Center Stage at the Southampton Cultural Center will present the play “Motherhood OUT LOUD” from next Thursday through March 24 at its Levitas Center for the Arts. Michael Disher directs. The play entrusts the subject of motherhood to a collection of American writers who aim to shatter traditional notions about parenthood, unveil its inherent comedy, and celebrate the deeply personal truths that span and unite generations.

    “Motherhood OUT LOUD,” which premiered at Primary Stages, was conceived by Susan R. Rose and Joan Stein. It contains monologues written by Leslie Ayvazian, Brooke Berman, David Cale, Jessica Goldberg, Beth Henley, Claire LaZebnick, Lisa Loomer, Michele Lowe, Marco Pennette, Theresa Rebeck, Luanne Rice, Annie Weisman, and Cheryl L. West. The cast includes Dan Becker, Valerie J. DiLorenzo, Adam Fronc, Barbara Jo Howard, Kasia Klimiuk, Joan Lyons, Josephine Wallace, Edna Winston, and Susan Wojcik.

    Performances will take place on Thursdays at 7:30 p.m., Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m., and Sundays at 2:30 p.m. General admission is $22, $12 for students under 21 with ID. Group rates are available and reservations are encouraged. Tickets can be purchased by telephone at 287-4377 or online at scc-arts.org.

    Guild Hall will screen a new production of Wagner’s “Parsifal,” starring Jonas Kaufmann in the title role, presented by The Met: Live in HD, on Saturday beginning at noon. The opera is staged by the director François Girard in his Met debut.

    The cast of Wagnerians assembled for the meditative opera about sin, redemption, pain, and healing includes René Pape as Gurnemanz, the wise knight; Katarina Dalayman as Kundry, the wayward temptress; Peter Mattei as Amfortas, the wounded king, and Evgeny Nikitin as Klingsor, the evil wizard. Daniele Gatti conducts Wagner’s powerful and complex score. Eric Owens, a bass-baritone who played the Niebelung Alberich in the Met’s 2010 production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, hosts the transmission and conducts backstage interviews with the stars. The running time is approximately 330 minutes, including two intermissions.

    Tickets cost $22, $20 for members, and $15 for students. Those supporting Guild Hall’s screenings of The Met: Live in HD with a gift in addition to their Guild Hall ticket purchase have been invited to attend the Operatif series of talks by Victoria Bond, a composer and speaker. The 30-minute talk begins one hour before each opera screening.

Ille Returns to Line

    After a midwinter absence, Ille Arts in Amagansett will present “Working the Line,” an exhibition devoted to the role of line in composition and style, beginning Saturday with a reception from 5 to 7 p.m.

    Five artists are participating, with two, Denise Gale and Christa Maiwald, serving as curators. Joining them are Michael Chandler, Janet Goleas, and Claire Watson. All of the female artists live on the South Fork. Mr. Chandler is from New York City. The title of the show comes from a restaurant kitchen term, but also applies to the connection between all of the works. The show will remain on view through April 11.

New at Neoteric

    “A Varied Form,” organized by Breahna Arnold, will be the next show at Neoteric Fine Art in Amagansett. The show is conceived as a “celebration of the human form,” with a selection of figurative paintings in various styles of realism and abstraction.

    Nick Weber, Molly Weiss, Ivan Kustura, Anita Kusick, and Ms. Arnold are the artists participating. The show will open on Saturday with a reception from 6 to 9 p.m. and feature life drawing with Dori Elliot. The art will extend to the food and drink, with creative takes on both by Faunette Arnold. Julian Pascual will perform music. The show will remain on view through March 23.

Alliance Takes Ashawagh

    The Artists Alliance of East Hampton will present the art of more than 30 participating members at its spring art exhibit at Ashawagh Hall in Springs. Opening tomorrow with a reception on Saturday from 5 to 8 p.m., the show will remain on view through Sunday. Each artist will show one artwork. The mediums include painting, sculpture, mixed-media art, drawing, and photography.

Photographers Meeting

    The East End Photographers will hold a group meeting on Sunday in Cooper Hall at the Rogers Memorial Library in Southampton from 2 to 3:30 p.m. Dave Burns will present images from his African safaris and tours.

   Reductive yet expansive, abstract yet universally real, and with seemingly infinite possibilities, the unique tapestries of 3.25-by-4.25-inch Polaroid prints John Messinger has been making for the past year should, one might think, keep him occupied for many more to come.

    With a Watermill Center residency just recently behind him, however, Mr. Messinger is ready for his next act. He will continue to work in this format, but the project currently occupying him is a book, “The Estate of Joseph A. Porter,” to be published by Harper’s Books this year.

