The John Drew Theater Lab will present a free staged reading by John Shuman of “Underneath the Lintel,” a 2001 play written by Glen Berger, on Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. The one-character play follows a librarian who discovers a returned book that is more than 100 years overdue and embarks on an around-the-world hunt for the borrower’s identity.

Mr. Shuman has acted on Broadway, off Broadway, in regional theaters throughout the country, and on screens both big and small. He has been seen at Bay Street Theater in “Chasing the Tiger” by Gail Sheehy, “The Orchard Play” by P. Seth Bauer, and “The Tempest” with John Glover. He last appeared at Guild Hall in “The V.I.P.’s,” written and directed by Cliff Robertson.

The Perlman Music Program has been awarded an Art Works grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. The $50,000 grant will support the Summer Music School on Shelter Island, the organization’s signature program.

The school is a seven-week residency for gifted young musicians who play the violin, viola, cello, and bass. Led by Toby and Itzhak Perlman, the school’s faculty includes professional string musicians from around the country who provide mentorship and coaching. Students have private lessons, ensemble rehearsals, and performance opportunities throughout the summer that are free and open to the public.

The N.E.A. has supported the Perlman Music Program for eight consecutive years. This year’s grant represents a significant increase in funding from previous years.

The Shinnecock Nation Cultural Center and Museum in Southampton will hold its 13th annual winter festival Saturday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. The free event will feature live dance and musical performances, food, children’s activities, and the Art Market, which offers authentic Native American-made jewelry, art, and other handcrafted traditional and contemporary pieces.

The museum’s Wikun Village tells the story of ancient life at Shinnecock. Native artisans will demonstrate 17th-century cooking, wood carving, and finger weaving throughout the day. The village staff will drum and sing at 2:30. An open fire inside a wigwam will offer a respite from the winter weather.

A food stand will have such traditional dishes as succotash, slow-cooked with cranberry beans, corn, and pork, as well as clam chowder, roasted squash, and more.

The Southampton Arts Center in Southampton Village will have an open house for the holidays on Saturday from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m.

In honor of the center’s current show, “Awkward Family Photos,” guests will be encouraged to take their own pictures at a holiday-themed photo booth with a seasonally appropriate backdrop and props. Those with ugly holiday sweaters or similarly themed attire have been invited to don them for the event.

Those who wish to attend can reserve their places at [email protected]. Wine and other festive refreshments will be served.

“The 50 Year Argument” by Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi, screened at the Hamptons Take 2 Documentary Film Festival, offers proof not just of the vitality of the documentary medium, but of the growing importance of the festival itself.

This year’s program included a gala honoring Barbara Kopple, the award-winning director of films such as “Harlan County USA,” a film by Michael Apted, as well as “The 50 Year Argument,” an examination of The New York Review of Books. The screening was followed by a discussion with Jason Epstein, one of the publication’s founders.

The title refers to a toast at the beginning of the film, given at the celebration of the journal’s 50th year in 2013. Mr. Epstein is one of the first of several people involved with the publication who is interviewed for the documentary. He has had a house in Sag Harbor since the 1970s.

In the film, he recalls that the magazine came out of a perfect storm of events. He and his wife at the time, Barbara Epstein, were having dinner with their neighbors Robert Lowell and his wife, Elizabeth Hardwick. Ms. Hardwick had just launched an attack on The New York Times Book Review, calling it a “provincial literary journal” in Harper’s, where Robert Silvers was an editor. The 1963 newspaper strike was depriving the city of both news outlets and a place to advertise books. Mr. Epstein, an editor at Random House, sensed an opportunity, realizing it would be the only time a publication that competed with The Times Book Review could be launched. Among the city’s and even the world’s intelligentsia, it was a hit from the beginning.

Ms. Epstein and Mr. Silvers agreed to be co-editors. Mr. Lowell and Ms. Hardwick were contributors. They realized it was a chance to “do what we wanted, any way” they wanted, as Mr. Silvers says in the film.

This mission included being firebrands for original and rigorous intellectual thought, and adopting positions and viewpoints outside of the mainstream that more often than not proved themselves to be correct. The New York Review published early critiques of American involvement in Vietnam and Iraq, and was among the first to criticize the arrest and the scapegoating of a group of young African-American and Latino males for the brutal attack on the Central Park jogger in 1989.

