseen more than 250 programs since joining the museum as associate curator in 2011.

Larry Rivers at Tibor de Nagy

An exhibition of mixed-media constructions by Larry Rivers dating from the mid-1960s to the early-1970s opens today at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York City and will remain on view through March 7. Many of the works have not been exhibited in more than 40 years.

According to the gallery, Rivers abandoned much that had established his reputation, including his painterly touch, in 1966, when he began to work with new materials, including Mylar, plastics, and Plexiglas, which were used in three-dimensional constructions and collages. As with all of his work, Rivers’s engagement with the personal and political, the public and the private, is apparent in the mixed-media pieces.

Rivers, who lived in Southampton from 1951 until his death in 2002, was an accomplished jazz saxophonist before he was encouraged to take up painting by two artist friends, Jane Freilicher and Nell Blaine. He was in many ways a maverick whose work defied neat categorization and ranged from gestural abstraction to figurative paintings and sculpture.

UPDATE: The following program has been canceled as of Jan. 23.

The East Hampton Presbyterian Church is offering film enthusiasts an opportunity to journey into the cinematic past with a screening of “Our Hospitality,” a 1923 film starring Buster Keaton that will be accompanied by Bernie Anderson on the church’s organ, on Saturday at 7 p.m.

Keaton, known for his physical comedy and his “great stone face,” plays a city slicker from New York who finds himself in the middle of a family feud in Kentucky in the 1840s. He also directed the film, which includes train chases, waterfalls, romantic intrigue, and slapstick. At the time of its release, Variety called it “one of the best comedies ever produced for the screen.”

Mr. Anderson has an M.F.A. in musical theater writing from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and studied with the famed organists Lee Erwin and Ashley Miller. In 2001, he was the organist for the New Jersey edition of the Library of Congress’s American Movie Classics Film Preservation Tour, performing his own scores for Laurel and Hardy’s “Big Business,” “The Great Train Robbery,” and Harold Lloyd’s “Safety Last.”

Although some silent films were released with separate soundtracks, in most locations they were accompanied by piano or organ, and the music was usually improvised. Mr. Anderson follows in that tradition, improvising on the spot in order to maintain a feeling of spontaneity, regardless of his familiarity with the film.

The church suggests a $15 donation, though children and young adults will be admitted free.

A screening of the National Theatre Live presentation of “John,” a work conceived and directed by Lloyd Newson and produced by London’s DV8 Physical Theatre, will take place at Guild Hall Saturday at 8 p.m.

DV8 Physical Theatre has produced 18 highly acclaimed dance-theater works and four films for television. The company’s new production, “John,” authentically depicts real-life stories, combining movement and spoken word to create an intense theatrical experience.

Mr. Newson, DV8’s artistic director, interviewed more than 50 men, asking them frank questions, initially about love and sex. One of those men was John, whose years of crime, drug use, and struggling to survive inspired the production.

“John” contains adult themes, strong language, and nudity and is not suitable for viewers under 16, according to Guild Hall. Tickets are $18, $16 for members.

Janice Friedman, a jazz pianist and vocalist, and Marco Panascia, a bassist, will perform a program of jazz standards and original songs in a free concert at the Montauk Library on Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. 

Ms. Friedman has performed at jazz festivals throughout the United States and Europe, in concert halls and clubs including Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, the Blue Note, and Birdland, and at posh hotels such as the Waldorf Astoria and the Essex House. Mr. Panascia, too, has performed at important music festivals and venues worldwide and been featured in bands with such jazz luminaries as Natalie Cole, Kenny Barron, and Alvin Queen.

The Watermill Center will inaugurate its 2015 residency season with a brunch Sunday at noon, followed by a tour of the center and an open rehearsal by Catherine Galasso, a choreographer and multimedia artist, at 3 p.m.

Ms. Galasso will present excerpts from “stabat,” “swan lac,” and “hiroshima,” three works by Andy deGroat, an important New York choreographer during the 1970s who collaborated frequently with Robert Wilson. The works will be performed by Rachel I. Berman, John Hoobyar, Anne Lewis, Sarah Sandoval, Austin Selden, and Connor Voss.

Sunday’s events are free. Reservations, which are required, can be made at watermillcenter.org.