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.

The Bridgehampton Museum’s Parlor Jazz concerts will resume Saturday at 7:30 p.m. with “Home Is Where the Heart Is,” a performance by Pamela Luss, a contemporary jazz vocalist, who will be accompanied by Julie Bluestone on saxophone and flute.

Ms. Luss’s repertoire includes traditional ballads, pop hits, Latin songs, and the blues. She has released four albums, the most recent of which, “Sweet and Saxy,” is a collaboration with Houston Person, who served as saxophonist and producer. Nate Chinen, a New York Times critic, called the album “a strong entry in the contemporary jazz-vocal catalog.”

Tickets to the performance, which will be hosted by Jane Hastay, a pianist, and Peter Martin Weiss, a bassist, are $25, $15 for members, and can be purchased at bhmuseum.org.

It wouldn’t be a Loudon Wainwright III album without a mix of exuberance and melancholy. In “Looking at the Calendar,” from his latest CD, “Haven’t Got the Blues (Yet),” the speaker throws up his hands and admits “there really is no day / That makes sense for us to end it, to throw it all away.”

It’s a breakup song with a sense of loss set to unusually (for the singer-songwriter) amplified, emphatic guitar, and Mr. Wainwright’s voice is at its full-throated best.

Once again, one of our sharpest chroniclers of family life comes through, in his writerly way, with closely observed details: “And we can’t quit at Christmastime / That’s also insanity / You have to check the lights work right / I have to lug the tree inside / It takes two to make the tree stand straight, to get it in the stand.” Yet this and all the other tender presaging of compromised singlehood Mr. Wainwright delivers with triumphant stridency.

Wainwright fans will recognize the sensation, memorably registered in what might be popular music’s happiest sad song, “Unhappy Anniversary,” off “Career Moves,” his 1993 live album. Fittingly, the new release brings back a couple of the players and sidemen from that happening party of a recording — David Mansfield, of the chiming mandolin (he’s the producer too this time), and Chaim Tannenbaum, a master harmonist who on that earlier album hit the high notes like he was the second coming of Ira Louvin of the Louvin Brothers.

Ah, the holidays: It’s safe to call them a theme. Mr. Wainwright, who in “Suddenly It’s Christmas” on “Career Moves” sweetly intones that “Christmas comes but once a year,” and pauses before the eviscerating “and goes on for two months,” here informs us, “I’ll be killing you this Christmas . . . a Bushmaster’s on my wish list,” asking, “What’s wrong with a handgun / When everybody has one? / Which is why we all need to be armed.” One of his wryly topical forays that you won’t be hearing on NPR.

Depression, all the rage these days, is explored, as the disc’s title suggests, more than once. “Depression Blues” addresses the affliction’s tenacity: The bluesman can sing about it; the comic (or entertaining singer-songwriter) can “Get that audience to lovin’ you boy, be a clown and get ’em goin’,” but “After the show when they all go home you’re left with your problem.”

The highlight of the album, though, might well be the dispatches regarding how we live now. “A space is a place that’s a beautiful thing,” Mr. Wainwright sings in “Spaced,” about the nirvana of a city parking space achieved. “When I see a space that I don’t even need / There’s a twinge of a feeling, it’s akin to greed.”

Further on city life, “Man & Dog” looks at the pleasures and oddities of such companionship, from the plastic bags carried at all times to the post-argument escape: “Walkin’ with a dog is easy / He listens, he don’t talk.”

The neat trick to “In a Hurry” is that it starts out like a Cheeverian observation of a working stiff getting off a train weighed down by a briefcase and an ulcer, and the tendency is to accept the authorial voice of Mr. Wainwright — of the storied East Hampton family of Dutch colonial bigwigs, robber barons, Time magazine columnists, and congressmen. Then the point of view is revealed: “I hold out this coffee cup, there’s no coffee in there.” The panhandler doesn’t want the commuter’s rushed, stressed life, “But if you give me something, it might help you too.”

To get back to the holidays — it is New Year’s, after all — Mr. Wainwright leaves us with the elegiac “Last Day of the Year,” which casts the celebration as a wake for time gone by. It’s a time for messing up the dating of checks, too, but please, listener, “Hallelujah hooray / Remember the last day / In March it’s cold and wet / And we tend to forget.”

“Law & Order,” a show in its last week at Harper’s Books in East Hampton, is perfectly appropriate for the milieu. Brad Phillips, a Canadian artist, makes visual art often using text as subject matter, and not just any text but deeply evocative, assertive, assaulting, and sometimes disturbing text.

He chooses a rather repetitive format. None of the works on paper in the show exceed 22 by 15 inches, and the paintings on canvas are only fractionally larger. The paper looks torn from sketchbooks and so the idea of loosening something bound is subtly reinforced.

