Arts

T.S. Eliot called April the cruelest month, but that was 15 years before the first of Guild Hall’s 79 Artist Members exhibitions, which, at least for the award winners, are anything but cruel. This year’s iteration, which will include works by more than 400 artists, will open on Saturday and continue through June 3.

Gabe McKinley’s drama “Extinction” — running now through April 16 at Guild Hall — sits firmly in the “Men Behaving Badly” genre.

Fifty years ago, Ron Jones, a young teacher in Palo Alto, Calif., devised an unusual project as an experiment for students in his sophomore high school history class. While it was mentioned only in the student newspaper at the time, it has since become the subject of a short story, a TV movie, a novelization, and a German feature film screened at Sundance, a musical, a documentary, and a full-length play.

Although Mario Cuomo famously said, “Campaign in poetry, govern in prose,” the reverse is more often true, especially in times of political upheaval, when stark divisions are exposed and disquieting questions about a nation’s character are raised. Throughout history, calamitous times often have us seeking solace — and wisdom — in verse.

Katherine Addleman, a classical pianist, will perform a concert of works by Franz Schubert at the Montauk Library on Sunday at 3:30 p.m. Schubert, who died in 1828 at the age of 31, bridged the gap between music’s classical and romantic periods. Known as an extremely prolific composer, he produced symphonies, chamber music, piano works, and art songs, many of which are regarded as masterpieces.

Ille Arts in Amagansett will open “Eleven Under Thirty,” a group show featuring young artists, with a reception Saturday from 5 to 8 p.m. “Bent,” a show of work by three artist-illustrators, will open at the White Room Gallery in Bridgehampton tomorrow and continue through April 23. A reception with live music by the Benders will take place Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m.

It started when Sawyer Spielberg was looking for a scene to perform in Lyle Kessler’s Master Class for Actors in New York City. One of his classmates, Brynne Kraynak, knew the playwright Gabe McKinley and had seen his play “Extinction” workshopped in graduate school. She thought one of the roles would be right for Mr. Spielberg.

The Parrish Art Museum will mark five years at its current site in Water Mill this fall, and is already in a celebratory frame of mind. The museum, designed by the Swiss architecture firm Herzog and de Meuron and completed in 2012, has launched a show looking back on 70 of the 300 works it has acquired since then.

“Je Christine,” a free solo performance by Suzanne Savoy about Christine de Pizan, a late-medieval literary figure who was born in Venice in 1364 and married a French nobleman at the age of 15, will take place tomorrow at 7:30 p.m. at the Montauk Library.

For art lovers who have never visited the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, the film “Van Gogh: A New Way of Seeing,” which will be shown at the Southampton Arts Center tomorrow at 8 p.m., is the next best thing.

Judith Leiber’s 65-year career will be examined in a retrospective of her work.

The Choral Society of the Hamptons gave its spring concert, “Across the Centuries,” to a large and grateful audience this past Sunday, the first Sunday of spring, at the East Hampton Presbyterian Church.

A writing workshop taught by Judson Merrill, one of Guild Hall’s five artists-in-residence, will take place on four consecutive Thursdays starting April 5 from 6 to 8 p.m. Titled “Writing Workshop Real Fiction: Writers, Readers, and the Battle Over Truth,” it will examine the ways fiction uses and abuses ideas of truth and authorship, experiment with those techniques, and discuss the creative and social benefits as well as the pitfalls.

“The Last Waltz,” Martin Scorsese’s film of the Band’s final concert in 1976, has immortalized that event. Among the musicians who performed were Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Eric Clapton, Muddy Waters, Neil Young, and many others.

The Southampton Cultural Center’s Rising Stars piano series will launch its spring season on Saturday evening at 6:30 with a “Petite Soirée Musicale.” The evening will include hors d’oeuvres, drinks, a silent auction, and performances by two acclaimed young pianists, Fei-Fei Dong and Tanya Gabrielian.

