The John Drew Theater Lab will present a free staged reading of “Viva Los Bastarditos,” a new musical by Jake Oliver, Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. The production will be directed by Ethan McSweeny, a Tony Award nominee, and will star Blake DeLong and Alex Morf.

Set in a fictional land known as West Massachusetts, the play pits two villainous landlords against Los Bastarditos, three rock stars who unite to fight the would-be dictators and their army of rent collectors. The play draws upon and repurposes golden-age musicals, vaudeville, bedroom farce, and B-movie westerns.

The Grammy-nominated Eroica Trio will premiere a new work by Bruce Wolosoff, a Shelter Island composer, at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston on Sunday at 1:30 p.m. Titled “The Loom,” the piece was inspired by the paintings of Eric Fischl, who collaborated closely on the project and created a new painting inspired by Mr. Wolosoff’s music. Trios by Beethoven and Smetana will also be on the program.

Sitting in his Springs studio last week, Joe Zucker recalled an art history class in which the professor showed a slide of a certain artist’s late work, a painting of stylized horses. “It was truly awful, and the professor stressed how awful it was. And I thought, how the heck am I ever going to avoid having late work, short of early termination.”

A room at the Art Institute of Chicago is currently devoted to five of Mr. Zucker’s paintings, part of its permanent collection. They range in date from 1965 to 2010 and utilize different materials and styles. “They’re all very physical,” he said. “My paintings are objects, they’re not easel paintings, and I think the thing I was struck by is that even though the works in that gallery cover a period of more than 40 years, there’s an organization to them, so that every section is dependent on the next section. They’re devoid of arbitrary decisions.”

Joe Zucker was well established in the art world when he and his wife, Britta Le Va, moved from New York to East Hampton in 1982. “I was showing with Holly Solomon, doing a lot of work, a lot of shows, but it became too much,” he said. “Many artists, if they can, leave New York after a time, especially if they aren’t originally from there.” The move was precipitated in part by the need for a larger workspace. “I realized I would have to pay handsomely for a bigger loft that would have the same water bugs, the same roaches, and the same rodents.”

The artist was confident his decision would make sense in the long run, but the move wasn’t only about workspace. “I have avocations that I’m deeply involved in that are available out here. I am a hard-core fisherman, and I fish every spring in the Midwest.” A former high school basketball star, he has been an assistant coach of the Bridgehampton Killer Bees for many years. “It’s about watching the kids play and having fun with them.”

Born and raised in Chicago, Mr. Zucker attended Miami University of Ohio for two years before transferring to the Art Institute of Chicago, where he earned a B.F.A. and an M.F.A. After graduation, he taught for two years at the Minneapolis School of Art. “It was a comfortable place to live, and one could easily fall into staying there for the rest of your life. Fortunately somebody came from New York and offered me a job at the School of Visual Arts. There wasn’t one second of hesitation.”

He arrived in the city in 1968 and within a year was exhibiting at the Bykert Gallery, a cutting-edge space helmed by Klaus Kertess. Among those showing there were such rising artists as Chuck Close, Brice Marden, David Novros, and Dorothea Rockburne. “The gallery produced many important artists, so I transitioned right into a situation that was very much a dialogue about work, and if you had a show, there was a lot of feedback. Whether the feedback was good or bad, it felt like it meant something in the art community.”

From the beginning, Mr. Zucker’s work existed outside conventional modernist thinking. “I had ideas about the importance of craft, that craftsmen passed their knowledge from generation to generation. It wasn’t based on mainstream art language. I didn’t work toward a style. By that time I was a heretic. I no longer believed that feelings could be transferred from your soul to a canvas. I believed my paintings were free from ‘divine intervention’ influencing my stylistic development.”

Soon after moving to New York, Mr. Zucker began his “100-Foot-Long Piece.” Exhibited in the city in 1972 and at the Parrish Art Museum in 1992, more than 20 years after its creation, it encapsulates much of what his work is about. Indeed, it can be seen as metaphor for more than four decades of artistic production. It consists of some 30 vertical panels of slightly varying dimensions, each one using different materials, techniques, and stylistic strategies from those preceding and following it.

