The “dueling fiddles” alone might be worth the price of admission. As it is, they will be put to use accompanying Caroline Doctorow and her band, the Ballad Makers, as they perform tunes from “the American Songbook and other stories” on Saturday at 7:30 p.m. at the Bridgehampton Museum’s archives building on Montauk Highway. Mariann Megna, who sings and plays guitar, will join them. The cost is $20 at the door.

Ms. Doctorow lives in Bridgehampton. He latest album, “Dreaming in Vinyl,” made it to number two on the national folk radio chart.

The musical “Evita,” which will begin previews at Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor on Tuesday and open on Aug. 4, engages social and political issues that are as relevant today as they were in mid-20th-century Argentina.

“Eva Peron, a complicated woman who frankly uses her sexuality to gain power, is an interesting character to look at in light of the #MeToo movement,” said Scott Schwartz, the theater’s artistic director. “Peron was a populist leader, and it’s interesting to see his rise in the current climate, and how celebrity and politics mix in a very personal way.”

Like previous Bay Street musicals such as “Grey Gardens” and “My Fair Lady,” “Evita” posed a challenge for Will Pomerantz, director of the production: how to turn a large-scale Broadway show into a more intimate experience in a 299-seat thrust stage theater.

“The big idea is that the whole thing takes place in a tango bar in Buenos Aires,” said Mr. Pomerantz, who is also Bay Street’s associate artistic director. “The idea was to celebrate the intimacy of our space and focus on the characters and relationships and the psychology, things that can sometimes get lost in larger-scaled productions.”

With music by Andrew Lloyd Webber and lyrics and book by Tim Rice, “Evita” concentrates on the life of Eva Peron, the second wife of the Argentine president Juan Peron. The story follows her early life, rise to power, charity work, and eventual death.

“ ‘Evita’ has been on my list for a long time for Bay Street,” said Mr. Schwartz. “I love this show, I think it’s kind of a masterpiece. The score is just one hit after another, from ‘Don’t Cry for Me Argentina’ to ‘Rainbow High’ to ‘Another Suitcase in Another Hall.’ ”

Unlike the original play, which opens at Eva Peron’s funeral, the Bay Street production is set on July 26, 1962, the 10th anniversary of Evita’s death, in a run-down tango club where a group of Peronistas gather every year to put on the play and recall why they loved Evita so much.

“It’s going to be a very dance-based production, with a lot of tango,” said Mr. Schwartz. Marcos Santana, whose Broadway credits include “On Your Feet,” “Rocky,” and “Guys and Dolls,” is the choreographer.

With one exception, 12-year-old Dakota Quackenbush from East Hampton, the cast is entirely Latino. “I’m very excited by this group of actors,” said Mr. Pomerantz. “They’re going to blow the roof off this place.”

The production stars Arianna Rosario (“On Your Feet,” “Cats,” “West Side Story”) as Eva Peron, Trent Saunders (“Aladdin,” “American Idiot” tour) as Che, the anonymous working-class narrator, and Omar Lopez-Cepero (“On Your Feet,” “American Idol” finalist) as Juan Peron. Life will belatedly imitate art in November, when Ms. Rosario and Mr. Lopez-Cepero will be married.  

The cast also includes Kyle Barisich (“The Phantom of the Opera,” Bay Street’s “My Fair Lady”) as Magaldi, and Gabi Campo (“The Prom” on Broadway) as the Mistress. Ensemble members are Julian Alvarez, Edgar Cavazos, Lauren Csete, Elisa Galindez, Juan Guillen, Jose Ozuna, Ms. Quackenbush, Carolina Santos Read, and Danelle Rivera.

“Everything is done in the club,” said Mr. Pomerantz, “using tables, chairs, some hand props, and some simple costume changes. And instead of having 38 or 40 people, we’re doing it with a cast of 14. The audience can really focus on all of them as individuals.” 

The members of the ensemble play all the roles — soldiers, aristocrats, the working class, and the working poor. “We get to see the ensemble transforming sometimes three or four times within the same music sequence.”

