Arts

Why, you might reasonably ask, should you give space in your garden to a plant that is found all around us?

Fragrance, that is why, and summersweet, or sweet pepperbush, Clethra alnifolia, has it in abundance. It is spicy, somewhat reminiscent of cloves and cinnamon, and a light breeze casts its perfume over a large area.

Clethra would deserve space in the garden even if we spent our August days chasing its scent walking, biking, or tooling in an open car in Northwest, Springs, and Napeague, where it grows along the roadside, mostly on the damp, shady side.

Late summer on the South Fork can sometimes seem like a mostly deflated balloon: paunchy, flaccid, and spent. A sense of scraping bottom often takes hold, and any new endeavor, show, or exhibition is met with suspicion or derision, often borne of the same contagious exhaustion.

Sciulli at Duck Creek Farm

“Quiet Riot,” a site-specific installation by Christine Sciulli, will open today with a reception from 5 to 8 p.m. in the John Little Barn at Duck Creek Farm in Springs and remain on view through Sept. 20.

Ms. Sciulli, who lives in Amagansett and New York, uses projected light to explore the potential of simple geometry. The exhibition, which has been organized by the John Little Society and Jess Frost, will be open Fridays and Saturdays from 4 to 7 p.m. and by appointment.

Images of Accabonac

The Box Art Auction benefit for East End Hospice will present a preview of the cigar box creations of area artists beloved locally and internationally on Wednesday from 5 to 7 p.m. at Hoie Hall of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in East Hampton Village. The boxes will remain on view next Thursday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. The auction itself will be held Sept. 6 at the Ross School.

For more than a half century, a group of writers and artists have met in East Hampton to duke it out for supremacy on a softball diamond. Some of the most vaunted names in American arts and letters have participated, making it an almost sacred ritual in some circles.

Athos Zacharias’s house on Copeces Lane in Springs is unlike any other in the neighborhood. It is a two-story rectangular solid, constructed of whitewashed concrete block, flat-roofed, with large windows, an outdoor circular staircase, and an exterior block wall painted to resemble a Mondrian. The entrance is through the kitchen.

If a viewer did not know that Alisa Baremboym and Gregory Edwards were newlyweds, it would soon become obvious in seeing their show at the Fireplace Project in Springs. “Contact” is a dialogue between two artists whose lives and vision have become entwined, not literally but with enough feeling to create circuits and sparks throughout the gallery space.

The Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill will kick off the weekend tomorrow at 7 p.m. with its Maritime Film Festival, consisting of 14 short films, all under five minutes, that reflect filmmakers’ and artists’ appreciation of the sea.

Founded by Andrew Poneros, a sailor and artist, and Timothy Regan, it aims to explore the human legacy of life and expedition on the water and to create an arena for artists and filmmakers to share a deeper understanding of our relationship with the sea. Tickets are $10, free for members, students, and children.

 “Weimar Cabaret: When All the World Lost Its Reason,” a tribute to the songs and songwriters who flourished in Germany between World War I and the rise of Nazism, will take place at the Montauk Library Saturday at 7:30 p.m. Admission is free.

Bay Street Theater’s Comedy Club will feature Robert Klein, who has sold out the Sag Harbor venue several times over the years, on Monday at 8 p.m. A Grammy and Tony Award nominee, Mr. Klein is one of the most familiar faces in comedy, having performed on stage, screen, Broadway, and television for more than 40 years.

It has been another busy summer at the Stephen Talkhouse, the Amagansett bar and intimate live-music venue that has been hosting internationally recognized artists — onstage and in the audience — since 1987. This year, the venue has featured legendary performers including Taj Mahal, Southside Johnny, Buster Poindexter, the English Beat, David Bromberg, Leon Russell, Sonny Landreth, and, last night, Junior Brown.

If you can’t get enough Shakespeare and haven’t had enough of Propero so far this summer, “The Tempest” is being offered twice this weekend by the Bay Street Theater, although not at its home base. On Saturday, a free outdoor reading will take place at Mashashimuet Park in Sag Harbor. On Sunday, the actors will meet guests and present another reading of the play on Shelter Island. Both performances start at 7.

“The Tempest” also continues at the Mulford Farm in East Hampton, tonight through Aug. 24 at 7 p.m. It is a production of the Hamptons Independent Theater Festival.

“Last Days in Vietnam,” the third film in the Hamptons International Film Festival’s SummerDocs series, will be screened on Saturday at 7:30 p.m. at Guild Hall.

This final film from Rory Kennedy, whose intimate biography of her mother in the film “Ethel” was screened in the SummerDocs series two years ago.

Alec Baldwin will host the event and lead a discussion with Ms. Kennedy and Stuart Herrington, one of the subjects of the film.

New at Halsey Mckay

Halsey Mckay Gallery in East Hampton is presenting two concurrent exhibitions through Aug. 24. “Waterworks” features Karl Haendel and Adam Helms, both of whom transform pre-existing images from pop culture, news media, the Internet, and other sources, in this case, water-related subjects.

The string quartet Brooklyn Rider performed back-to-back hour-long concerts on Saturday, just about halfway through this summer’s Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival. One was, as usual, at the Bridgehampton Presbyterian Church, at 6 p.m., and, in a new partnership for the festival, the other was at 9 p.m. at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill.