    Joseph Porter, a New York City homeless man, was the subject of Mr. Messinger’s master’s thesis at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. The pair spent two years together, sharing not only lives but creative visions, he said in his East Hampton studio recently. “I gave him a camera to use, I shared my journal entries; he shared his entries. We blurred the lines between observer and subject and fact and fiction.”

    At one point, Mr. Porter pitched a tent on Mr. Messinger’s lawn in East Hampton. Eventually, though, he ceased all communication and withdrew his support for the photo-documentary project. Still, the man without a home listed the documentarian as his next of kin on an intake form at a city shelter, and when he died, Mr. Messinger inherited what there was of his estate: two undeveloped rolls of film, his diaries, and the objects he carried around with him.

    The book will “make a portrait of this man,” seen through the eyes of Mr. Messinger as a curator of his life.

    “I think all documentary work is on some level a self-portrait of the docmentarian,” Mr. Messinger said. He draws his influence in this, he said, from artists such as Walid Raad and Sophie Calle, who meld constructed histories into a documentary format to question the perception of truth.

    “Historically, we look at a camera as an object by which we render reality. It’s led to a lot of mythologies and idyllic ways of thinking about what a camera is and what it is capable of,” he said. Only recently, with the advent of Photoshop and other photo-editing programs, has the realization that photographs are capable of lying taken hold. “On some level, though, cameras have always lied,” said Mr. Messinger. “There’s a selective curation of reality . . . we always ignore the presence and ideas and ideologies of the person behind the camera, and I find that fascinating.”

    Mr. Messinger is no stranger to romantic notions about photography. He has been actively involved with cameras since he was 9 years old and his godmother, who came to live with his family, put a darkroom in the basement and gave him one. He had always been artistically inclined by nature, but with other mediums he “found it terribly frustrating not to recreate what was in my mind’s eye. Photography was such a revelation. I knew it was what I wanted to do.”

    Thinking he might one day work for National Geographic, Mr. Messinger, who teaches at the Ross School now, enrolled as a Ross student to concentrate on photography. He went on to earn a degree in photojournalism from Boston University and a master’s of fine arts at the School of Visual Arts.

    He has been working with the Polaroid tapestry structure for the past year. It started with a cross-country trip in a borrowed van and grew and deepened from there. The format worked within the close confines of the van. “I slept on a big bed in the back of the van,” he explained. “The Polaroids can’t be placed on top of each other while they’re drying. It takes time for the emulsion to set, so I would lay them out on the back of the bed.”

    Seeing the photos laid out that way gave him the spark to connect them. It also limited the size of those early works to the size of the bed.

    His goal for the trip was to find, see, and capture sites of historical or natural significance. He went to Spring Green, Wisc., where Frank Lloyd Wright had a hand in the local architecture; Angel’s Landing in Utah, a natural rock formation captured frequently in the discovery of the American West; the Ninth Ward of New Orleans, and Detroit, a mecca for photographers looking for the abject and decrepit in the landscape, a trend some have taken to calling “ruin porn.”

    The initial series has been popular, but Mr. Messinger began to think that the critical eye he was taking to the project and the themes he was examining — “the ubiquity of the photograph and the proliferation of digital images in the digital age” as well as “the imperialistic male-centric dominance of the West”— were starting to get lost.

    Citing Don DeLillo’s “White Noise” and its examination of the self-perpetuating aura of “the most photographed barn in America,” the artist said he began to feel that he was photographing the most photographed barn in America and “perpetuating the very thing I was exploring.”

    Arriving at the Watermill Center and surrounded by new and alien objects and surroundings, he said the one connection he still had to the outside world was his iPhone. “I started photographing my computer screen for the first time.” It was the key to a deeper examination of “our relationship with technology and images in the digital age,” he said. The series he created there is called “Facebook Makes Us Lonely.”

    “I’m not being professorial or wagging my finger at anyone,” said Mr. Messinger. “I’m not above it myself. In fact, I’m exploring things that define my day-to-day.” He found computer monitors fitting as subject matter because they connect people. “That’s sad to me on some level, another kind of ruin.”

    In this digitized context, his Polaroid images can also be registered as pixels, which are also square in shape. The things he chose to photograph on the monitors allowed him to broaden the theme, such as screen savers, his own Facebook profile picture, and the precise color used to make a “green screen,” what filmmakers use to animate live-action movies, “a blank space in which you can fill in your own reality.”