Those arrested that night for the crime were exonerated in 2002 when the actual rapist came forward and DNA testing backed up his admission of guilt. They had already served their sentences. In September, they were awarded a $41 million civil rights settlement. Joan Didion understood early on that the case against them was not supported by the evidence. She saw it as a hysterical reaction about crime in the city and the deepest fears of its residents, which resulted in a need to put someone, anyone away. In the film she is interviewed about the article she wrote about the miscarriage of justice as well as her close but unconventional editorial relationship with Mr. Silvers.

After the screening, Mr. Epstein, who is now in his 80s and hard of hearing, leaned close to Andrew Botsford, one of the hosts of the festival, and told him that he liked the film over all. After seeing it for the third time, however, he was even more critical of the fact that it failed to accurately portray his late ex-wife’s contribution to the publication. Ms. Epstein died in 2006. There is some discussion of her in the film, but in the end the viewer walks away with the strong impression that the journal is and always was Mr. Silvers’s baby.

In the early days, Ms. Epstein would work until the school day ended, come home to be with her children, and then return to the office after 7 p.m. and work some more. The documentary, according to Mr. Epstein, made it seem as if Mr. Silvers did much of the work on his own, when in fact he did it jointly with Ms. Epstein for almost all of the 50 years covered by the film. The problem was that there was no footage of her doing so and no stills, because she was naturally camera shy.

The footage of Mr. Silvers was taken in the year surrounding the anniversary and shows a man from an analog time adapting, in his way, to the contemporary workplace. It captures an office buried in paper and bound volumes. No e-books here. When Mr. Silvers communicates digitally, he dictates, as he likely always did, to an assistant who types up the email for him. The younger staffers who run the publication’s blog say in the film that many of the writers who have adapted to the blog form still send their submissions in by fax for others to typeset.

Asked what will happen when Mr. Silvers, who is a spry 84, is no longer at the helm, Mr. Epstein was dismissive. “Bob is immortal. He will always be there,” he said with a smile.

Most of the film consists of present-day interviews or of footage of writers reading from their stories, but the archival footage the directors have selected is a treat. Norman Mailer, a longtime writer for the journal before his death in 2007, is shown boxing, introducing Mr. Lowell as if he were at a prize fight, and tangling with Susan Sontag at a forum on feminism. The film also utilizes clips from the famous literary smackdown between Gore Vidal and Mailer on Dick Cavett’s show that started with a head butt Mailer gave Vidal in the green room. It should be noted that all of those mentioned wrote for The New York Review.

Other early writers were W.H. Auden, Hannah Arendt, Saul Bellow, Truman Capote, Lilian Hellman, Mary McCarthy, William Styron, Robert Penn Warren, and Edmund Wilson. The website states that the circulation is 135,000, but Mr. Silvers adds about 10,000 to that figure in the film, stating that at one point Ms. Epstein decided that was the ideal number to sustain it. Her position was that striving for any more growth would never justify itself in advertising revenues.

In the end, if the film is about, as Colm Toibin puts it, capturing “the sensuality of ideas” that The New York Review has offered over the years, it does a respectable job of seduction.

Forty-six years to the day after the Beatles released the eponymous album that is commonly known as “The White Album,” a most interesting and perhaps unusual homage to that sprawling, 30-track work of genius followed it into the world and the collective consciousness. Last Saturday, another rock ’n’ roll quartet, this one known as the Mercyfunks, released “Don’t Pet the White Dog,” a sort of New Wave version of “The White Album.”

Led by Kevin Teare, a visual artist who lives in Noyac, the Mercyfunks will celebrate the album’s release with a free in-store performance at Innersleeve Records in Amagansett on Saturday from 5 to 7 p.m. Vinyl and compact-disc editions of the album, and other merchandise, will be available.

Seventy percent of the album and merchandise sales from the band’s website, themrcyfks.com, will be donated to Lyme Nation, which Mr. Teare, who was diagnosed with chronic Lyme disease, described as the most progressive clearinghouse for information and treatment protocols concerning the global epidemic of tick-borne diseases.

“Don’t Pet the White Dog” is replete with solid and rocking songs like “We Was Transformed,” “I’m in Love (With the Secret Government),” and “South Tower Screensaver,” none of which directly recall the Beatles. Also included, however, are more experimental tracks like the cryptically titled “39*10’N 78*10’W (DICK on the Headstone),” a musique concrete piece and clear homage to “The White Album’s” abstract and experimental “Revolution 9.” Each LP and CD is individually numbered and includes a full-color poster that is itself an homage to Richard Hamilton’s poster that was included with “The White Album.”

