Marvin Hamlisch, a composer and longtime resident of Westhampton Beach and later Sag Harbor, will be the subject of a new PBS “American Masters” series documentary scheduled to premiere nationally and on WNET 13 tomorrow at 9 p.m.

    Mr. Hamlisch, who died in 2012, was the composer of Broadway musicals and movie soundtracks. His credits include “A Chorus Line” and hit songs such as “The Way We Were” and “Nobody Does It Better.” His work won several awards including a number of Grammys, Emmys, Oscars, and Golden Globes. He also won a Tony and a Pulitzer Prize.

    Directed by Dori Berinstein, the film includes interviews with his family and colleagues such as Barbra Streisand, Carly Simon, Quincy Jones, Steven Soderbergh, Christopher Walken, and many others.

    Free Grass Union, a bluegrass and folk-inspired band, will bring its unique musical stylings to the Stephen Talkhouse in Amagansett on Saturday night at 8.

    The band features Gregory Butler, who may be familiar as a teacher to those with children in the East Hampton school system, on vocals and mandolin. He is joined by Kim Humphrey, who plays guitar and sings, and Mitch Erdman, who plays upright bass.

    The band was formed in 1999 and has since played at numerous fairs and festivals as well as bar and concert stages. Tickets cost $10 at the door.

    The Parrish Art Museum is hosting Into the Light, an early winter dance party, tomorrow from 6 to 8 p.m. Music will be spun by D.J. Mister Lama, now of Sag Harbor, a self-described “Peruvian redneck from Texas who has been manipulating sound for more than 20 years.”

    Video from the tropics will heat up the atmosphere, and drinks and snacks will be available from the Café by Art of Eating. The cost is $10, free for members, and includes museum admission.

    Advance reservations may be made at parrishart.org.

New at Crazy Monkey

    The Crazy Monkey Gallery in Amagansett is opening a new show tomorrow called “New Year=New Art.” Work by the gallery members Andrea McCafferty, Daniel Schoenheimer, Barbara Bilotta, June Kaplan, Ellyn Tucker, Bob Tucker, Mark E. Zimmerman, Bobbie Braun, Lance Corey, Beth O’Donnell and Melissa Hin will remain on view through Jan. 26.

    A reception is scheduled for Jan. 11 from 5 to 7 p.m.

Huey Landscapes at Harper’s

    “Radiant Swim,” an exhibition of recent paintings by Elizabeth Huey, curated by Jess Frost, is on view at Harper’s Books in East Hampton through Feb. 18. A reception for the artist will be held on Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m.

    Ms. Huey’s new landscapes present figures surrounded by water. They splash in swimming pools, gather under beach umbrellas, and plunge off diving boards against backdrops of motels, mountain resorts, beaches, waterfalls, and other environments, both natural and man-made.

    A selection of the artist’s photographs, both made and found, is also on view, as are collages that further illuminate her process. Ms. Huey, who has a master’s degree in fine arts from Yale University, has exhibited nationally and internationally. She lives in Brooklyn.

Bujese Selects at Markel

    “Dealer’s Choice,” an exhibition organized by Arlene Bujese, will occupy the Kathryn Markel Fine Arts gallery in Bridgehampton from Saturday through Feb. 2. Ms. Bujese, who is curator of art exhibitions at the Levitas Center for the Arts at the Southampton Cultural Center, ran her eponymous gallery on Newtown Lane in East Hampton for almost a decade. Many of the artists in “Dealer’s Choice” showed there.

    The exhibition includes works by Mary Abbott, Calvin Albert, Will Barnet, Stephanie Brody-Lederman, Darlene Charneco, John Dayton, Carol Hunt, William King, Elaine de Kooning, John Little, and Fulvio Massi. An opening reception will be held on Saturday from 5 to 7 p.m.

A Call for Art

    The Rogers Memorial Library in Southampton has issued a call for East End artists to submit works for a juried art exhibition to be held in the library’s Madelle Semerjian Gallery in April. The library is seeking “images that highlight the many remarkable places in and around the Village and Town of Southampton.”