    For his 16-foot-wide tapestry, “I went into Photoshop and keyed in the code for the color of a green screen and photographed it 400 times.” The color variation comes from distance from the screen and the light conditions in the room at the different times it was photographed. It was a way of reintroducing the human element into a process that is otherwise coolly mechanical.

    For Mr. Messinger, Facebook is related to a similar overall concept. He calls his self-portrait “Echo and Narcissus in the Digital Age.” “It’s interesting to me how we co-exist with a virtual identity,” he said. “Facebook is a hall of vanity mirrors and we all fall guilty to it. Our relationship to our virtual personality is as delusional as our relationship to ourselves.”

    Furthering these concepts, the screen savers in “While We Were Sleeping” and other works give machines the human quality of sleep, while also serving as a nightlight for adulthood as one drifts off staring at them. “At the same time, they suggest that what we see on those screens in our waking hours may change our perception of reality” in our unconscious hours, said the artist.

    These explorations allowed him to interact with his initial themes in a way that truly fulfilled his original intent. “Bob said, ‘If you run into blocks here, they’re your blocks,’ ” said Mr. Messinger, speaking of Robert Wilson, the founder and artistic director of the Watermill Center. Conversely, “ ‘If you get to a good place, you’re bringing that as well.’ I ended up completely agreeing with him.”

    Mr. Messenger's work can be seen at Eric Firestone Gallery in East Hampton or on his Web site johnmessinger.com.

   When artistic talent is just a footnote in someone’s life, strange and extraordinary things can happen. When someone’s life is already legendary, the effect can be exponential.

    Such is the case with Gerald Murphy and the chain of events that led the United States Postal Service to choose his work as one of 12 “forever” stamps commemorating early modernism in American art. Its selections put Murphy in the company of such titans of the period as Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Stella, Arthur Dove, and Stuart Davis. The stamps will be released next Thursday and will be available online and in post offices nationwide.

    Susan McGowan, the director of Stamp Services and Corporate Licensing, said the “original goal of the Modern Art Comes to America stamp issuance was to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Armory Show. . . . After consultation with our art history experts, we chose to showcase notable American modernists working between 1913 and 1931.” Ultimately, the works that looked best “within the exacting confines of the stamp format” were chosen. “Not every work of art adapts to the miniature dimensions of the stamp ‘canvas,’ ” Ms. McGowan said.

    Although they met in East Hampton and it remained the one constant address of their lives, Murphy and his wife, Sara Wiborg Murphy, actually became famous for being one of the first and most central American couples in France after World War I. Their years as expatriates were documented in “Living Well Is the Best Revenge,” Calvin Tom­kins’s book from 1971, and liberally fictionalized by F. Scott Fitzgerald in “Tender Is the Night.”

    The Murphys knew everyone who was anyone in France at the time and formed lasting friendships with the Fitzgeralds, Ernest Hemingway and a couple of his wives, John Dos Passos, Cole Porter, Pablo Picasso, Fernand Leger, and a host of other literary, artistic, and musical sensations of the early 20th century.

    Murphy was also a bit of an artist himself — “a bit” in the literal sense, because the actual years he painted, seven in all, according to Mr. Tomkins, produced only a few works, thought to be as little as eight at one point and now estimated to be as many as 14. He was painstaking and precise in devising a style that prefigured the illustrative realism of Pop, sometimes using a brush with only one camel hair to get the details just right. His friendships with the artists were instructive, but also intimidating, according to several accounts.

    Until a show in Dallas in 1960 and through 1974, when an exhibition organized by William Rubin at the Museum of Modern Art brought attention to his compositions, Murphy’s forays into painting were mostly forgotten.

    Laura Donnelly, Murphy’s granddaughter and the food editor of The East Hampton Star, recalled this week that his reaction to the 1960 Dallas Museum of Art show was characteristic. “He was self-deprecating about it, the way he was about everything, but he took it seriously.” Given his reputation as a dandy, she said his response was somewhat predictable: “It seems that I’ve been discovered. I wonder, what does one wear?”

    He was known to say to his friends that he was not a first-rate painter, and one of his paintings was found rolled up in his garage in East Hampton, surrounded by the broken bits of his tool collection. Still, Ms. Donnelly said he was serious about his work, and she believes the stamp selection would have made him very happy.

    In the years since the 1974 show there have been further reassessments and more exhibitions. It started with Mr. Rubin, who said at the opening of the MoMA show that Murphy was one of the few “really major painters of the 20th century,” according to Ms. Donnelly’s father, William Donnelly, who wrote the introduction to “Sara & Gerald,” the book by Ms. Donnelly’s mother, Honoria Murphy Donnelly.