Mr. Pomerantz had a hunch that setting the play in the tango club would make sense, because tango is part of the score and part of the culture of Argentina. His subsequent research into the period led to some interesting discoveries.

In 1955, three years after Eva’s death from cancer and early in Juan Peron’s second term as president, a military coup not only sent him into exile, it led to the outlawing of anything to do with the Perons, including possessing any memorabilia related to the couple or even saying their names. 

In addition, because Peron revived tango as an indigenous art form when he was coming into power in the 1940s, the dance was outlawed after the coup. “So the tango bar in the play is also a kind of secret, even dangerous spot where the Peronistas could hang out and celebrate the Perons,” said Mr. Pomerantz. 

Performances will take place through Aug. 26 on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Sundays at 7 p.m. and Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays at 8, with 2 p.m. shows on Aug. 12, 19, and 26. A limited number of “pay what you can” tickets will be available at the box office at 11 a.m. on Tuesday for that evening’s performance. Tickets range from $40 to $145. The Aug. 4 opening night show is sold out.

On Aug. 8, there will be a community gathering at Guild Hall in East Hampton for a discussion of a topic of increasing urgency: the state of the American criminal justice system and issues surrounding mass incarceration. According to an advocacy group called the Prison Policy Initiative, some 2.3 million people in the United States are currently incarcerated, and, by all accounts, an American’s chances of being incarcerated for a given crime differ radically according to the color of their skin as well as their economic background. 

Co-hosted by Guild Hall and East, The Star’s magazine, the evening will be led by Zachary Lazar, a novelist who lives part time in North Sea; Sarah Koenig, a reporter and podcast pioneer who grew up in Sagaponack, and Garnette Cadogan, a scholar who writes about race, urban life, and the promise of plurality in American cities.

Tickets to the event, which starts at 8 p.m., are free, as the organizers hope to draw in as many people as possible and create an atmosphere in which diverse perspectives are openly shared. Community leaders from all over the East End have been invited. “We’ve reached out to church groups, schools, politicians, people from Shinnecock Indian Nation, and Black Lives Matter organizers,” said Bess Rattray, East’s editor. “The point is to bring people together to talk about an issue that matters to all of us, regardless of which political party we belong to.”

Each of the illustrious trio leading the talk has worked on or written about things related to criminal justice. Mr. Lazar, who teaches at Tulane University, has published several books on topics related to incarceration and is an active advocate for arts programming in prisons. Ms. Koenig, who became a household name with the “Serial” podcast, helped to bring problems in the justice system to a nationwide audience with its landmark first season in 2014. And Mr. Cadogan, a Martin Luther King Jr. visiting scholar at M.I.T., brings his expertise as a researcher and essayist whose work explores the vitality and inequality of cities. 

“I am a great admirer of the work of the three moderators,” said Andrea Grover, the director of Guild Hall. “Having them all together and in conversation with the community will be a high point of our summer.”

The format for the conversation is expected to be a combination of short presentations (both audio recordings and live readings), audience questions, and a moderated discussion. It is being called “Vengeance: A Community Conversation,” borrowing its title from that of Mr. Lazar’s latest novel, “Vengeance,” a hybrid of fiction and nonfiction that tells the story of man serving a life sentence at Louisiana State Penitentiary, the largest maximum security prison in the United States.

“The novel takes a story about mass incarceration and racism that people have heard about or read about in the news and gives a more intimate portrait of what that really looks like for one person,” Mr. Lazar said. The book  — which The New Yorker called “truer than true” — touches on themes of guilt and penance, racial bias, and the punitive nature of incarceration policy. Released this winter to glowing reviews, it has helped to spark a wider national conversation about the problems in our courts and prison system. Mr. Lazar says that he is glad his book can be a catalyst. “I think one of the very first steps our society needs to take in addressing these difficult issues is to face the fear of talking. It might be uncomfortable, but it’s the only way to learn.”

Mass incarceration is a topic likely to inspire passionate feelings, and organizers hope that discussions like these will help to promote action toward positive change. 

