Arts

Best Play Ever

    The Naked Stage will give a free staged reading of “The Best Play Ever . . . Seriously!” by Mike Anderson on Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. at Guild Hall. It tells the story of Harris Fynneman, the local mailman and fool, who finds himself the writer of the greatest play ever after a night of debauchery. In disbelief, he retraces his steps to discover how he stumbled upon his genius. Isaac Klein is the lead performer, joined by Meghan O’Neill and Ted Schneider.

   After eight childhood summers at her famous parents’ house in East Hampton, the Broadway lyricist Amanda Green went off to Camp Chimney Corners in Massachusetts, where she was homesick every single day.

    “I would write home and say, ‘Come get me!’ ” she said. “But after I was cast as Maria [in ‘West Side Story’], that was the last time they heard from me.”

While the new, state-of-the-art Parrish Art Museum building designed by an international architectural powerhouse firm is attracting much of the attention, what really stands out in the Water Mill museum is the art.

    Galleries across the South Fork will participate in a Thanksgiving Saturday Art Walk, a free self-guided tour of galleries from Amagansett to Southampton Village during the hours of 1 to 4 p.m. Guided tours led by South Fork artists will be available as well.

Handmade for Neoteric

    Neoteric Fine Art in Amagansett will open “Handmade” on Saturday. The show, which runs through Dec. 20, will be a holiday-themed exhibit of handmade artisan crafts and small works by local artists. The show emphasizes the personal human touch, according to Scott Bluedorn, the gallery director. Items will include jewelry, furniture, surfboards, home goods, designer objects, toys, trinkets, clothes, and other things small and large.

Marders Happenings

There is little if any dispute that the 1960s were a high-water mark for popular music. With the arrival of Bob Dylan and, in quick succession, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones to American ears, creativity exploded within the genre. No longer a collection of singles, the LP format became a sprawling canvas on which musical ideas within a song expanded dramatically, and individual songs could collectively form a larger theme.

PechaKucha Night

    Tomorrow at 6 p.m., the Parrish Art Museum will hold its first PechaKucha Hamptons event at the new location in Water Mill. The evening consists of presentations by 10 members of the East End creative community. They may be artists, musicians, writers, designers, architects, vintners, or other professionals.

    This year’s Black Film Festival, from the African American Museum of the East End, will take place on Saturday at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill from 12:30 p.m. until the evening.

    Five films will be screened. “Raising Izzie” is about two young girls who struggle to stay together on their own without their parents, and a couple who long for children. Directed by Roger M. Bobb, it will be shown at 12:30 p.m.

   Many people have been wondering what is going to happen to the space vacated by the Parrish Art Museum. A better question may be, what isn’t?

To the split mimosa, still standing, pink-tan bark fleshy in the odd after-shine.

To the man who answered the storm info number at 4 a.m.: Miss, you can sleep now.

To the women and men who lift branches from the roadside in dark, wave cars to detour

in fluorescent jackets, and those who leaning out of cranes — tap, pull, bend — work wires.

To the people who can’t get to jobs and to the King Kullen cashier who stowed a towel

in the car to shower at her friend’s. To postal workers sorting mail by kerosene lamp

Absence of the Body

    The Halsey Mckay Gallery in East Hampton will present “Habeas Corpus” beginning Saturday with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m. The exhibition will take the legal writ, which prevents unlawful detention, in its most literal sense — to produce the body. For the purposes of this show, however, it will subvert this right by removing the figure from these works.

Shevchenko to Perform

    The Southampton Cultural Center will present Margarita Shevchenko on Saturday at 7 p.m.

    Ms. Shevchenko, a Russian who lives in this country and a performer and coach at Pianofest, will be performing for a second time at the cultural center. The program will include works by Handel, Tchaikovsky, Scriabin, and Chopin. Ms. Shevchenko has won a number of international Chopin competitions.

Birds and Other Creatures

    Glenn Horowitz Bookseller will present “Billy Sullivan: Bird Drawings” and “Lucy Winton: Creatures,” beginning on Saturday with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m.

    At the same time, the rare-book dealer will showcase its publication of “BIRDS,” a limited-edition book with Mr. Sullivan’s drawings and an essay by the author Margaret Atwood, a highly regarded birder and conservationist.

   Overcoming years of planning and fund-raising hurdles, and despite recent storm-related issues, including a loss of power, that forced cancellation of its preview events, the new Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill will open its doors to the public on Saturday.

   The opening of the Parrish Art Museum’s new building in Water Mill on Saturday will include a multimedia concert of compositions by a young composer with local roots.

   Previews of “Murder Ballad,” a new rock musical about a love triangle gone horribly wrong, commenced on Tuesday at the newly re-launched Studio at Stage II at the Manhattan Theatre Club. Set in New York City, the show opens Nov. 15 and is scheduled to run through Dec. 2, and features a combination of traditional and cabaret-style seating, with the actors moving throughout the entire 150-seat space during the performance.