    William Agee, a professor of art history at Hunter College in New York City and the author of a 1985 Arts magazine article on Murphy that he said was indicative of his “respect and admiration for his work,” said last week that the news of Murphy’s inclusion in the stamp issue showed how his reputation has continued to rise in the last decades.

    A show organized by Williams College in 2007, which traveled to Yale University and the Dallas Museum of Art, was also pivotal in bringing Murphy’s work back to the attention of the art world. The show placed the work in the company of pieces by Picasso, Leger, and other contemporaries in France, and critics found that it measured up to the international modern masters just fine.

    In his review of the Williams show, Peter Schjeldahl of The New Yorker said, “Usually, I’m unbeguiled by the rich and glamorous, and I attended ‘Making It New’ in a resisting mood. Then I looked. Gerald’s paintings are a gold standard that backs, with creative integrity, the paper money of the couple’s legend. . . . If one of the lost paintings, ‘Boatdeck’ — a sensation at the 1924 Salon des Independants, in Paris — had survived, it surely would be an icon of modernism.”

    Although Ms. Donnelly has not heard from the Postal Service about whether there will be any event associated with the stamp’s release, she took part in an informal one this month with some of the writers who have focused on her grandparents in recent years, such as Amanda Vaill and Deborah Rothschild, at Bemelmans Bar in New York City. Ms. Donnelly said it should have been at the Algonquin, given her grandparents’ long association with New Yorker writers such as Mr. Tomkins and Dorothy Parker, who, when they both lived in the Hotel Volney on the Upper East Side, watched over Sara Murphy and vice versa after Gerald died in 1964.

    When she was growing up, Ms. Donnelly remembered, she spent time with her grandfather in East Hampton, where he would read his grandchildren Edward Gorey cartoons as bedtime stories and take them to Shelter Island to find haunted houses, making deviled eggs for a picnic and calling them “ghost eggs.”

    In “Sara & Gerald,” Mr. Donnelly mentioned Jeffrey Potter’s recollection of Murphy’s “dancing with his golden granddaughter alone with a delight and pride in his expression” at an East Hampton fair when she was very young. Murphy died when Ms. Donnelly was in the fourth grade.

    In “Living Well Is the Best Revenge,” Mr. Tomkins recalled the more glamorous aspects of the Murphys’ time in France, which lasted for more than a decade. The couple moved there because they found America’s cultural and political conservatism during those years to be stifling. With radically new developments in painting, film, music, and literature, Europe was where the 20th century was actually happening, Mr. Tomkins wrote.

    After years in their house, Villa America, in Antibes, a Riviera town they helped make chic and famous, they left France for good in 1933, following the relapse of their son Patrick in his bout with tuberculosis, a disease he contracted in 1929 when he was 9 years old. He eventually died at age 16 in 1937, after his older brother, Baoth, succumbed to meningitis in 1935, also at age 16. The Murphys were heartbroken at the loss of their two sons, and the illnesses were the impetus for Gerald to stop painting.

    After France, Murphy went back to work at his family’s business, the Mark Cross Company in New York City, which was foundering after his father’s death in 1931. He brought the company back to profitability and remained there until his retirement 22 years later. Through a series of residences, the Murphy’s East Hampton property, culled from an estate that was at one time 600 acres, was a constant. The family’s divestiture of their land continued over time, and the one remaining cottage on the beachfront property, called the Pink House for the faded color of its walls, was sold last year and has since been torn down by the new owners.

    Ms. Donnelly said she remembers the Leger that hung at her grandparents’ house and first finding out about their famous friends in high school when she started reading 20th-century literature and learning about modern art. “My mother was reticent about speaking about that part of their lives, so it was a surprise.” She said her first thought upon hearing it was that she wanted to meet Picasso. It never happened, but she did get to know Parker from her visits to her grandmother until Parker’s death in 1967. Sara Murphy died in 1975.

   What’s in a face?

   The answer, one finds after a walk through the colorful, compact, but powerful exhibit at the Suffolk County Historical Society in Riverhead, is the ability to define one’s self-image, both as an individual and as a people. “Hidden and Forbidden: Art and Objects of Intolerance; Evolving Depictions of Blacks in America” will be on display through June 1.

    The objectification and dehumanizing of African-Americans by whites in post-Civil War America through imagery, toys, and everyday objects was a process that began after emancipation, according to David Byer-Tyre, the curator, who put the exhibit together with Kathryn M. Curran, the society’s director, and Georgette Grier-Key, a board member.

    “The slave owner had a vested interest that the slave would be healthy,” he said last Thursday. After investing the type of money required to buy a slave, he said, it was in the slave owner’s interest to protect his or her health and welfare.

