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Dog Days Arts Calendar

Photo by Carol Rosegg

NYC Now Playing

Photo by Carol Rosegg

Under the pen name “Samuel Shem,” Dr. Stephen Bergman has been working as a writer for 30 years. A former playwright-in-residence at the Boston Shakespeare Company, Bergman has been featured in two Best Short Plays anthologies and has written three novels. His wife, Janet Surrey, is an author and clinical psychologist who has taught at Harvard Medical School. Together, the couple has written the highly acclaimed new play, Bill W. and Dr. Bob, a Depression-era success story about the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous. After sold-out runs in Massachusetts, Ohio, and California, Bill W. and Dr. Bob has moved to New World Stages in New York, where it enjoys an open-ended run. (Stage 2, 340 West 50th St., 212-239-6200)

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Now Playing

Comedy writer Gregg Kavet says the most amazing part of his and co-writer Andy Robin’s years at Harvard in the late 1980s was that, despite the fact that they once faked a suicide, they never got kicked out. Instead, the Lampoon veterans managed to land jobs writing a dozen episodes of Seinfeld. In 1999, the duo began work on a screenplay about “two hapless guys in a tough New Hampshire town who convince themselves they’ve killed someone and run from the law based on this fake assumption.” Live Free or Die, which picked up top film festival prizes in Austin and Seattle in 2006, is now running in select theaters. The DVD is due out early this summer. For more information, visit www.livefreemovie.com.

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NYC Through June 17

Janet Echelman’s passion for “sculptural intervention” is demonstrated by her 20-ton, suspended steel-rimmed circle in Porto, Portugal; and by the forthcoming “Hoboken Island” in the Hudson River, a September 11 memorial co-designed with architect Jeanne Gang and other members of the FLOW Group for the city of Hoboken, N.J. The versatile artist, who also paints, was awarded commissions to construct two separate pieces for the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympic Games as well. One of Echelman’s current installations, The Expanding Club, is on display at the Radical Lace & Subversive Knitting show at the Museum of Arts & Design in New York. Through June 17. (40 West 53rd St., 212-956-3535)

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LEIPZIG Through June 23

For her first solo exhibition, in Leipzig, Germany, Brooklyn-based artist Jane Fine will show 10 new paintings on wood panels from her Skirmish series, a title that denotes armed military conflict as well as artistic struggle. Fine’s work has been described as “Saving Private Ryan crossed with a banana split, or reading Pentagon memos on wine and LSD,” by the New York Times. She says her recent paintings sit on the border between figuration and abstraction, with a dose of absurdity. For now, according to the artist, “abstraction has been granted a temporary victory.” Through June 23 at PIEROGI Leipzig. (Spinnereistrasse 7, Halle 10 PF 514, Leipzig, 49 0 341 241 90 80)

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LUCERNE August 23 & 25

Nine years ago, cellist Yo-Yo Ma founded a cross-cultural music exchange program called the Silk Road Project with a mission to promote the artistic accomplishments of Central Asian countries, nourish international community, preserve cultural traditions, and “resituate classical music within a broader global context.” Today, the Silk Road Project, and its affiliate the Silk Road Ensemble, is a flourishing cultural institution that has expanded into traveling concerts and long-term musician residency programs at Harvard and elsewhere. Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble perform this summer at the Lucerne Festival in Lucerne, Switzerland, August 23 and 25. (Hirschmattstrasse 13, P.O. Box CH-6002, Lucerne, 41 0 41 226 44 80)