His oil paintings may use words to replicate an old paperback book cover, as in one titled “Personal Work‚” with the artist cast as author. Or a watercolor may portray a woman in a sexualized position (“compromising” seems unnecessarily judgmental, as she appears clearly in control of what she wants to display with her hand and finger placed just so). The work, “Against Courbet, Flipped,” apparently refers back to Gustave Courbet’s “Origin of the World,” a controversial painting of its time and in later eras for portraying its subject’s sex organs with only a portion of the torso rounding out the composition. The sheet over the top of the body implies sleep or even death of the subject and seems deeply salacious on several levels.

Through words, Mr. Phillips has effectively taken any feminist critique off the table with his text painting “The Male Gays.” By deflating the decades-old critique of female objectification by male artists, he seems to imply a post-post feminist viewpoint: We have all come to terms with the portrayal of women as objects, and women have taken these portrayals back and used them for their own empowerment. Now, in an era of Tracey Emin, who also uses text in her work, and naked selfie sexting, perhaps some male artists feel comfortable returning to business as usual with a twist.

Does women’s ownership of their own sexualization preclude critique of what could be argued is a natural tendency of males to objectify them? In other words, does a watercolor titled “Bends Before Breaking” of an unclad woman standing on a chair in a contorted pose that implies cooperation and enjoyment of the exercise mean anything anymore? Or is it just a banal part of the cultural landscape?

Mr. Phillips is a good artist, not only in the academic sense. He can reproduce the figure and objects with deftness, and he chooses his subject matter the way Michelangelo might have been said to have chosen his for the Sistine Chapel, understanding that the nudes he populated his paintings with in a restrictive setting did not always need to be unclothed.

Why are some of the torsos disrobing themselves emaciated? Is it a critique or a sign of approval? This is hard to know just by looking. As true as the artist is in some respects to his subjects/objects, he tends to get overwrought and abstracted in many of their features.

There are very few faces here. Mr. Phillips is reminiscent of a Mannerist artist with all of the tools of the prior eras available to him, yet content to use them in a way that highlights the decadence of his era. The flowers he paints in “For All Women, but Mainly for Sex Workers & Single Mothers” are post-still life, slightly wilted carnations, already implying death and decay.

Because he paints the words in his word paintings, there is an ambiguity as to whether one should look at or read them. The text, which plays with aphorisms and other sayings, expressions, lyrics, and titles, grabs the viewer’s attention by disrupting those tried-and-truisms to come up with something cheeky and subversive.

“Gentleman Prefer High End Hookers,” in a loopy, watercolor cursive on paper, stops the visual flow by playing with expectations, offering a more corrosive alternative to the already objectionable original movie title. The mood might seem a bit “Space-Age Bachelor Pad” here, but each work is its own manifesto. Take “Bed, Bath, and Bullshit” or “There’s No Business Like No Business,” which could be Marxist or capitalist depending on who is doing the interpretation.

In looking at these works, an image came to me of several artists who have used text placed together in a classroom setting. Lawrence Weiner, the dean, is at the front lecturing in his complex, erudite style, Richard Prince sits at a desk copying jokes in the margins of a Playboy magazine he has hidden in a textbook, Sean Landers madly scribbles away notes on a legal pad, and Christopher Wool and Mel Bochner are painting signs for some anti-pep rally in the back. Somewhere off to the side is Brad Phillips shooting spitballs of crumpled-up pages of J.D. Salinger at all of them.

With his world-weariness and provocation, he is definitely on to something rank in the current zeitgeist. It is not entirely clear whether his approach has any lasting meaning as cultural critique, or whether he cares.

The show closes Monday.

Upcoming at the Parrish

In connection with their Parrish Art Museum exhibition “Mary Queen of the Universe,” Steven and William Ladd have for the past two months conducted a “scrollathon,” in which local students tour the exhibition and work with the artists to learn how to make and use scrolls. A talk by the Ladds today at noon will describe their involvement with the East End community and how it has affected their work. The program will also include a preview of their film “The Parrish Scrollathon,” which will document their residency.

A different experience will be on offer tomorrow at 6 p.m., when Cliff Baldwin, an artist and filmmaker, will present the New York premiere of “The Language of Light,” a live cinema event that celebrates natural and man-made light.

An original score provided by the Aquebogue Orchestrion, a digital musical instrument programmed by the artist, accompanies the visuals. The imagery includes a carnival in Jamesport, traffic and night street scenes in Paris and Berlin, extraterrestrial views from the International Space Station, the spectacle of light in Times Square, a fully illuminated Eiffel Tower, and a segment that explores the glow of light that emanates from cellphones. Audience participation will be encouraged during the latter segment.

The score fuses traditional sounds from the Coney Island carousel and barrel organs with electronic samples collected in New York, Stockholm, Warsaw, and Budapest. The images are directly triggered by the music that Mr. Baldwin composes in real time, thereby fusing film, sound, and live performance.

Mr. Baldwin is a word artist, designer, sculptor, and filmmaker who lives and works in Aquebogue. He has exhibited in Tokyo, Cologne, Berlin, Mexico City, Los Angeles, and New York, and has work in numerous collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Walker Art Center, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Canada, and the Rhode Island School of Design Museum.