    Once freed, though, the African-American masses became a threat to whites, both financially and spiritually, leading to the metamorphosis in the way blacks were viewed, both nationally and locally, the exhibit shows.

    Realistic images of Africans and African-Americans predating the Civil War greet a visitor upon entering the exhibit. There is a beautiful applique quilt dating from the 1840s that shows an African-American woman churning butter, and an oil portrait of a free black woman.

    Then the transition occurs, and suddenly, in post-emancipation America, African-Americans are seen in totemic images, sometimes ape-like, sometimes bird-like, with strange red lips and leering, rolling eyes. Thus began the objectification of a people, Mr. Byer-Tyre said.

    The toys in the exhibit, in a grouping titled “Jim Crow,” exemplify this.

    “The toy reveals something sinister,” Mr. Byer-Tyre said. An African-American child had limited choices as to what to play with. “If you were playing with a white doll, you’d be chastised by both races,” Mr. Byer-Tyre said, looking at the Little Black Sambo, Gollywog, and Jim Crow dolls in a shadowbox-type case. “None of them depict the child. The skin is extremely dark,” he pointed out. The figures and images all share an unnatural charcoal-black color, not reflective of the rainbow of skin tones in black America.

    The images, he said, were created in the North, particularly in New York, for consumption in the South and across America.

    All this, however, was not happening in a vacuum. Men like Richard Allen, a founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in the late-18th century, Frederick Douglass, publisher of the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator and the first African-American congressman following the Civil War, are celebrated in another illuminated case, followed by the more violent form of white oppression, the Ku Klux Klan.

    Counter to popular belief, the K.K.K. was alive and well on eastern Long Island, as the chilling garment, including hood, that are on display in another case along with a noosed rope, remind us.

    “We call the Ku Klux Klan homegrown terrorists,” Ms. Greir-Key said. On display along with the local K.K.K. outfit is an embosser that reads, “Women of the Ku Klux Klan, Riverhead, New York.”

    Ms. Curran recalled how the society acquired the piece.

    “When the embosser came in, it was handed to me by somebody who said, ‘The family said, “get this out of here!” ’ It was either the historical society or the Long Island Sound.”

    The K.K.K. outfit was left in a bag on the society’s doorstep. Ms. Grier-Key pointed out that the hood had extensive sweat stains, as well as repairs, all consistent with the garment being well used.

    She understands the guilt that such objects can engender, but is grateful the items were donated. “We are a historical society. We’re not here to edit history, we’re here to teach history,” she said.

    Also in the exhibit is a wall showing how corporate America embraced the racist Jim Crow image.

    “People become overly desensitized,” Ms. Grier-Key said. “As an African-American, you have no control over how these likenesses are used. What is odd about the advertising images is that the images have become icons, copyrighted. Aunt Jemima has seven different faces.”

    The American entertainment industry was happily on board, as well, with whites in blackface portraying African-Americans as buffoons, as shown by another section of the exhibit.

    The exhibit ends with the various images depicting the political struggle of black Americans, interwoven into a larger body politic.

    “Typically, white America looks at African-American history as being separate. To this day, when you provide a narrative, it is seen as a unique experience, as if whites don’t appropriate blackness on every level,” Mr. Byer-Tyre said.

    The overall layout of the exhibit was a collaboration between the three historians, based on the materials available.

    Many of the items shown are from private collections, including that of Mr. Byer-Tyre. “Why shouldn’t African Americans take control over things that were used to manipulate them?” he said of African-Americans collecting the toys and objects that were once used to demean blacks. Such objects, he said, act as a reminder of the danger of letting someone else control images of one’s self.

    Education and enlightenment were important objectives for the trio. “It teaches tolerance in a time when bullying is going on.” Ms. Grier-Key said, and offers “a teaching moment, to teach children that it is okay to look different. It is okay to be darker-skinned.”

    While working on the exhibit, Ms. Grier-Key and Ms. Curran went before the society’s board to warn them that there could be some negative reaction to it. They wanted the board to go forward with its eyes open. The board backed their efforts, and brought Mr. Byer-Tyre on board.

    Along with the antique items, a few modern works by black artists are sprinkled in as a juxtaposition.

    Reaction to the exhibit has been visceral, but overwhelmingly positive, although one viewer expressed dismay about it to Ms. Curran. “One African-American man came in and said, ‘This should not be negative. Black History Month should not be negative.’ ”

    Her response was simple. “This is history, it is not something we can change.”

    The historical society’s exhibition space is at 300 West Main Street in Riverhead.