The first section consists of a piece of wire mesh from which four rods topped with paper cones protrude. Other segments include images of Billy the Kid and the Charioteer of Delphi, photographic enlargements of fabrics, a charcoal drawing of the tombstone of the owner of a bar the artist frequented in Chicago, cotton balls soaked in red paint, lawn-chair webbing, and shelf paper. The cotton balls would reappear often in Mr. Zucker’s work, perhaps most famously in a series that took as its subject the history of cotton production, including slavery, plantation life, and the invention of the cotton gin.

“My work is proletarian,” he said. “I use a lot of construction materials. For a recent series of fresco works I used Sheetrock, sanding off the paper to reveal the gypsum core and incising a grid pattern into the material. I used watercolor to create the images, since that medium and gypsum bond well, resulting in a surface similar to the wet plaster murals of the Mexican muralists. The way the individual squares suck up a dot of watercolor paint is a thing of beauty.”

Another series was a riff on the paintbox, which ordinarily holds art materials. He fashioned shallow boxes divided into sections, into which the paint was poured, rather than applied with a brush. Each box had a cover that was exhibited with the open box. “As you open one, you see it as a painting, a compartmentalized object such as a red house, but when you close it up and put it away it’s a crate going into storage. It changes in meaning, and rarely do paintings have two meanings.” The interior of the box was itself painted, while the tools of the trade — brushes, rags, palette knives — were discarded.

Mr. Zucker’s grandfather was a train engineer. “Half of my family were railroad people. The other half railroaded people. I remember sitting at a crossing gate somewhere in Wisconsin waiting for 20 minutes for a freight train to go by. Within each car there’s a different content, and at any time you can insert another car into the train.” He explained that while each of his series of works differs from every other in materials and style, his underlying approach is based on the same principles, so that each section or series “is built from a kind of constructed logic. It’s like being a contractor of the absurd.”

“My goal is for each piece or series to be singular. I don’t have favorites. All I care about is if a body of work is strong and resonates with its materials, and the style that’s produced by the selection of materials. My lack of quintessential style allows my work to be open-ended. The choice of materials enables me to paint about current issues.”

New at Drawing Room

Concurrent solo exhibitions of work by Costantino Nivola and Rolph Scarlett will open at the Drawing Room in East Hampton tomorrow and remain on view through Oct. 13.

Nivola, who lived in Springs from 1948 until his death in 1988, developed a lexicon of sculptural form ranging from monumental public commissions to intimately scaled figures and abstractions in relief, bronze, clay, marble, concrete, and sand casts. This exhibition focuses on works in clay of figures at leisure on Louse Point.

Scarlett was a pioneer of modernism whose non-objective paintings were championed by Hilla Rebay of the Museum of Non-Objective Art in New York and Solomon Guggenheim, the arts patron. His visual language changed over seven decades from rhythmic geometries, the earliest of which reflected the influence of Paul Klee, to fanciful abstractions.

Two at Halsey Mckay

The Halsey Mckay Gallery in East Hampton is presenting solo shows by Colby Bird and Chris Duncan through Sept. 22. Mr. Bird’s exhibition, titled “Set Down,” includes five new works on paper and five new support structures that rely on wood and fruit to balance the artworks placed on top. The show is a meditation on the roles of labor and reward in the pursuit of an art career.

In “The Sun and the Air,” Mr. Duncan continues his ongoing exploration of the sun as metaphor, inspiration, and subject. For these works, the artist placed colored fabric in various locations that figure in his life and practice. Without intervention or the use of dye or emulsion, imagery emerged through time and ultraviolet exposure.

Harris and Wimberley

The Gerald Peters Gallery in Manhattan is presenting concurrent solo exhibitions of works by Tracy Harris and Frank Wimberley from Wednesday, with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m., through Oct. 3.

Ms. Harris, who lives in East Hampton, draws on architecture, science, and the modernist tradition in her paintings, which are embedded with buried images, both abstract and figurative.

Mr. Wimberley, a Sag Harbor resident, applies his paints shade by shade, brushstroke by brushstroke, to create what he calls a “controlled accident.” The resulting paintings are marked by overwhelming color, endless depth, and palpable texture.