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

Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor will present “Elvis 80: A Tribute to the King” on Saturday at 8 p.m. Gene Casey and the Lone Sharks and the Vendettas will celebrate Elvis Presley’s 80th birthday with a selection of his hits and other early rock ’n’ roll classics.

Asked about the genesis of the program, Mr. Casey said that after his band’s successful 25th anniversary show at Bay Street in 2013, he was asked if he would like to do it again in 2014. “I didn’t want to do the 25th anniversary plus one,” he said. “I wanted to have a theme of some sort, so I mentioned to Gary Hygom, Bay Street’s managing director, that it would be Elvis’s 80th birthday and asked if he’d want to do a tie-in with that.”

Mr. Hygom liked the idea and suggested adding the Vendettas to the bill. Both Gene Casey and the Lone Sharks and the Vendettas have been strongly influenced by roots music and early rock ’n’ roll, and both bands are based on eastern Long Island.

Mr. Casey and the Lone Sharks will play Elvis songs, some of their own original music, and an assortment of early rock songs related to Elvis’s music.

“He did a lot of Little Richard songs, and Chuck Berry songs as well, so we might veer from strictly Elvis to a related selection totally in the spirit of early rock ’n’ roll. All the early guys — Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Fats Domino — they are like the Mount Rushmore of my world.”

Elvis was a very private person who loved Monty Python and wanted to make a kung fu movie, according to Mr. Casey. “He wasn’t just a conventional Southern guy. He made it possible for white people to get down. If you look at old TV shows, before Elvis, everybody just kind of stood at the microphone. And there were very few black artists on network TV. So when he came on and did his thing, it was outrageous to people, but he was just doing what came naturally. There was almost an innocence about him that I found touching and appealing.”

Gene Casey formed the Lone Sharks after he moved to the East End in 1988. Members of the band have come and gone, but the music remains drenched in the roots of rock. Their most recent CD, “Untrained,” released in 2012, features 12 original songs that evoke early rock, classic country and western, and 1960s pop. The band did 150 shows in 2014, mostly on Long Island but also in Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York City.

The Vendettas, too, will mix “Elvis tunes with other music from his Sun Records label mates and rockabilly and R&B of that era,” according to Jay (Jaybone) Janoski, guitarist and founder of the band. “Elvis was the prototypical rock star, the complete package. He had a great voice, looks, and stage presence. He has a tremendous body of work that covers so many areas stylistically, including really gritty, almost punk rock to gospel and ballads. Elvis has had some influence on all the rock ’n’ roll we listen to.”

Mr. Janoski began his career with the Hackensack Men and the Trenton Horns, another Long Island-based group. After leaving the band, he took stock of the material he had been playing and realized that early rock and rockabilly numbers were his favorites. He then formed the Vendettas.

“I found rockabilly backwards in a way,” he said, “first through Robert Gordon, then Stray Cats, and then the Blasters. When I started playing guitar I would read about guys like Cliff Gallup, who played with Gene Vincent, Paul Burlison, who played with the Rock and Roll Trio, and, of course, Scotty Moore, who played with Elvis.”

Coming up for Mr. Casey and his band is Rockin’ for the Homeless VII, a benefit that will take place Jan. 24 at the Polish Hall in Riverhead. Who Are Those Guys and Boot Scoot Boogie are also on the bill. “It’s a good thing to do in January,” Mr. Casey said.

The Vendettas will be appearing in a rockabilly show at the Bryant Library in Roslyn on Feb. 1.

Tickets, which are selling briskly, are $25 and can be purchased at the Bay Street box office or at baystreet.org.

Guild Hall will present the Met: Live in HD’s broadcast of “The Merry Widow,” an opera by the Austro-Hungarian composer Franz Lehár, on Jan. 17 at 1 p.m. Premiered in Vienna in 1905, the comic opera concerns a wealthy widow from Ponteverdo, whose citizens fear their country will be bankrupted if she marries a foreigner and takes her money elsewhere.

Renee Fleming stars as the femme fatale who captivates all of Paris in this new staging by Susan Stroman, a noted Broadway director and choreographer. Nathan Gunn and Kelli O’Hara co-star in the production, which will be conducted by Andrew Davis. Tickets are $22, $20 for members, $15 for students.

The Montauk Library is offering patrons and friends an opportunity to see “The Merry Widow” at Guild Hall at a discounted price of $15. Checks payable to “The Montauk Library” are due at the library’s circulation desk by Sunday. Tickets will be distributed in the Guild Hall lobby at 12:30 p.m. on Jan. 17.

The Hampton Theatre Company will hold open auditions for “Clybourne Park,” Bruce Norris’s Pulitzer and Tony Award-winning drama about racism in a Midwestern city, on Monday and Tuesday from 5 to 7 p.m. at the Quogue Community Hall. Union and non-union actors have been invited to attend.

The play has roles for four men and three women, ages late 20s to late 40s. Three men and two women are Caucasian; one man and one woman are African-American. Readings will be from the script. Neither monologues nor appointments are necessary.

Rehearsals will begin in early February, and performances will run from March 12 through March 29. More information is available from [email protected].