Mr. Teare, who played drums, is accompanied by Pony Thompson on vocals, Keelan James on piano, and Jewlee Trudden on guitar, who fronts the band InCircles and was previously Mr. Teare’s studio assistant. Guest performers include John Sebastian of the Lovin’ Spoonful; Jay Daugherty, who performs with Patti Smith; the composer Carter Burwell; Sara Lee of Gang of Four and the B-52’s, and Peter Stampfel of the Fugs.

An artistic creation inspired by the Beatles is not new to Mr. Teare. “I’ve been working on art about the Beatles for a ong time,” he said. “The paintings and art I’ve been doing over last 10 to 15 years have to do with deification of the Beatles — I don’t mean that in an ironic or cynical way, just as a matter of course. There’s a case to be made that, in terms of art, the Beatles were the most influential event of the last half of the 20th century.”

“Don’t Pet the White Dog,” Mr. Teare said, was not meant as a tribute, as such, but “I wanted it to be a sort of dedication to something that was incredibly meaningful to me. The Beatles are one of the most interesting things that have happened, sociologically, in my lifetime.”

The album does recall the rock ’n’ roll music of the Beatles’ era, as well as the process by which that music was made. The basic tracks were recorded live, meaning the core group of musicians performed together, at the same time and in the same room. The music was recorded to an analog tape machine, largely a relic in the digital age, and the sonic attributes of tape are apparent.

Mr. Teare mixed the music for the vinyl release. Ms. Trudden, with Cynthia Daniels, the producer and engineer, mixed and mastered the CD version at Ms. Daniels’s MonkMusic Studios in East Hampton. “They’re very different sounding,” Mr. Teare observed. “Vinyl is pretty . . . primitive, in some ways.” 

“The White Album’s” recording, taking place in the early days of the Beatles’ slow dissolution, was characterized by growing tension, its members beginning to work in isolation. While the Mercyfunks recorded “Don’t Pet the White Dog” together, Mr. Teare was enduring a struggle of his own. “This project was ongoing during the whole time I was being treated for chronic Lyme,” he said. “I was doing drum tracks with a PICC line,” or peripherally inserted central catheter, “in my arm, getting daily infusions. I had that for six weeks.”

Chronic Lyme, he said, is often misdiagnosed, and he decried a “troubling conflict of interest between the infectious-disease industry, which writes protocols doctors have to use, and the insurance companies. None of the insurance companies want to pay for this, because how to cure it is still a mystery once it gets to the central nervous system.”

Fortunately, Mr. Teare said, “I feel better than I did two years ago, but am still being treated.”

Vincent Longo had his first exhibition in New York in 1949. Since then his paintings and prints have been shown extensively and joined the collections of dozens of important museums here and abroad. During that time, from Abstract Expressionism through Pop, Minimal, Conceptual, and many other kinds of art, his work has remained resolutely his own. Not static, but driven by beliefs and principles that have informed his practice from the beginning.

During an afternoon in his sunny studio on Windmill Lane in Amagansett, surrounded by paintings and prints from the 1940s to the present, Mr. Longo spoke authoritatively and insightfully about his work and life as an artist, and the experiences that have influenced his development.

Given his Dickensian childhood, a life as an artist was not an obvious path to follow. Born in Manhattan in 1923, Mr. Longo was orphaned two years later. He and his brother, Frank, were sent to St. Agatha’s Home for Children in Rockland County. “Frank and I were orphans, but most of the kids were not. They were either from very poor families or broken families.” The property was fenced in, and trips to the world outside were rare.

When his mother was dying, her cousin Rose promised to take care of the boys. When Mr. Longo was 14, he and Frank went to live with Rose and her “big, noisy family” in Brooklyn. He attended Textile High School in Manhattan, where he studied commercial art. “But my last year of high school I discovered I didn’t have any talent for it.”

At the time, he met Edmond Casarella, an older boy from the Brooklyn neighborhood who was attending Cooper Union. “He saw that I was interested in art and started giving me drawing lessons. He became a mentor, and I followed him to Cooper.” Though Mr. Longo enrolled as a commercial art major, he changed to painting after one year.

One of his teachers encouraged him in the direction of abstraction and gave him lessons in Cubism. Another, Leo Katz, talked about Cubism as a breaking up of the solidity of objects into planes — the Cubist grid — and introduced the young artist to Jung, Lao-Tzu, and Buddhism.