Artists on Film

“Artists on Film,” an annual series presented by the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in Springs and organized by Marion Wolberg Weiss, an art and film critic, will open its 2014 season tomorrow at 7 p.m. This year’s experimental, documentary, and narrative works by and about artists will explore the theme of discovery.

The opening program will include four short films by Anita Thacher, an artist known for her work in film, video, public art, multimedia, light, architectural and sculptural installation, as well as painting, photography, and prints. Her art explores issues of perception, both spatial and personal, and is included in such public collections as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art.

Subsequent programs will feature Andrea Cote, Peter Webber, and Teller. A discussion with Ms. Weiss follows each screening. Admission is $5, free for members.

Tonic Artspace in Sag

The peripatetic Tonic Artspace will pop up at the John Jermain Memorial Library in Sag Harbor from Sunday through Oct. 24, with a reception set for Wednesday from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m.

The Bonac Tonic Art Collective was conceived in 2005 with the belief that art should be for everyone. Participating artists in the upcoming exhibition are Chick Bills, Matt Brophy, Scott Gibbons, Carly Haffner, Grant Haffner, Christine Lidrbauch, and Oliver Peterson.

Dell Cullum at Pierre’s

“When the Day Awakes,” an exhibition of photographs by Dell Cullum, will open at Pierre’s in Bridgehampton with a reception Saturday afternoon from 3 to 6. It will remain on view through Sept. 30.

The subject of the show, which will include some 25 works, is the way daybreak is shared in various East Hampton locales by human, marine, and wildlife inhabitants. Mr. Cullum, who lives in East Hampton and is a contributing photographer to The Star, is a nature photographer and filmmaker, and the owner of Hampton Wildlife Removal and Rescue.

He has photographed every sunrise for the past three years at sites ranging from Montauk to Georgica Beach. “It wasn’t until I started shooting the sunrise that I realized the secret world of wildlife that many don’t get to see,” he said. “It was a spiritual awakening in so many ways.”

Kevin Teare in Quogue

Kevin Teare, a Sag Harbor artist and musician, will exhibit watercolor studies and oil-on-Mylar paintings at the Quogue Library art gallery from Saturday through Sept. 29. A reception will be held Saturday afternoon from 2:30 to 4:30.

A visual artist and a musician, Mr. Teare draws for much of his work on popular music, specifically the work of the Beatles, “with all its sonic and compositional innovation as well as its sociological and cultural gravity.” The works in the show will be featured in his forthcoming book “The Most High (The Drop ‘T’ Logo Changed My Mind).”

Modernist Painting at Vered

“Modernist Color: The First 90 Years” will open at Vered Gallery in East Hampton tomorrow with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m. and will remain on view through Oct. 21.

The birth of modernism in painting is generally placed in the 1860s. In broad terms, modernist painters were more concerned with qualities of color, shape, line, and other issues intrinsic to painting than with more traditional representation. The development of photography was also a factor in the turn away from naturalism.

The Vered exhibition ranges from a 1913 painting by John Singer Sargent to relatively recent work by such artists as Larry Rivers and Robert Mapplethorpe. Other well-known names include Man Ray, John Sloan, Milton Avery, Arthur Dove, Arshile Gorky, and Helen Fran­kenthaler, among others.

Landscapes at Grenning

“Summer Landscapes,” an exhibition of work by plein air artists, is on view at Greening Gallery in Sag Harbor through Sept. 28. While many of the painters live on the East End, some travel from as far away as Italy to limn the local landscape.

Participating artists are Nelson White, Ben Fenske, Ramiro, Melissa Franklin, Marc Dalessio, Daniel Graves, Leo Mancini-Hresko, Edward Minoff, Mary­ann Lucas, and Hal DeWaltoff.

Photography in Montauk

The Depot Gallery in Montauk will present this year’s Montauk All-Photography Show from today through Sept. 15, with an opening reception set for Saturday from 5 to 7 p.m.

The seven photographers, who employ a wide range of images and techniques, are Jerry Cooke, Lori Corless, Garry Giliberti, Anne Palermo, Gaelin Rosenwaks, Hiram Jacob Segarra, and Rich Silver.