The Crucible’

    Beginning on Tuesday, the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor will present “The Crucible” as part of its Literature Live! series of plays taken from the core curriculum of American schools. The play, by Arthur Miller, will be staged for school groups on weekdays and for the public on weekends. A special matinee at 2 p.m. will be performed on Nov. 24 in addition to that evening’s closing performance.

    The 1952 play is about the Salem witch trials between 1692 and 1693 and is an allegory of the Communist “witch hunts” of Joseph McCarthy.

   Inda Eaton celebrated her newest CD, “Go West,” by doing just that on a road trip from New York City to Los Angeles with stops including Philadelphia, Phoenix, Boulder, Colo., and Casper, Wyo. After an “epic drive from Milwaukee in full trucker mode,” she arrived home in Amagansett last weekend in time to perform on Friday night at Guild Hall at the “Way Out East” show with Caroline Doctorow and Nancy Atlas.

“Trucker mode gets the job done at the expense of all rational thought and life training,” she said on her blog.

Facing the Portrait at Ross

    The Ross School gallery in East Hampton will exhibit contemporary portrait paintings in a show opening tomorrow with a reception from 4 to 6 p.m.

    “Face Off” will feature the work of Sydney Albertini, Jack Ceglic, John Hardy, Christa Maiwald, and Christina Schlesinger. The show was organized by students in Jennifer Cross’s museum studies class — Julian Fava, Rebecca Hamilton, Jeheli Odidi, Hongjie Zhu, and Sun Zhehai.

Guild Hall will revisit the much praised and beloved photography of Fritz Leddy on Saturday with the opening of “Fritz Leddy, Part 2,” a new selection from the more than 2,000 negatives the former East Hampton Village police chief left behind

Journey in Song

    A unique and powerful night out has been promised for tomorrow’s event subtitled “Journey in Song,” with Inda Eaton, Nancy Atlas, and Caroline Doctorow. The three local powerhouse female musicians will join together onstage at the John Drew Theater at Guild Hall. The ticket price is $20 for an evening of Americana, folk, country, and rock. All three are popular performers, “great songwriters, and fun people,” according to Ms. Eaton.

   The museum at Guild Hall is offering a bit of something for everyone this season with the opening of four shows in its various galleries.

    Those familiar with Linda Stein’s artwork might be surprised to find needles, thread, and fabrics lying around her TriBeCa and Northwest Woods studios. Ms. Stein, whose earlier works were often composed of such materials as driftwood, drawer knobs, and engraving plates, is now making what she calls “bullyproof” vests.

    On the one hand, the predominantly cotton vests stand in contrast to her earlier works; on the other, the transition is all too natural.

   “Inherit the Wind,” a play based on the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial and written in the 1950s in reaction to McCarthyism, has vital resonance for our own era, particularly on the eve of a national election. The tight and well-acted production by Michael Disher for Center Stage at the Southampton Cultural Center is well worth seeing, not only as a diversion but for its underlying message.

   To look behind the scenes of an event that you’ve come to look forward to, large or small, and find the efforts of one person holding it all together can be surprising. If, that is, it isn’t the new normal in this constrained age. Poetry Pairs at Guild Hall regularly brings top-flight readers here while adding a touch of the literary to that institution’s otherwise varied lineup. Thanks to Fran Castan.

    The series has essentially been her baby since 2007 — “to the point of exhaustion and no money,” she said, only half-kidding, over the weekend from her house in Springs.

Retreat Art Benefit

    A juried art exhibition benefiting the Retreat will open at the Richard Demato Fine Arts gallery in Sag Harbor on Saturday with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m. On view will be the work of 25 finalists chosen by Christina Strassfield and Kathryn Markel from more than 300 entries.

Watermill Center Events

    The seventh annual Artist Residency Program at the Watermill Center will begin with residency events tomorrow at 6:30 p.m. and Saturday at 5:30 p.m.

His Gramercy Park apartment comes complete with a northern exposure to the Empire State Building, but it’s not a view Richard Rutkowski enjoys often.

    Whether in Los Angeles, Chicago, New Orleans, Paris, Scotland, Japan, or even the house he inherited from his father in Water Mill, he has racked up a lion’s share of frequent-flier miles. As a director and cinematographer, husband, and father, the East Hampton native has had a vagabond existence for the past several years.

I suppose all of its legions of fans have their own favorites at Breadzilla in Wainscott. For me it’s the oatmeal sunflower-seed bread, just about the best loaf I’ve ever had. Whether it is lunch, dessert, or a loaf of bread, the high quality shines through.

    The same can be said for the garden, narrow strips alongside two of its walls and other beds in the front enclosing a circular lawn where customers relax and enjoy their treats. It may be small, but the garden packs a big punch, with wave following wave of gorgeous, saturated color all season long.