While at Cooper Union, he had a small cold-water flat he used as a studio. When, several years later, he lost that and found himself with no place to work, Augustus Peck, the director of the Brooklyn Museum Art School, let him enroll for free and use its studio space. While there he took courses with Max Beckmann and Ben Shahn.

Picasso and Kandinsky influenced his work from this period. He showed a visitor an abstract painting from 1951 titled “Green Light” that, while not resembling his more mature work, already exhibited his propensity toward line. Sharp triangles radiate from the center, suggestive of an exploding star. Such “bursting centers,” as he called them, have figured in his work ever since.

During the 1950s he was part of the New York School, but his work from that period doesn’t resemble that of his peers. While he frequented the bars and galleries of the time, he didn’t become a member of the Club, an Eighth Street meeting place for artists of the period, until 1954. “I was so pure about my work I didn’t want to be influenced, so I avoided the Club for six years. What people don’t realize now is that New York was wide open at the time. All the Club members painted differently. The thing they had in common was the desire to break from Paris.”

Mr. Longo said that the most accessible of the better-known artists was Franz Kline, who enjoyed talking with younger artists. “The 1950s and 1960s was the best time to be a young painter,” he said.

In 1957, he learned about an opening at Bennington College in the print shop. He thought it was for one year, but he stayed for 10. The faculty included such Color Field painters as Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, and Paul Feeley, who was the department’s director. In addition, Clement Greenberg, one of the most influential critics of the mid-20th century, lectured there.

Mr. Longo had been reading Greenberg’s articles in Partisan Review since 1947, and he first met him 10 years later, when they were in a drawing show together. “He was a frustrated artist. He considered himself a failed painter. I was never part of his group. He didn’t like my work, but he liked me. He used to tell people I was the only artist he would run into in libraries.” Mr. Longo also became very friendly with the sculptor Tony Smith while at Bennington, and the two later taught at Hunter College.

Mr. Longo and his first wife, Pat, became interested in Neolithic art in the 1950s and visited various sites in France in 1956. “The idea of an enclosed center, leaving a trace that had some kind of significance, that wasn’t figural, became very developed in Neolithic art,” he said. A 1962 trip to Malta to see the proto-European megalithic temples further reinforced his conviction that abstraction was rooted in ornament, spiral forms, and concentric repetition.

“When I came back from Malta I started doing these dark etchings that emphasized the center. I had been doing really large woodcuts that got a lot of attention, and my etchings got around a lot.” There is a polarity in his work between expressionist gesture and central balance. “I kept the gestural going in the woodcuts. Because the medium was meant for carving, it’s naturally gestural. But whichever way I’m working, woodcuts or paintings, I never plan anything.”

The square and the circle are fundamental elements of his work. “I start with a certain kind of structure, the center relating to the edge at the same time.” The Buddhist mandala and Hindu yantra have been recurring motifs in his paintings, less for their symbolism than for their simple renewal of archetypal forms, “which I thought had a bearing on contemporary discourse.”

“Squaring,” an etching from 1967, consists of four arcs, separated by white space, that describe a circle. No straight lines are used, but when one focuses on the center, the white of the paper emerges as a perfect square.

While his grid paintings might at first seem anything but unplanned, he has written, “The forms and constructs I use are necessarily deliberate, but I work with them relatively freely. Images and ideas are worked out rather than thought out. I hope to come upon something unfamiliar using common forms, repeating them and at times finding some aspect of myself hitherto unrecognized in them. Basic forms such as the grid are taken as given.”

For many years, Mr. Longo avoided East Hampton because it was an “artist’s hangout.” He first visited in 1971 with Kate Davis, an artist he had just started seeing, and fell in love with the area. He and Ms. Davis have been together ever since, renting a house and studio on Copeces Lane in Springs every summer until, in 1988, they bought their current house in Amagansett.

At 91, he still works every day. “I feel that making art has to do with leaving traces. That’s what human life is about, leaving a trace of yourself.”

Mr. Longo’s work will be included in the winter salon at the Drawing Room in East Hampton, where he will have a one-person show in 2015.

Five Young Contemporaries

The Parrish Art Museum has developed the Parrish Contemporaries Circle, for younger patrons of the museum ages 21 to 45. The group will offer access to six art-related events and experiences each year on the East End and the New York metropolitan area. These will include private collection and artist’s studio tours and networking events.