On the Horizon

“On the Horizon,” an exhibition of work by contemporary landscape artists, will take place Saturday and Sunday at Ashawagh Hall in Springs. A reception will be held Saturday from 5 to 8 p.m. The show, which has been organized by Ellen Dooley, will include paintings, photographs, drawings, sculpture, and mixed media, in works where the literal gives way to each artist’s unique interpretation.

The Biercuk-Luckey garden in Wainscott will be open to the public Saturday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. as part of the Garden Conservancy’s Open Days program.

The four-season woodland garden shelters a collection of rhododendrons, azaleas, kalmia, pieris, understory trees, perennials, bulbs, and tropicals in season. Winding paths and stone walls enhance a sense of depth and elevation change on a mostly flat acre.

Heading west on Montauk Highway from East Hampton, visitors have been advised to turn left onto Sayre’s Path. The house is the first driveway on the right; parking will be on the road. Admission is $5.

“Gruesome Playground Injuries,” a two-person play by the Pulitzer Prize finalist Rajiv Joseph, will have four performances at Guild Hall, beginning tonight at 7.

First produced in 2009, the play tells the story of Kayleen and Doug, who meet in the nurse’s office of their elementary school. They come together periodically over the next 30 years due to injury, heartbreak, and self-destructive tendencies.

Starring Julia Masotti and Jacob Alden Roa and directed by Brian Clemente, the play is the first to be staged by Genny Productions, a new theatrical production company founded by alumni of the State University at Geneseo.

Other performances will take place tomorrow and Saturday at 7 p.m. and Sunday afternoon at 3. Tickets are $25 and can be purchased at brownpapertickets.com. 

On Tuesday evening at 7:30, Guild Hall’s JDTLab will present a free reading of “Deep Down in Brooklyn: An American Story,” a new solo play written and performed by Ed German, familiar to East End listeners as host of “The Urban Jazz Experience” and “Friday Night Soul” on WPPB 88.3 FM.

Based on Mr. German’s memoir of the same name, the play takes the audience from his youth in a cellar apartment in 1950s Brooklyn to service as a Marine in Vietnam, from which he returned wounded and unprepared for the future. A soundtrack of classic rock, soul, and jazz accompanies the story. “Deep Down in Brooklyn” is produced by Bonnie Grice.

The Montauk Library will present a free concert by the Zigzag Quartet on Saturday at 7:30 p.m. The musicians — Alexander Wu (piano), Francisco Roldan (guitar), Hilliard Greene (double bass), and Danny Mallon (percussion) — cross musical boundaries from flamenco to jazz to contemporary works composed exclusively for them. The program will include pieces by R. Gnattali, David Tcimpidas, Astor Piazzolla, Leonard Bernstein, Binelli, and Dave Brubeck.

The quartet has performed extensively throughout the tristate area, including concerts at Lincoln Center, Jazz WinterFest, Brooklyn College, and Bryant Park. They will also perform at the Rogers Memorial Library in South­ampton, on Sunday at 3 p.m.

The irreverent humor and mordant social commentary of Fran Lebowitz will kick off a star-studded Labor Day weekend at Guild Hall tonight at 8. Ms. Lebowitz, who began her career as a columnist for Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine, is the author of two best-selling collections of essays, “Metropolitan Life” and “Social Studies.”

Hosted by Dick Cavett, the evening will feature Ms. Lebowitz’s insights on topics that might include gender, race, gay rights, the media, and her pet peeves. Prime orchestra seats are priced at $150, $145 for Guild Hall members. Orchestra seats are $65 and $63, balcony tickets $50 and $48.

Ben Folds will take the John Drew Theater stage on Saturday at 7:30 p.m. Mr. Folds, a singer-songwriter-producer who first found mainstream success as the leader of the platinum-selling Ben Folds Five, has gone on to a successful solo career recording multiple studio albums, a pair of records documenting his renowned live performances, a remix record, and music for film and television.

Holders of prime orchestra tickets, which are priced at $150, $145 for members, may attend a post-performance party and craft beer-tasting, with food and live music, in Guild Hall’s garden. Orchestra seats are $65 and $63, and balcony seats are $50 and $48.