    Oil, acrylic, watercolor, drawing, prints, mixed media, and photography are all acceptable. The maximum size is 26 inches wide by 28 inches high. Entries may be submitted electronically until March 1 via the library’s website, myrml.org. The entry fee is $10 per piece with a maximum of three entries per artist.

    Twenty-five works will be selected for the April exhibition by Tom Edmonds, director of the Southampton Historical Museum, Paton Miller, an artist, and Ellen Jo Myer, a former library trustee. Five winning entries will remain on view at the library for the entire summer season.

    Canio’s Cultural Cafe is offering “Climate Change: A Way Forward,” a workshop put together by the Northwest Earth Institute, on four Thursdays in January, beginning next Thursday, from 4:30 to 6 p.m. The course will include readings of essays by Elizabeth Kolbert, Michael Pollan, and Bill McKibben, aimed at stimulating a discussion of climate change.

    The Northwest Earth Institute, based in Portland, Ore., develops programs designed to motivate individuals and organizations to take action toward a sustainable future. Space is limited, and Canio’s can be called for the required preregistration. There is a materials fee of $25.

    Actors take note: Center Stage at the Southampton Cultural Center will hold open auditions for Tracy Letts’s “August: Osage County” on Jan. 18 at 3 p.m. and Jan. 19 at 5 p.m. at the center. Winner of five Tony Awards, including best play, “August: Osage County” takes place in the Oklahoma home of Beverly Weston, a 69-year-old alcoholic and former poet who has disappeared, and his wife, Violet, a manipulative alcoholic and addict.

    The couple’s three daughters and their companions return home for what turns out to be three weeks of dysfunctional family dynamics. Twelve roles, including Beverly, Violet, and two of the daughters, are available. Auditions will involve readings from the script. Performances will begin in March. More information is available at southamptonculturalcenter.org.

    Center Stage at Southampton Cultural Center is premiering “Sex: What She’s Really Thinking,” a new play by Ilene Beckerman, next Thursday at the Levitas Center for the Arts. Conceived by Ms. Beckerman with Michael Disher, director of Center Stage, the play presents the unspoken thoughts of women — and men — about sex, in a fast-paced series of monologues and sketches.

    Performances will take place on Thursdays at 7:30 p.m., Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m., and Sunday afternoons at 2:30. Tickets are $22, $12 for students under 21 with ID. Group rates are available; reservations have been encouraged. The play will run through Jan. 26.

    The Hampton Theatre Company in Quogue is also opening a new production next Thursday. “Heroes,” translated from the French and adapted by Tom Stoppard from “The Wind in the Poplars” by Gerald Sibleyras, is set in France in 1959 in an old soldiers’ home, where three World War I veterans fantasize about regaining their freedom, despite their age and limitations.

    The production, which runs through Jan. 26, stars Tom Gustin, George Loizides, and Cyrus Newitt, and is directed by Andrew Botsford. Showtimes are Thursdays and Fridays at 7 p.m., Saturday evenings at 8, and Sundays at 2:30 p.m. Tickets are $25, $23 for senior citizens, except Saturday, and $10 for students under 21.

    This year has been a busy one for Joan Semmel. She had a solo exhibition at the Bronx Museum of the Arts in the spring, solo shows at both Alexander Gray Associates, her New York dealer, and Art Basel, exhibited at Frieze New York, and now has two paintings at the Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum in Bremen, Germany, in the group exhibition “Sie. Selbst. Nackt.” The title, which translates as “She. Herself. Naked,” could be applied to much of Ms. Semmel’s career as a painter.

    For more than 40 years, Ms. Semmel has chosen as her subject the “normal,” rather than idealized, human body, and offered a radical departure from the traditional self-portrait as a complete image of the person painting it. Her paintings also posit an alternative to what Laura Mulvey, a feminist critic, called the “male gaze.”

    John Berger, an art critic and novelist, wrote in his influential 1972 book “Ways of Seeing”: “According to usage and conventions which are at last being questioned . . . men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. . . . Women are depicted in a different way to men, because the ‘ideal’ spectator is always assumed to be male.”