“Songs and Stories,” a cross-genre performance series, will be launched by the Southampton Cultural Center on Saturday from 3 to 6 p.m. The ongoing initiative will pair writers, poets, musicians, dancers, visual artists, and other creative individuals in free performances presented simultaneously at different venues in Southampton.

Inspired by the art exhibition “Tactility,” Iktus Percussion will perform two pieces at the cultural center. Sebastian Noelle Jazz will explore chance and the unconscious at Arthur T. Kalaher Fine Art.

“ToasT,” a new play by the acclaimed spoken-word artist and Tony Award-winning writer Lemon Andersen and directed by Elise Thoron, will be given a staged reading at Guild Hall tonight at 8. A Public Theater commission first presented at the Public’s Under the Radar festival, “ToasT” weaves characters from black oral narratives into a drama about a group of inmates at Attica during the 1971 riots at the prison.

Lady Gaga is a musical artist with a strong visual sense who transforms herself regularly from public appearance to public appearance, record to record, video to video. Robert Wilson works with performers, composers, and writers to create highly visual, mostly musical productions.

While much was made of Gaga’s collaboration with Jeff Koons on the art work for her “Art Pop” album and the related art pieces, launch parties, and joint appearances, a more satisfying union has occurred with Mr. Wilson, the results of which are on view now at the Watermill Center.

Bob Marley, winner of this year’s XM/Sirius Super Bowl of Comedy, will appear at Bay Street Theater Monday at 8 p.m. as part of its Comedy Club series.

The Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill will present the East Coast theatrical premiere of “Remembering the Artist: Robert De Niro Sr.” tomorrow at 6 p.m. Terrie Sultan, director of the museum, will lead a Q & A with Geeta Gandbhir, the film’s director, after the screening. Tickets are $10, free for members, children, and students.

Anthony Bourdain, a chef and writer whose explorations of food and culture have formed the basis of several successful television series, will be at Guild Hall Sunday at 11 a.m. for a conversation with Florence Fabricant, a cookbook author and food columnist for The New York Times. A book signing will follow.

“Robert Motherwell: The East Hampton Years, 1944-1952” will open Saturday at Guild Hall and remain on view through Oct. 13. The exhibition will include 22 works from important private and public collections that illuminate a portion of Motherwell’s work that is not well known or often exhibited.

The Orchard, a Southampton estate designed by Stanford White, will be the subject of the second Samuel L. Parrish lecture, to be delivered by Gary Lawrance, an architect and co-author of “Houses of the Hamptons: 1880-1930,” next Thursday at 5 p.m. in the music room at Whitefield, 155 Hill Street.

Mr. Lawrance will discuss the evolution of the Orchard from an early Greek-revival farmhouse to the 16-acre estate built in 1895 for James L. Breese, a financier. Considered one of White’s finest summer homes, it is now the Whitefield Condominiums.

Take whatever musical comedy you recall and be ready to suspend disbelief when you go, as you should, to see “My Life Is a Musical,” which had its world premiere at the Bay Street Theater on Saturday night.

Adam Overett, who wrote the music, lyrics, and book, knows what’s been on stage and in film in the last few decades, and he draws upon that familiarity in a two-act tour de force, which is both satiric and sentimental with a bit of pop psychology, romance, and Marx Brothers mayhem. They’re ingredients for success.

Two little girls, seemingly about 6 and adorable in sheer white dresses and black slippers, lean against two trees on the lawn of the old Parsons Blacksmith Shop near Ashawagh Hall in Springs. An audience, limited to eight people, stands nearby. The girls start to play tag, join in a circle dance, and collapse onto a blanket, gazing at the sky, until one runs away, her friend chasing and calling after her.

“Summer Job” at Harper’s

“Summer Job,” an exhibition of recent work by Enoc Perez, will open Saturday at Harper’s Books in East Hampton and remain on view through Oct. 14.

The series, which includes collages, two sculptures, and a selection of repurposed three-dimensional objects, juxtaposes products of high and low culture and forms of high and low artistic media. Using found images, Mr. Perez investigates the changing nature of representation in the age of social media.

Humor, music, and fashion are on Guild Hall’s agenda this weekend. David Sedaris, an NPR humorist and best-selling author, will bring his trenchant wit and incisive social observations to the John Drew Theater Sunday evening at 8.

Arlene Slavin’s “Intersections” series, on view at Guild Hall through Oct. 13, consists of outdoor sculptures made up of interwoven, translucent, colored vinyl strips, and paintings whose bands of color make similar use of the grid and the diagonal. These new works, most of which were produced over the past two years, refer consciously to paintings Ms. Slavin was making during the early 1970s.

Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor will present Carlos Mencia on Monday at 8 p.m. as part of its Comedy Club series. A performance at an open mike night at the Laugh Factory in Los Angeles launched Mr. Mencia on the path to a successful stand-up career, a popular series called “Mind of Mencia” on Comedy Central, comedy specials on HBO and Comedy Central, and film and television appearances.

Last Thursday night, a storm brewed in Bridgehampton and threatened to spread east across the towns into the peaceful Village of East Hampton. This being late July, everything about the previous sentence is spurious. The weather was calm and East Hampton, peaceful? In July?

Still, there is no denying that “The Tempest,” that old play by William Shakespeare, will take over East Hampton, specifically Mulford Farm, from Wednesday to Aug. 24.