Adam Pascal, an actor, singer, and musician who originated the role of Roger Davis in “Rent,” will perform at the Southampton Arts Center with Larry Edoff, a Grammy-nominated musician, on Saturday at 8 p.m. in “Meandlarry,” the final program of Guild Hall’s Songbook Salon series.

Mr. Pascal, who received for his role in “Rent” a Tony nomination for best actor and Drama League and Obie awards, will perform rearranged and re-imagined Broadway classics, pop and rock hits, and original music. The concert will also include several songs from “Rent,” which won both a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award. Tickets are $60, $58 for Guild Hall members. The $85 V.I.P tickets include a post-performance reception with the artists.

“Stirring the Pot: Conversations With Culinary Celebrities” will conclude for the season on Sunday at 11 a.m. with a conversation between Daniel Boulud and Florence Fabricant. Mr. Boulud, the chef whose culinary empire comprises 15 restaurants on three continents, was born in Lyon, France, and came to the United States in 1982. His flagship restaurant, Daniel in Manhattan, has three Michelin stars and was cited as one of the 10 best restaurants in the world by The International Herald Tribune. A book signing will follow the talk.

Tickets are $15, $13 for members. A limited number of $75 tickets will include a 10 a.m. continental brunch with Mr. Boulud and Ms. Fabricant, a food writer for The New York Times.

Linda Eder will bring her diverse repertoire of show tunes, standards, pop, country, and jazz to the John Drew Theater on Sunday at 7:30 p.m. Ms. Eder, who starred on Broadway as Lucy Harris in “Jekyll and Hyde,” for which she was nominated for a Drama Desk award, has established herself as one of today’s most acclaimed interpreters of pop standards and theatrical songs. She has performed for sold-out audiences at such venues as Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, and Radio City Music Hall, and has been featured in many PBS concert specials.

Prime orchestra tickets at $100. Orchestra seats are priced at $65, $63 for members, while balcony tickets are $55 and $53.

“The Homesman,” a western starring Hilary Swank and Tommy Lee Jones and directed and co-written by Mr. Jones, will be the Centerpiece Film at the 22nd annual Hamptons International Film Festival, taking place from Oct. 9 through Oct. 13. Hilary Swank, the film’s star, will be in East Hampton for the film’s East Coast premiere.

The actor, writer, and director Bob Balaban, who has a house in Bridgehampton, has been named this year’s honorary chairman of the festival.

Adapted from the novel of the same name by Glendon Swarthout, “The Homesman” focuses on a subject seldom highlighted in westerns — the plight of women in the Old West. Hilary Swank portrays Mary Bee Cuddy, a self-sufficient pioneer woman who has taken on the task of transporting three deranged women from Nebraska to Iowa. When she finds George Briggs, played by Mr. Jones, sitting on a horse under a tree with a rope around his neck, she rescues him — on the condition that he accompany her on her journey.

Grace Gummer, Miranda Otto, and Sonja Richter play the three women, all of whom have come unhinged by the rigors and deprivations of life on the plains. The star-studded cast also includes Meryl Streep, James Spader, and John Lithgow.

According to Peter Bradshaw, reviewing the film in The Guardian after its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, “Tommy Lee Jones shows some true storytelling grit in this superbly watchable frontier western; he has a muscular and confident command of narrative, driving the plot onward with a real whip-crack, and easily handles the tonal swings between brutal shock, black comedy, and sentimentality.”

The festival has also announced the titles in its Views From Long Island section, which focuses on local filmmakers and films with geographical ties to the East End. The films will include the pilot of the Showtime production “The Affair,” which explores the effects on two marriages of an extramarital relationship between a New York City schoolteacher and a young waitress, who meet in Montauk. Much of the drama was filmed in and around Amagansett, where some residents objected to the fallout from the large-scale production on their neighborhoods.

Much of Lou Howe’s first feature film, “Gabriel,” was also filmed on the East End. Rory Culkin stars in the title role of a young man longing for stability and happiness while struggling with mental illness. Soon after being released from an asylum, Gabriel obsessively pursues his high school girlfriend, whom he hasn’t seen in years, testing the limits of his family’s understanding.