An Early Spring

    Painters looking for an early spring might enjoy Lois Bender’s art classes at Bridge Gardens in Bridgehampton beginning in March.

    Spring Art Journeys: Sketching and Painting Nature from “skyscapes to flowerscapes” will be offered in four sessions, every other Saturday from 1 to 3 p.m. beginning March 2. The first class will be Watercolor: Warm-up Skills to learn the basic skills in grid-style exercises. The class will cover washes, brushstroke use, and color blending.

    Classes take place in an indoor studio at Bridge Gardens and each class costs $35. Information on following classes and registration is available at [email protected].  Participants may bring their own materials (a list will be e-mailed upon registration) or may purchase kits of essential starter supplies for $10 to $20 depending on materials.

Hampton Photo Arts

Is Overexposed

    Hampton Photo Arts and Framing will sponsor an exhibition of the work of more than 50 photographers at Ashawagh Hall this weekend.

    Organized by Laurie Barone-Schaefer, the show will open on Saturday with a reception from 5:30 to 11 p.m. with live music, cocktails, and food provided by Nutrition Dragon.

    Those participating include Peter Ngo, Gordon Grant, Michael Heller, Rosa Scott, Ellen Watson, and The Star’s own Carrie Ann Salvi.

    The show will also be open Sunday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Bach & Forth Forms

    Bach & Forth, a new chamber music ensemble featuring Thomas Bohlert on organ and piano and Trudy Craney, a soprano, both of East Hampton, will perform on Tuesday at 8 p.m. at St. Peter’s Lutheran Church in New York. The ensemble also includes Terry Keevil (oboe, English horn, duduk), Rebecca Perea (cello), and Linda DiMartino Wetherill (flute).

    Bach & Forth’s goal in formulating its concert format is to present the old and new in music, and everything in between. Although this concert will predominately feature performances of Baroque music, including arias and chorale preludes by J.S. Bach and a Telemann trio, it will also include Eugene Ysaye’s unaccompanied cello sonata, songs of Margaret Garwood, a contemporary American composer, and a composition by Mr. Keevil for the Armenian oboe, the duduk.

    Tickets, available at the door, cost $20, $15 for senior citizens, and $10 for students. Bach & Forth will perform a different program at St. Peter’s on May 14. The church is at 619 Lexington Avenue.

Neoteric Symposium II

    Neoteric Gallery will make its presentation of short talks by South Fork artists and kindred spirits a monthly event, starting with “Neoteric Symposium II” tomorrow from 8 to 10 p.m.

    Scott Bluedorn, the owner of the gallery and a speaker this month on worm farming, has modeled his series on the Parrish Art Museum’s popular PechaKucha events. The speakers will have 10 minutes and 10 slides to discuss their work and passions.

    Other speakers this time out will be Mark Crandall on “Hoops 4 Hope,” Denise Lassaw on “The Art and Life of Ibram Lassaw,” James Ryan on “Cymatics: Visible Sound,” and Serge LeComte on “The Philosophy of Logic.”

    Admission is $10 and refreshments will be served.

Bay Street Challenge

    The board of the Bay Street Theatre executive committee has issued a $100,000 challenge grant through March 15 for every dollar the theater raises from donations and subscriptions. Those who wish to support the theater will have their purchases and donations matched dollar for dollar through this grant.

    At the same time Bay Street Theatre will also begin what it is calling a “listening tour” to gain feedback from the community as to how its programming might better serve the community’s needs and interests. The theater plans to conduct these sessions over the next six months with locations to be announced.

Shakespeare Auditions

    The Roundtable Theatre Company and Academy will have several events in the next few weeks.

    It will hold auditions for its 2013 season on Monday from 4 to 8 p.m. Equity and non-Equity actors are encouraged to participate in the auditions for plays, musicals, and readings. Those interested should prepare both a Shakespearean monologue and a contemporary monologue. The time limit of three minutes will be strictly applied. Singers have been asked to prepare 32 bars in their key. The auditions will be held at LTV Studios in Wainscott.

    The group will also begin spring sessions of its Shakespeare acting class and Shakespeare reading workshop at Guild Hall. The acting class starts March 11 and will take place Mondays, 6 to 9 p.m., through April 29. The reading workshop begins March 6 on Tuesdays through April 24, 6 to 8 p.m. Registration can be made through Jennifer Brondo at Guild Hall.

‘Rebel Angels’ Rehearsal

    An open rehearsal for “Fall of the Rebel Angels,” an evening-long multimedia performance inspired by the work of the Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens, happens Saturday night from 6:30 to 8:30 at the Watermill Center. The piece, according to a press release, will employ dance, multichannel video projections, and prerecorded Baroque music mixed with contemporary electronic soundscapes in order to investigate visceral physicality, sensuality, and the spectacular.