“Under the Influence,” an exhibition of artwork by four former docents at the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, will be on view at Ashawagh Hall in Springs on Saturday from 11 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. and Sunday from 11 till 2. A reception will take place Saturday from 5 to 7:30 p.m. The Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill will present “Don’t Blink: Robert Frank,” a documentary about the Swiss-born photographer whose work changed the course of 20th-century photography, tomorrow at 6 p.m.

A wealthy novelist husband. A hot-to-trot stepmother. A ne’er-do-well son. A loaded gun. What could possibly go wrong?

Compositions by Bruce Wolosoff, a composer from Shelter Island, will be performed at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in East Hampton on Saturday afternoon at 2 and at Symphony Space in Manhattan on Monday at 8 p.m.

“Confessions of a Subculturalist,” a spoken-word performance piece by the artist Michael Holman, will bring to life his personal experiences in New York City’s 1980s art and hip-hop scenes, at the Southampton Arts Center tomorrow at 7 p.m.

Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor will offer refuge from the bleakness of early spring this weekend with two nights of rock ’n’ roll, a new All Star Comedy Show, and a film from the vaults of the Hamptons International Film Festival.

A cooperative pop-up gallery at the Malia Mills swimsuit boutique on Main Street in East Hampton has energized the space, previously empty in the off-season, with art exhibitions and readings. Drama will be added to the mix on Saturday at 6:30 p.m. when Chloe Dirksen and J. Stephen Brantley perform a staged reading of “May 39th,” a 40-minute play by Callie Kimball.

Since she began taking photographs almost 40 years ago, Joanna McCarthy has exhibited her work widely, won numerous prizes and awards, and been published in many magazines. However, prior to that career, she led another life in front of the camera as a model with the Wilhelmina and Ford agencies and was photographed by such luminaries as Irving Penn, Hiro, and Saul Leiter. For a number of years, the two careers coincided.

The final program in the Madoo Conservancy’s lecture series “Madoo Talks: House and Garden” features Margie Ruddick, an award-winning landscape architect. Ms. Ruddick will offer a set of principles for a more creative and intuitive approach to landscape design that challenges the belief that natural processes cannot complement high-level landscape strategies.

The Met Live in HD will present “Idomeneo,” Mozart’s first operatic masterpiece, on Saturday at 1 p.m. at Guild Hall in East Hampton. Set in Crete after the Trojan War, the opera is at heart a romance between Ilia, princess of the recently defeated Troy, who is a captive in Crete, and Prince Idamante, her captor.

The Red Door Chamber Players will perform “Sailing the Mediterranean Sea,” a concert of music by Italian, French, Greek, Turkish, and Albanian composers, on Saturday at 8 p.m. at Sag Harbor’s Masonic Temple at 200 Main Street. The doors will open at 7 for wine and refreshments.

In the next installment of a concert series that has brought many world-class musicians to the South Fork, the audience will embark on a “Brazilian Voyage” when Nilson Matta, a Grammy-nominated bassist and composer, leads a trio by the same name at 7 p.m. Saturday at the Southampton Arts Center.

In Process @ the Watermill Center, a periodic invitation to the community to engage with its resident artists, will present a performance by Physical Plastic, a Los Angeles-based theater project of Kestrel Leah and Yiannis Christofides, on Saturday between 2 and 4 p.m.

“Community for the Retreat: A Night at Stephen Talkhouse” will bring G.E. Smith and Taylor Barton to the Amagansett club for an evening of rock ’n’ roll next Thursday at 7 p.m. D.J. Jack Luber will follow the live performance.

Bastienne Schmidt, the artist who organized the exhibition “A Sense of Place” at the Southampton Arts Center, will be joined by other artists from the show for a free talk and gallery tour on Sunday at 3 p.m. Guild Hall has set Sunday at 5 p.m. as the deadline for registration for this year’s Artists Members Exhibition. Walk-in registrations will not be accepted.

From “Wall Street” to “Boiler Room” to “The Big Short,” the world of finance, high and low, continues to provide an endless source of material for filmmakers. The realm of real estate seems neglected by comparison, with the exception of a few films, among them “99 Homes,” about greed at the low end of the market.