This event can be seen as part of a larger trend toward issue-focused arts programming at Guild Hall. Over the last few years, the 87-year-old institution has made a proactive shift in its focus, with Ms. Grover and her colleagues prioritizing artists and events that further dialogue around issues of social justice. This summer, for example, their “Thinking Forward” lecture series, presented in partnership with the Bridgehampton Child Care and Recreational Center, has included a talk by Khalil Gibran Muhammad, an author and the former director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, who discussed issues of race, class, and marginalization on the East End. In June 2017, a panel of speakers from the Innocence Project gave a presentation on criminal justice reform and wrongful conviction in conjunction with a show of portraits of exonerees by the artist Taryn Simon. 

Initiatives like these are helping to redefine the role of art and arts spaces on the South Fork. No longer just a place to see a play or an exhibition of paintings, Guild Hall’s museum and theater are being positioned as a true community center, where people gather to talk about important issues, and even, perhaps, to be inspired to get organized. Ms. Grover sees this as integral to Guild Hall’s mission: “It is our obligation as an institute that was founded as a civic space to be offering a venue for discussions like these.”

Mr. Lazar is particularly hopeful that conversations like these will encourage people to become active locally: “I think that many of the big problems with race and the justice system in America are deeply rooted in our history and will be hard to change. That said, many of these incarceration policies are made on the state level and people can have a serious impact by becoming active in their local communities.”

Mr. Lazar notes that, just last year, grassroots organizers in Louisiana helped to pass a criminal reform bill that aims to reduce the number of people being incarcerated for petty crimes. “It’s not perfect, but it is something.” Thanks to a number of these small efforts, Louisiana no longer has the highest incarceration rate of any state in the union, which it did for a long time. “I think it is number three now,” he said, laughing. “Baby steps.”

A Manhattan auctioneer claims he has unearthed six Willem de Kooning works from an abandoned storage locker in New Jersey. David Killen purchased the contents of the unit for $15,000 and says the finds could range in value from $10,000 to $10 million.

According to Mr. Killen, the unit was once owned by Orrin Riley, an art conservator who died in 1986, and his partner, Susanne Schnitzer, who took over the business until she died in 2009. It contained 200 artworks. Mr. Riley founded the Guggenheim Museum’s conservation department before starting his own Manhattan studio in the West 30s. 

After a nine-year period during which Ms. Schnitzer’s estate and the New York State attorney general notified all of the clients who might have left works with the studio, those that remained were declared abandoned and cleared to be sold, Mr. Killen said.

Lawrence Castagna of Springs, a conservator and former de Kooning studio assistant, was asked by Mr. Killen to restore the works, all oil paintings on paper and newsprint dating from the 1970s with one possibly from 1960. “For 35 years they had been kept in a folder with glassine over them. I was hired to remove the glassine to see what they were,” he said on Tuesday.

Mr. Killen chose him for the restoration work because he also had worked in Mr. Riley’s studio, a job Mr. Castagna found through the recommendations of de Kooning and his wife, Elaine de Kooning. 

When he saw the six works, he knew right away they were by the artist. “I took a look at a corner of one of them [not covered by glassine] and it hit me in the gut,” he said. Another expert Mr. Killen said he hired also agreed on the attribution, but opted to remain anonymous. “Anyone who knows anything about de Kooning wouldn’t deny what they were,” Mr. Castagna said.

He clarified that he is not an authenticator, as media reports have said, but that he could tell they were de Koonings from his experience working directly with the artist as well as later in Mr. Riley’s studio, where he recalled several drawings from this period being restored or repaired. “Orrin Riley never had anything that wasn’t important in there,” he said.

De Kooning does not have a catalogue raisonné, a complete list of works that scholars and his foundation have agreed are authentic. The foundation also declines to authenticate work, so confirming its bona fides is tricky. The six works are unsigned, which is not unusual.

Mr. Castagna was still in high school in the mid-1970s, but began working in de Kooning’s studio in 1982 during the artist’s “Ribbon Painting” phase. He started with Mr. Riley in 1986.

He took the drawings back to his studio in Springs to remove the glassine, “some 500 feet from where they were made,” he said. They are now back in Mr. Killen’s gallery, and some were unveiled at a reception on Tuesday night.