    Rubens was one of the most important painters of the royal courts in Europe in the early 17th century. His portraits, landscapes, and history paintings of mythological, allegorical, and religious themes represent the height of the extravagant Baroque tradition. Ms. Galasso and her collaborators will reckon with and channel the emotionality of his works into movement, through a contemporary lens of guttural, animalistic physicality. The paintings, with their palpable sense of violence and sensuality, are the fodder for this abstract performance work, one that is far from the original topic in terms of recognition, yet embodies the core ideas.

    Ms. Galasso and collaborators will present a live-performance excerpt of “Fall of the Rebel Angels,” drawn from the material created during her residency at Watermill, as well as discuss the themes and process behind the project.

Play Rescheduled

    The inclement weather earlier this month has led to the rescheduling of “The Mistress of Monticello,” which was to have been performed on Feb. 8 and Feb. 9. The Southampton Cultural Center has moved performances to tomorrow and Saturday. The play was written and directed by Tina Andrews, who also wrote the miniseries “Sally Hemings: An American Scandal” for CBS.

    Tickets are $10 and $5 for students under 21 and are available at the door beginning 40 minutes before the start of the performance.

Latin Jazz at Parrish

    Richie Siegler, a percussionist and founding director of Escola de Samba BOOM, will bring the Richie Siegler Quartet to the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill tomorrow at 6 p.m. for an evening of Latin and Brazilian-influenced jazz. Joining Mr. Siegler are Max Feldcrest on vibes, John Ludlow on alto sax, and Jeff Koch on bass. Tickets are $10, free for Parrish members. Reservations via the museum’s Web site, parrishart.org, are strongly recommended.

    Mr. Siegler, who organizes the summer drumming sessions at Sagg Main Beach in Sagaponack, has been drumming since the age of 4, and was leading two bands working in and around his Greenwich Village neighborhood by the time he was 12. His longtime passion for Latin music led to his founding of Escola de Samba BOOM, a 50-member percussion group dedicated to the rhythms and joys of Brazilian samba.

‘Hansel and Gretel’

    The Stony Brook Opera will present a new chamber version of Engelbert Humperdinck’s opera “Hansel and Gretel” on Sunday at 2 p.m. at the Southampton Cultural Center’s Levitas Center for the Arts. The piece is scored for a chamber ensemble of flute, clarinet, horn, string quartet, and piano with a cast of six and a small children’s chorus, as in the opera. The opera will be sung in English translation, and there will be theatrical lighting and costumes.

    Tickets cost $20, $10 for students under 21 with ID, and $5 for children under 12. They are available online at scc-arts.org or at the door beginning 40 minutes before the performance.

More Opera

    In Celebration of the bicentennial birth dates of Wilhelm Richard Wagner and Guiseppi Verdi, Prentiss Dunn will introduce two operas at the Levitas Center — Wagner’s “Parsifal” on Saturday at 2 p.m. and Verdi’s “Don Carlos” on March 9, also at 2. Tickets cost $10 and are available at the door.

    “Parsifal,” Wagner’s last opera, is said to be among his greatest single works. This score, according to a release, contains some of the most sumptuous orchestral music of the 19th century as well as metaphysical and dramatic content gleaned from such diverse but mutually enriching sources as Buddhism, Christianity, paganism, and Shopenhauerianism.    

    The program will end with a discussion of possible psychological and spiritual interpretations of this work. Mr. Dunn’s lecture, using DVD excerpts from the James Levine Met production, as well as illustrations on piano, will focus on Wagner’s unique vocal and instrumental procedures, including how to recognize and benefit from his leitmotif system.

    “Don Carlos,” a late-period work considered by many opera lovers to be Verdi at the height of his powers, is based on an epic poem by Friedrich Schiller. A DVD of van Karajan’s Salzburg production will be shown on March 9.

‘Big Jim’ Seeks Investors

    Eric Salzman and Ned Jackson are seeking investors for “Big Jim and the Small-Time Investors,” an opera and music theater piece they are composing. Mr. Salzman and Mr. Jackson held a reading last spring at the Flea Theater in New York City and the work is scheduled for performance by the Center for Contemporary Opera next year. But they are short of funds, Mr. Salzman said.

    “Big Jim,” according to a press release, is about an L.A. con man, a kind of dot-com televangelist who is peddling a virtual reality scheme that purports to let its viewers imagine that their wildest fantasies have come true.