    As if in direct response, Ms. Semmel has written, “I have tried to find a contemporary language in which I could retain my delight in the sensuality and pleasure of painting, and still confront the particulars of my own personal experience as a woman. My intention has been to subvert the tradition of the passive female nude. The issues of the body from desire to aging, as well as those of identity and cultural imprinting, have been at the core of my concerns.”

    “I feel as if I’ve had several lives,” Ms. Semmel said during a recent conversation at her SoHo loft. She was born and raised in the Bronx in a working-class household where art and culture played no role. “The turning point was when one of my public school art teachers told my mother I was talented and that she should encourage that. So my parents sent me to the High School of Music and Art. For the first time I was exposed to people of all races and backgrounds, and it was there I first began to think seriously about being an artist.”

    After high school she went to Cooper Union, where she met her husband. “We lived for a short time in Queens. We really didn’t like suburban life, but Manhattan was prohibitively expensive. So to get out of the suburbs we went to Madrid,” where her husband had secured a job. Their plan was to stay for a year, but they remained for eight.

    “Madrid was a completely different experience — a rebirth,” Ms. Semmel recalled. “I became friends with many Spanish artists. The art community was smaller than in New York, and easier to enter. I was an abstract painter at the time, and I developed an entire career in Spain.” She had many gallery shows in Madrid and traveled to South America, where she exhibited in Buenos Aires and Montevideo, Uruguay.

    Her experience in Spain had a big impact on her. “I became a feminist there. I came to understand the difference between being male and female in the art world. A woman at that time in Spain couldn’t sign a lease on an apartment or take her children out of the country without her husband’s permission. You could have a bank account, but your husband could take money from it. So when I came back, I was primed. I didn’t need to have my consciousness raised, it was already there.”

    Ms. Semmel returned to New York in 1970. “I had to come back since I wanted a divorce, and I couldn’t get one in Spain. It was tough. I had no money, two kids, and 35 really big paintings.” Within a year she found the Spring Street loft where she still lives. “SoHo was marvelous then. My real life began when I came back to New York.”

    She became part of a loose collective of female artists called Fight Censorship, which also included Louise Bourgeois, Anita Steckel, and Hannah Wilke. The first paintings she produced in New York were figurative portraits of couples having sex while she sketched them. The resulting paintings retained the gestural and painterly qualities of her earlier abstract work.

    After completing that series, which was derived from the “action drawings” she made of her subjects, she decided she needed better information to get the impact she wanted, so she began taking photographs. The photographs were black and white, the resulting paintings were more hard-edged and less gestural than those of the first series, but the colors were abstract.

    Galleries were reluctant to show the work from the erotic series. “My work wasn’t pornography, but was really a critique of pornography. I wanted to deal with the body and desire and sexuality without the kind of fetishism and power relationships usually represented in pornography. I was interested in getting into the public space a woman’s idea of what was sexually interesting.”

    From 1974 to 1979 Ms. Semmel produced what she calls the “self images,” which encapsulate many of the ideas that have informed her work since then. Rather than creating self-portraits from her image in a mirror, she photographed her body from the vantage point of her own eyes.

    The resulting images, while realistically painted, are radically foreshortened landscapes of male and female bodies that are at once recognizable but disorienting, in part because the camera does not compensate for perspective the way the brain does. “When I did that kind of image, it was very abstract,” said Ms. Semmel. “I thought of them as abstractions. I was a terrible photographer, but I used the mistakes.”

    Since 1979, Ms. Semmel has produced more than a dozen separate series of paintings, most of which, while moving back and forth between greater expressionism and greater realism, focus on some aspect of the human body. In 1986 she began a series of men and women working out in gymnasiums. “The mirrors were fascinating. They were a metaphor for the narcissism in the room, but they also allowed me to photograph people indirectly. Since I wasn’t pointing the camera at them, they weren’t posing.”