Mr. Killen has given estimates of the value of the works — which differ in size, style, and support — from $10,000 to $10 million, telling WCBS this week that the low estimate is probably too low and the high estimate too high.

There are three large-format works measuring around 40 by 60 inches, an unusually large size for works on paper; the rest are on newsaper. Mr. Castagna said that Elaine de Kooning told him that the newsprint paintings were the result of de Kooning’s not wanting to waste paint as he cleaned his brushes at the end of the day. He would put newspaper on the floor and run the brushes over them. “People who came to his studio said they liked the resulting images and he would give them away.” Some have been recently sold in the range of $60,000 to $80,000, he said.

Historically, de Kooning’s later work has been devalued compared to his work from the 1940s and ’50s. Lately, however, scholars and the art market have rediscovered de Koonings of that period and the prices of some canvases have increased into the millions. This has also resulted in some skepticism in the marketplace, as noted by artnet News, which quoted one market watcher as saying the timing of these findings might be “a little too on the nose.” Mr. Killen plans to sell the works in auctions beginning in October.

Since moving into its building in Water Mill in 2012, the Parrish Art Museum has invited one artist each year to create works that respond to and utilize its spaces and grounds in innovative and provocative ways. 

This year’s Platform exhibition, which will open Sunday, features the work of Barthélémy Toguo, an artist from Cameroon whose multidisciplinary projects explore issues of migration, mobility, colonialism, race, and the relationship between the global north and south.

“The Beauty of Our Voice” is Mr. Toguo’s first solo exhibition in an American museum, following his installations at biennials in Venice, Havana, and Sydney. In addition, he recently concluded a six-week residency at the Watermill Center, where he developed some of the work on view at the Parrish.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is “Road to Exile,” an installation that addresses the desire of young Africans to escape to a better life abroad. A life-size boat Mr. Toguo built at the Watermill Center is loaded with bags made of African fabrics and placed on a bed of glass bottles, whose fragility suggests the danger of the journey. “Road to Exile” will be juxtaposed with drawings, etchings, and paintings from the Parrish’s collection that depict boats in different eras and settings.

“Mobile Cafeteria” will transform another of the museum’s galleries into a participatory installation inspired by African street cafes. Mr. Toguo built furniture for the space, where visitors can play African board games, watch recorded African soccer matches, and learn about Bandjoun Station, a center for art, culture, education, and agriculture founded by the artist in Cameroon in 2007.

“Mobile Cafeteria” will also include artwork that explores socio-political issues in Africa and America, including “Black Lives Matter,” a series of pencil drawings of African-Americans recently killed in the United States by police, and “Stupid African President,” three nearly life-size photographs of the artist posing as African politicians.

Mr. Toguo, who divides his time between Paris and Bandjoun, Cameroon, also engaged nearly 100 Hamptons residents for “Head Over Water — Hamptons,” for which young adults from local schools and the Shinnecock Indian Nation were asked to answer the question, “Where do I fit in in American society?” The answers are printed on postcards along with original work by the artist.

“Barthélémy Toguo: The Beauty of Our Voice” will be on view through Oct. 14.

The painting, in an ornate Victorian frame, shows a rowboat on the water with a grassy bank beyond. The setting could be anywhere — maybe Town Pond in East Hampton, which is what its owner, Elissa Mott Derry of Flanders, had always been told it was. And the artist’s signature in the lower left corner, faint but still discernible — part of it, anyway — is . . . well, the first name is debatable, but the rest of it is beyond question:

Moran 1903.

Could this really be a hitherto unknown work by the celebrated artist Thomas Moran, whose 1883 studio, a national landmark right across from the pond, has just been opened to the public after years of restoration?

That was what Ms. Derry was hoping to hear from Doyle Auctioneers and Appraisers, whose annual Appraisal Day event, held at Clinton Academy, benefits the East Hampton Historical Society. For a $20 donation, optimistic owners of jewelry, silver, fine art, and other valuables can bring in up to five items for professional evaluation, just like on television’s “Antiques Roadshow,” where Doyle appraisers often appear.