Views From Long Island will also include the New York premiere of “Diplomacy,” a feature directed by Volker Schlöndorff, an acclaimed German filmmaker who has a house in Amagansett. Set in the summer of 1944, the film focuses on Dietrich von Choltitz, a German general who has been ordered by Hitler to destroy Paris rather than let it fall into enemy hands. Adapted from a play by Cyril Gély, the film details the efforts of Swedish Consul General Raoul Nordling to dissuade von Choltitz.

“Weenie,” a short film shot in East Hampton by the Sag Harbor-based filmmaker Dan Roe, will also be included in Views From Long Island. Weenie is a 16-year-old girl who has been grounded. Her mother doesn’t understand her, and her friend is pressuring her to come to a party, so she decides to sneak out. The filmmaker, who teaches at the Ross School, has called the film “a combination of Judy Blume and Alfred Hitchcock.”

A limited number of Founders Passes are available at a 15-percent discount until Monday at hamptonsfilmfest.org. 

While some of us were basking in the sun or sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic to get to the next much-hyped event, Enoc Perez was hard at work in his East Hampton studio on the pieces presented in “Summer Job” at Harper’s Books in East Hampton.

    The frothy riff touches on social media, appropriation, modern art, and, if you’re feeling academic in these lazy dog days, Lacanian notions and related theories of the subject and object of the gaze in art.

    This series has its roots in the artist’s earlier and loftier form of appropriation, namely using elements of Picasso’s compositions in combination with his exploration of the painted nude or on their own. Now, he has taken images from Instagram of minimally dressed women, from amateur selfies to more professional photos, and added collage and his own painted marks. The applied shapes resemble some of Picasso’s own abstracted female forms, the cutouts of Matisse, and even, perhaps with this summer’s Gagosian show of Marcel Duchamp in mind, a group of “Stoppages” in one work.

    Of course, Duchamp’s Dada explorations of collage and readymades were seminal and helped define the form. His rebranding of Mona Lisa postcards and popular advertisements with his own predilection for puns, the off-color joke, and sexual innuendo inspired generations to follow.

    One of the first works in the show, a superimposed “Desmoiselles d’Avignon” on a poster for the Harmony Korine film “Spring Breakers,” serves as a bridge between this higher form of art play and a film that used the nominally clad “Girls Gone Wild” culture as a plot device. The mash-up of women behaving outside of socially acceptable norms then and now is punchy in a way that is more powerful than might immediately be surmised. Its color bath of bloody red suggests violence, menace, and carnal love.

    That crossover work is the heaviest in the show in terms of art historical heft and impact. The others are more playful, coming from a small and more informal book the artist used to plan the series before he turned to the larger works on paper and canvas displayed in the gallery. Yet, it colors those pieces, making them more fraught than their romping beach-y revelry might otherwise suggest.

    Most of the canvas transfers and works on paper were worked out previously, with the cutout shapes predetermined. One inkjet piece on photographic paper is more freestyle, using a few small shapes but taking hints of paint that are found on some of the other works and applying them expressively in wide swathes around and over the figure. Although the splats, splashes, squiggles, and the above-referenced shapes by artists from a prior century are engaging, the wash of paint gives the work a deeper, more substantial feeling. It seems like a natural progression and is reductive in its expansion over the composition, allowing only glimpses of what the artist wants to be seen.

    The cutout shapes may function as a censor’s blue dots or pixelated screens, thwarting our ability to see the original image in its entirety and thereby making it all the more attention-grabbing, casting viewers into the role of voyeur. Not only are the body’s parts or its entirety obscured, but the faces are also always partially or wholly hidden, raising issues of objectification and a hint of malfeasance, the identities hidden to protect the innocent.

    The collaged bits make it into a happy game, playful colors and forms replacing a need for more visual information. With the paint, the artist reminds his audience who is in control. Rather than a frisky gambit, we see a more serious attempt to obscure and confound and a more direct homage to Richard Prince, another one of the artist’s predecessors and inspirations for this series.

    Since all of the works are dated from this year and were completed this summer, the question becomes: Is this where the series came from, or is it where it is going? In his earlier series involving transfers of oil stick drawings of buildings onto canvas, the brushwork he used to embellish them came later on. It would seem that this could be the same case here and a more suitable style for the cooler and more serious months ahead.

    The show will remain on view through Columbus Day.