    “Once people got used to seeing me with a camera, I began to shoot in the women’s locker room — always with the subjects’ permission. That was when I started appearing in my paintings with the camera. I wanted it to be clear you’re seeing an image of me in a mirror. It’s flat, reversed — neither the painting nor the photograph is ‘reality.’ ” This led to “With Camera,” a series of paintings of Ms. Semmel photographing herself in a mirror from different, often awkward, perspectives. She also created several series that involve “echoing” or “shifting” images, which portray the artist in multiple positions, fragmented and in motion.

    Ms. Semmel has been coming to East Hampton since 1971, renting a different place each summer, usually in Springs. “I decided I wanted to buy a house, but each time I thought I had enough for a down payment, prices had risen beyond my means. I finally put down a deposit on my house in 1987.” She paused and laughed. “Then the market crashed.” But she proceeded, and later added a studio to her house in Springs, where she spends every summer with John Hardy, who is also a painter.

    A Google search of “athletics in India” reveals the not surprising fact that cricket is the most popular sport in the country. Chess, hockey, soccer, and tennis are also widespread. On Wikipedia’s “Sports in India” page, one must scroll past 26 other pastimes before arriving at baseball. Curiosity is naturally piqued by the knowledge that Mirra Bank’s new documentary film, “The Only Real Game,” is not only about baseball in India, but about the sport’s popularity in Manipur, a remote, isolated state on the Burmese border that is virtually closed to foreigners.

    By the end of “The Only Real Game,” Ms. Bank has fashioned a portrait of the past and present of a complex but little-known society and the engagement with baseball of a group of characters ranging from M.K. Binodini Devi, the octogenarian writer, cultural leader, and daughter of the last king of Manipur to Jeff Brueggemann and David Palese, envoy coaches for Major League Baseball who have led clinics throughout Asia.

    The through-line of the film follows closely the instructional clinics in which the American coaches teach the game and encourage the progress of already-skillful players as well as children and other novices. One of the coaches, Mr. Brueggermann, was a pitcher in the Minnesota Twins organization until an off-season injury ended his career. Each takes to Manipur both enthusiasm for, and knowledge of the game. For many of the Manipuri, baseball is an obsession. For the more talented players, it is a hoped-for way out of a troubled society.

    Interwoven with the clinic material are archival photographs and film footage that fill in the history of Manipur; background material about the efforts of First Pitch USA, which organized the clinics, to develop a complex of playing fields there; conversations with community members about their lives, ambitions, and feelings about their country, and footage of life in Manipur, itself ranging from scenes of daily life — bathing, cooking, weaving, the market — to images of the omnipresent soldiers, visible evidence of 50 years of martial law.

    Manipur has a long history of independence and is renowned for its performers and athletes. It is the birthplace of polo, and its warrior culture has produced five forms of martial arts. After the country came under British rule in 1891, a rebellion was crushed and the royal palace destroyed by British troops. Manipur became part of India in 1949.

    Separatist groups arose as a result, and today there are some 30 armed insurgent militias and a visible militarization of the country. Scenes of violence captured by the film crew as well as testimony by Manipuri create a portrait of a violent, fractured society, to which the stately movement of cows throughout the city and the enthusiasm of players on the ball field provide stark contrast.

    The viewer learns that Manipur was a staging area for American troops during World War II for supply flights over the Himalayas, and archival film shows the G.I.s playing baseball, which two veterans recall was their primary release from the stress of those missions. The games, which were attended by the local community, are most likely the source of the region’s obsession with baseball. 

    The story of baseball and Manipur is a complicated one. Mirra Bank and her crew obviously earned the trust of the community. The uplifting baseball scenes and the reflections of the players on their love of the game and hopes for a future in it are offset by the failure of some of those dreams to materialize. The film engages the viewer, and twines his or her emotions with those of the Manipuri, so that one emerges from it inspired by the spirit of both the players and the coaches, but saddened by the overwhelming obstacles in their paths. Ms. Bank has woven an artful tapestry of a faraway culture and thereby breached the distance between it and the audience. The Manipuri become familiar, and their spirit and determination are unforgettable.

    “The Only Real Game” was shown at the Hamptons Take 2 Film Festival earlier this month. Information about future screenings can be found on the website onlyrealgamemovie.com.