Squinting at the signature through a high-powered loupe, Shani Toledano, the associate director of Doyle’s paintings department, took a good two or three minutes before raising her head. 

“I think it’s L-E-O-N,” she said finally. There was a long pause.

“Other people see T-H-O-M,” said an unconvinced Ms. Derry, who grew up in East Hampton, where, she said, her grandfather, a handyman, “traded a job” for the painting. “I was always told it was a rowboat on Hook Pond.”

Turning to Google, the appraiser called up a picture of Thomas Moran’s typical signature, a bold “M” with an arrow through it — nothing at all like the one on the painting. Ms. Derry’s face fell. 

Nonetheless, there was a connection. The Morans were one of the most prolific families of artists in American history. Among them was John Leon Moran, who rarely used his first name. He was Thomas Moran’s nephew, one of two sons of his older brother, Edward. That branch of the family lived mainly in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

Ms. Derry persisted. “Is there any value in it at all? If it’s an East Hampton scene?”

“The genre is sort of Victorian,” Ms. Toledano answered. “That’s a little out of favor right now,” she added gently. 

Finally, the appraiser allowed that the work might fetch $300 to $1,200 at auction. “I would hold on to it,” she advised. “I would love to live with that painting. Just ignore the signature and enjoy it.”

“It was hanging over the couch in the living room,” Ms. Derry replied. “I had someone make an offer for it a few years ago, I guess I should’ve taken it.”

She reached for the painting. “It’s going right back up,” she said.

The Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in Springs will present “The Permanent Collection: A 30-Year Survey” from Thursday through Oct. 27. The show will include artworks by Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, and others acquired since the center opened in June 1988.

Among the highlights are an untitled oil painting by Pollock, circa 1938, known descriptively as “Composition with Red Arc and Horses”; “Embrace,” a large 1974 screenprint by Krasner, and an oil and enamel painting on Masonite by Alfonso Ossorio, circa 1950, painted on one of the baseball game boards given to him by Pollock.

Other noteworthy additions to the collection are “Glory I,” (1971-1981, 1995), an oil on board by Roy Newell; Robert Arneson’s bronze bookends, “Saga of Jackson Pollock,” 1988; works on paper by Stanley William Hayter, Thomas Hart Benton, Mike Bidlo, and James Brooks, and photographs by Martha Holmes, Hans Namuth, Tony Vaccaro, and Fred McDarrah.

A reception and gallery talk by the museum’s director, Helen A. Harrison, will take place on Sunday from 5 to 7 p.m. 

With the exception of receptions like the one above, the Pollock-Krasner house is now open only by appointment.

The Watermill Center’s annual summer lecture series will open next Thursday evening with “Double Vision: The Unerring Eye of Art World Avatars Dominique and John de Menil,” a talk by William Middleton, a journalist and editor. Organized by Robert Wilson, the center’s founder and artistic director, this year’s series features speakers from a wide range of disciplines, including a poet, a playwright, a composer, and a professor of mathematics and economics.

The de Menils, whose art collection was one of the largest and most important assembled during the 20th century, settled in the 1940s in Houston, where they subsequently built the Menil Collection, the Rothko Chapel, the Byzantine Fresco Chapel, the Cy Twombly Gallery, and underwrote the Contemporary Arts Museum.

Mr. Middleton, who has been the fashion features director for Harper’s Bazaar and the Paris bureau chief for Fairchild Publications, will present a behind-the-scenes look at the art world of the 20th century and the influence wielded by the de Menils through what they collected and built.

Aja Monet, an internationally established poet, educator, and human rights activist of Cuban-Jamaican decent, will speak on Aug. 7. The youngest individual to win the Nuyorican Poet’s Café Grand Slam title, Ms. Monet poses questions in her poetry about the power of the imagination and metaphor to engage issues such as racism, colonialism, and sexism. She was a featured speaker at the 2017 Women’s March on Washington, D.C.

