True crime

Scottish crime drama "The Hard Man" will have its U.S. premiere at Risley Theatre, Nov. 3-5 at 8 p.m. and Nov. 6 at 2 p.m. The play is directed by Cornell theater professor Bruce Levitt and features students from Cornell and Ithaca College.

Written by Tom McGrath and Jimmy Boyle and first staged in 1977, "The Hard Man" is a fictionalized account of Boyle's early life as Glasgow's most notorious gangster, combining elements of cabaret, burlesque, farce and drama. Main character Johnny Byrne begins as a petty thief, and the escalating role of violence in his business of money-lending eventually leads to his life imprisonment for murder.

Tickets are $15, available at Ticket Center of Ithaca, 607-273-4497, online and at the door.

Music for films

The Alloy Orchestra returns to Cornell Cinema Nov. 4-5 to perform their original scores for three programs of classic and obscure silent films. The trio (Roger C. Miller on synthesizer, Terry Donahue on junk percussion, accordion, saw and banjo, and Ken Winokur on junk percussion and clarinet) will accompany Russian director Dziga Vertov's Soviet avant-garde masterpiece "Man With a Movie Camera" (1929), Nov. 4 at 7:15 p.m., followed at 9 p.m. by a performance with "Wild and Weird," a program of 10 innovative short silent films made between 1906 and 1927.

The ensemble also accompanies "From Morn to Midnight," directed by Karl Heinz Martin, Nov. 5 at 7:30 p.m. The Alloy Orchestra accompanied the rediscovered and restored 1922 German Expressionist film at its U.S. premiere at the Telluride Film Festival and at a showing at the New York Film Festival in October.

Tickets for each show are $12, $9 for students and senior citizens, available at http://CornellCinemaTickets.com, Ithaca Guitar Works, the Cornell Cinema office in 104 Willard Straight Hall and at the door. A pass for all three shows is $32 general, $23 students and seniors. Co-sponsors include the Cornell Council for the Arts and the Departments of German Studies and Theatre, Film and Dance.

Planning Manhattan

Professor emeritus of city and regional planning John Reps, M.R.P. '47, will give a lecture Nov. 8 on how the plan for Manhattan's streets took shape. "How Gotham Got Its Grid: The Inside Story of Manhattan's City Plan" begins at 4:30 p.m. in Kaufmann Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall. Free and open to the public. The College of Architecture, Art and Planning will hold a reception celebrating Reps' 90th birthday following the lecture.

An urban planning historian and an authority on American urban iconography, Reps taught at Cornell from 1952 to 1987 and served as the first chair of the new Department of City and Regional Planning from 1952 to 1964.

He is the author of 14 books, including "The Making of Urban America" (1965, now in its third printing); "Cities of the American West: A History of Frontier Urban Planning" (1979, winner of the American Historical Association's Beveridge Award) and "John Caspar Wild: Painter and Printmaker of Nineteenth-Century Urban America" (2006). The American Planning Association named Reps a "planning pioneer" in 1996, citing him as the father of modern American city planning history.

Women and politics

Mary Beth Norton, the Donlon Alger Professor of History, will discuss her new book, "Separated by Their Sex: Women in Public and Private in the Colonial Atlantic World" (Cornell University Press, 2011), Nov. 8 at 4 p.m. in Olin Library's Amit Bhatia Libe Café. Free and open.

Norton's book shows how gender came to determine the right of access in Britain and America by the middle of the 18th century, tracing the profound shift in attitudes toward women's participation in public affairs, as cultural arbiters argued that women should confine themselves to home and family.

Norton will lead a question-and-answer session and sign books after the talk. Her other books include "Liberty's Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women," "In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692" and "Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society."

Organ recitals

The Department of Music will present Belgian organist Jean Ferrard in a solo recital, "Teachers and Pupils of the North German Baroque, from Sweelinck to Bach," Nov. 8 at 8 p.m. on the baroque organ in Anabel Taylor Chapel.

Ferrard was a featured soloist for "Keyboard Culture in 18-Century Berlin," the conference and festival held in March as inaugural events for Cornell's baroque organ.

Also, acting university organist and visiting lecturer Randall Harlow will perform a Midday Music for Organ program of virtuoso transcriptions in honor of Franz Liszt's 200th birthday, Nov. 9 at 12:30 p.m. in Sage Chapel. Both programs are free and open to the public.

Poet laureate

Gail Holst-Warhaft, the 2011 Tompkins county poet laureate, will read from her work at a Literary Luncheon, Nov. 16 at 11:30 a.m. at the Cayuga Heights residence of Professor Robin Davisson and President David Skorton.

Holst-Warhaft, Ph.D. '90, is director of Cornell's Mediterranean Studies Initiative and an adjunct professor of comparative literature and biological and environmental engineering.

A light lunch will be served at 11:30 a.m. The event is free and open to the first 25 people responding by Nov. 9 to special-events@cornell.edu.

'No Exit'

Jean-Paul Sartre's "No Exit," the existential tale of three people condemned to spend eternity together in a locked room, will be staged Nov. 10-12 and 17-19 at the Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts.

The Department of Theatre, Film and Dance production adds dance to the traditional storyline, with a cast of visiting professional actors and students. Director Juliana Kleist-Méndez '12, a College Scholar studying peace through theater, will lead discussions of the play with the audience after each performance, and a talkback with Kleist-Méndez and the cast will be held Thursday, Nov. 17.

Shows are in the Schwartz Center's Kiplinger Theatre, Nov. 10-12 and 17-19 at 7:30 p.m., with one matinee, Nov. 19 at 2 p.m. Tickets are $12, $10 for students and senior citizens, plus a $1 processing fee. Advance tickets are available 12:30-4 p.m. weekdays at the Schwartz Center box office, 430 College Ave.; by calling 607-254-ARTS; or at http://www.schwartztickets.com.

On creative amateurism

Medieval scholar Carolyn Dinshaw will present the 2011 Gottschalk Memorial Lecture, Nov. 10 at 4:30 p.m. in Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall. Free and open to the public.

Dinshaw teaches social and cultural analysis and English at New York University. Her talk, "Amateur Hour," will examine the boundary between highly trained literary scholars and amateur medievalists and explore the creative possibilities of amateurism. Dinshaw's publications include "Chaucer's Sexual Poetics" (1989) and "Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Post-Modern" (1999).

The lecture is paired with an introductory course, English 2010: The English Literary Tradition I, covering the historical beginnings of English literature through the middle of the 17th century. It is being taught this semester by associate professor of English Masha Raskolnikov, who has incorporated Dinshaw's work and the lecture into the course syllabus.

Dinshaw also will participate in the Gottschalk Graduate Symposium, a Nov. 11 panel discussion on queer amateurism and queer temporality.

The Gottschalk Memorial Lecture honors the late Paul Gottschalk, Cornell professor of English and author of "The Meanings of Hamlet" (1972). Information: http://www.arts.cornell.edu/english/news/events/.