    Mr. Salzman and Mr. Jackson are trying to raise $12,000 to $15,000 to complete the composition, make the necessary revisions, orchestrate, and meet various other costs connected with printing, copying, and setting up auditions. They are working with U.S. Artists, a nonprofit organization that helps artists create or complete major projects, to raise some of the needed money. Information about making a donation to the project can be found at usaprojects.org/project/big_jim_the_small_time_investors.

Helen Keller Ballet

    Ann Reinking and Melissa Thodos, award-winning choreographers, are teaming with the composer Bruce Wolosoff, a South Fork local, to create “A Light in the Dark,” the story of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan. It is their second full-length contemporary story ballet, this one telling an intimate family story about the extraordinary woman who was deaf and blind yet went on to become a world-famous writer, political activist, and inspiration.

    Performances will be on March 2 at 8 p.m. and March 3 at 2 p.m. at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance in downtown Chicago.

King Speaks

    A rarely seen one-hour interview with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. will be screened tomorrow at 6 p.m. at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill. The film will be introduced by George Silano, the North Haven cinematographer who made it.

    King speaks about the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. Also featured is a conversation with his wife, Coretta Scott King. The film had never been screened publicly until its premiere on Jan. 28 at the Rogers Memorial Library in Southampton. Admission is free.

Music, American Style

    Eugenie Russo, a pianist, will give a concert, “Americana: Music by Copland, Bernstein, and Gershwin,” on Saturday at 7 p.m. at the Southampton Cultural Center. Ms. Russo is a former artist in residence for the State of Virginia and has toured as a representative of the U.S. State Department and Austrian Foreign Ministry. She has performed, recorded for television and radio, and taught master classes throughout Asia, Europe, and this country.

    She has taught piano at the Josef Matthias Hauer Conservatory in Austria since 1991 and is a professor at the Vienna International Pianists Summer Academy, as well as a jurist for piano competitions, such as the International Rosario Marciano Piano Competition. Tickets cost $15 and can be purchased at the door. A reception with the artist will follow.

Coming to Bay Street

    The Bay Street Theatre has announced that three plays have been chosen for its Mainstage season. “Lend Me a Tenor” by Ken Ludwig will run from May 28 to June 23, directed by Don Stephenson. “The Mystery of Irma Vep” by Charles Ludlum will be performed from July 2 to July 28, with Kenneth Elliott directing. From Aug. 6 to Sept. 1, it will be “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” directed by Marcia Milgrom Dodge, with book by Burt Shevelove and Larry Gelbart and music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim.

    “It’s going to be a summer full of laughs, that’s for sure,” Tracy Mitchell, the Sag Harbor theater’s executive director, said. “We know people in the Hamptons are here for a good time all summer, and we plan on delivering our share of fun.”

    “We think these shows are some of the best comedies written for the stage,” said Gary Hygom, Bay Street’s managing director for production, “and the musical ‘Forum’ is not only one of the greatest musical comedies, it also features the music and lyrics of Stephen Sondheim, with the signature song ‘Comedy Tonight!’ ”

    The 2013 Mainstage season program is partially funded by Suffolk County. Three-play subscriptions are available online at baystreet.org or by calling the box office Tuesday through Friday between 11 a.m. and 5 p.m.

Love and Passion

    This weekend, Karyn Mannix Contemporary will present the eighth iteration of the “Love and Passion” series of Valentine’s Day shows at Ashawagh Hall. The subtitle this year is “The Naughty Show,” with mature themes of an erotic nature from more than 70 artists.

    The exhibition will open Saturday afternoon at 1 and then have a reception that night from 5:30 to 8. Alfredo Merat will provide music, along with performances by the Neo-Political Cowgirls and Adam Baranello and the A&G Dance Company. The evening also features a 50-50 raffle to benefit the Springs Food Pantry.

    On Sunday, Teri Kennedy will host “The Wild Side,” a poetry-and-performance open microphone event that begins at 11:30 a.m. Maria Bacardi and Michelle Murphy are the featured poets.

Devil’s Workshop? Not!

    “Not the Devil’s Workshop: Women’s Hand Work, 1800-1930” will be the next show at the Southampton Historical Museum, opening on Saturday and running through April 27. Sheila Guidera, an antiques collector and the curator of the show, used the phrase “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop” as her inspiration.

    Her collection contains 19th-century mirrors decorated with paintings of landscapes and flowers — a popular handcraft at the time — as well as samplers, tatting, lace, and other unique objects and products of female needlework done in the downtime between preparing meals and other chores and raising a family on the South Fork.

    The show will coincide with National Women’s History Month in March. The opening will be held on Saturday from 2 to 4 p.m.