On Tuesday, the first such event will take place at the FLAG Art Foundation in Manhattan, where Eric Fischl will be there to discuss the exhibition “Disturbing Innocence.”

Future events will include a tour of Fred Seegal’s art collection in New York City, a midwinter party hosted by David Burke Group New York, a cocktail reception and walkthrough of the exhibition “Chuck Close Photographs” at the Parrish with its director, Terrie Sultan, a tour of the museum’s art vault, and tours of North Fork artists’ studios.

The membership, which includes other benefits, will cost $350 annually. More information is available by contacting Melissa Gatz at [email protected].

Brodsky’s Blueprints

“Plans,” an exhibition of recent ink-on-silk works by Eugene Brodsky, an artist with studios in East Hampton and New York City, is on view at Sears-Peyton Gallery in Chelsea through Dec. 20.

The works reflect Mr. Brodsky’s fascination with the blueprints and sketches of significant 20th-century architecture, especially “the worked-on, tattered, erased, and notated records of how something came to be.” Each piece fuses his vision with that of an architect or planner, resulting in images that suggest, but do not replicate, their origins.

Mr. Brodsky has described these pieces as “essentially creating a jigsaw puzzle of silk,” a complicated process that includes drawing, collage, vector conversion, laser-cutting, inking, silk-stretching, pinning, and assembly, processes that, in the artist’s words, “remain mostly invisible to the viewer, who rightly just sees what’s there.”

Last summer, Sophie Chahinian successfully launched a Kickstarter campaign, ultimately raising $25,000 to help fund the Artist Profile Archive. It’s a website that houses short-form videos of contemporary artists discussing their own work.

Three of Ms. Chahinian’s videos are now on display at Guild Hall as part of its current exhibition of new additions to the permanent collection. A gallery talk and guided tour, led by with Christina Strassfield, Guild Hall’s chief curator, will take place on Saturday afternoon at 3 p.m.

As part of the exhibit, video profiles of Chuck Close, April Gornik, and Eric Fischl play on a continuous loop, each running between six and eight minutes. An additional profile of Joel Shapiro, whose work is also on display, is forthcoming. The exhibit runs through Jan. 4.

Ms. Chahinian wears many hats. In addition to working as a real estate agent in the East Hampton office of Douglas Elliman (a sponsor of the video exhibit), she recently served as interim associate curator at Guild Hall, filling in for an employee out on maternity leave.

“This is the thing I love to do,” she said of the video profiles, which she films and edits with a team of freelance filmmakers. “It’s my purpose.” Fund-raising, though, remains a perpetual challenge. She said the Kickstarter campaign was “too nail-biting” to undertake again.

The exhibition’s inclusion of works by Mr. Fischl (an oil on linen portrait), two recently acquired pieces by Mr. Close (including a self-portrait made of polished stainless steel and paper), and an oil-on-linen seascape by Ms. Gornik, was fortuitous, affording a perfect venue for Ms. Chahinian’s videos. Taken together, the profiles add a rich layer of context, providing not only biographical tidbits of each artist but insights into their individual techniques and creative processes.

Ms. Chahinian is constantly in search of new sponsors willing to underwrite production costs. Each video costs around $5,000 to make. LTV, where the videos have also been aired and where tax-deductible contributions can be made, is the Artist Profile Archive’s nonprofit sponsor.

The East Hampton Library will screen “Stuart Sutcliffe: The Lost Beatle” Saturday at 1 p.m. The 60-minute BBC documentary, directed in 2005 by Steve Cole, tells the story of Sutcliffe, who became friends with John Lennon in 1957 when both were students at the Liverpool School of Art, and joined the rock group, then known at the Quarrymen, in 1959.

As the group’s bass player, he traveled with them to Hamburg, where they performed in clubs and lived above a soft-core porn theater. He continued to paint in Hamburg, and in 1961 he left the group to concentrate on his career as an artist. When he died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1962, he was enrolled in the Hamburg State School of Fine Art and living with Astrid Kirchherr, a photographer.

The screening of the film will be followed by a question-and-answer session with Pauline Sutcliffe, Stuart’s sister and a Wainscott resident, and Diane Vitale, who, along with Ms. Sutcliffe and Giles Cooper, wrote “In Conversation With Stuart Sutcliffe,” the 2012 book that commemorates his life and work and includes photographs of Sutcliffe taken by Ms. Kirchherr.