The series will shift from culture to politics on Aug. 9 when Eric Maskin, Adams University professor at Harvard, will discuss “How to Improve Presidential Elections” with Claude Grunitzky, the president and a board member of the Byrd Hoffman Water Mill Foundation. Dr. Maskin’s areas of expertise include game theory, contract theory, social choice theory, and political economy. 

“Get on the Bus: Writing the Opening Scene” will be the subject of a talk on Aug. 14 by Robert O’Hara, a playwright and director whose many honors include the 2018 Herb Alpert Award, the N.A.A.C.P. Best Director and Best Play awards, two Obies, and the Oppenheim Award. His recent plays, “Zombie: The American” and “Barbecue,” premiered at Woolly Mammoth Theater and the New York Shakespeare Festival, respectively.

The series will conclude on Aug. 16 with “Roots and Pulses,” a talk by Nico Muhly, a composer whose influences range from American Minimalism to the Anglican choral tradition. The recipient of commissions from the Metropolitan Opera, Carnegie Hall, St. Paul’s Cathedral, and others, he has written more than 80 works for the concert stage, including the opera “Marnie” (2017), which will be staged by the Met in the fall.

All talks take place at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $15, and advance registration is required.

Bruce Willis, Brooke Adams, Michael Nouri, Mercedes Ruehl, and Harris Yulin are among the stars who will be out this week at Guild Hall, where a jazz-infused benefit for the Pushcart Prize and WordTheatre in the Schools and two staged readings will be presented.

“Hey, Doyle! — Tales and Jazz” will bring to life the writings of Brian Doyle, a four-time awardee of the Pushcart Prize and the editor of Portland magazine, who died in 2017 at the age of 60. 

Mr. Willis will perform “Memorial Day,” a short essay by Mr. Doyle published posthumously in the most recent volume of the annual Pushcart Prize anthology of the best of the small presses published and edited by Bill Henderson, who lives in Springs.

Other actors who will bring Mr. Doyle’s stories to life are Paul Guilfoyle, Sharon Lawrence, Lorraine Toussaint, Bruce Vilanch, Bellamy Young, and Ms. Adams and Mr. Nouri. The program, which will take place on Saturday at 8:30 p.m., is produced and directed by Cedering Fox, the artistic director of WordTheatre, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving the tradition of storytelling.

Tickets are $40 to $65, $38 to $63 for members. V.I.P. tickets, which include an after-party from 10 to midnight, are $250.

On Monday at 8 p.m., Ms. Ruehl and Mr. Yulin will star as two longtime lovers, Emma and Jerry, in a staged reading of Harold Pinter’s 1978 play “Betrayal,” which Mr. Yulin will also direct. The play marked a departure for the Nobel Prize-winning playwright from the spare, elliptical works that established his reputation. 

“Betrayal” begins in 1977, when Emma and Jerry meet after her marriage to Robert dissolves, and then works backward to the beginning of their affair nine years earlier, exposing in the process secrets about the characters and calling into question the nature of their intimacy.

Writing for The Telegraph about a 2011 London production, Charles Spencer said, “It concerns itself . . . with the devious workings of the human heart, with love and guilt and passion. And it does so with emotional depth, subtlety, and an immense technical panache.” Tickets are $30 to $75, $28 to $70 for members.

A staged reading of “Daughters of the Sexual Revolution,” a play by Dana Leslie Goldstein directed and developed by Kimberly Loren Eaton, will be onstage next Thursday at 8 p.m.

Set in suburban New York in 1976, it focuses on the fallout from an affair between two married women, Joyce and Nina, which is discovered when a surprise visit from Joyce’s daughter catches the women in an intimate moment.

Ms. Goldstein is an award-winning playwright whose work has been shown at the Manhattan Theatre Club, the Cherry Lane Theatre, Theatre 80 St. Marks, New Dramatists, and many others. Tickets are $30 to $75, $28 to $70 for members.

The Sag Harbor Cinema Arts Center’s Artists Love Movies series will present “SPF-18,” the first feature film by Alex Israel, on Sunday at 6 p.m. at the Southampton Arts Center.

“SPF-18” is a coming-of-age story about four teenagers who get to spend their post-graduation summer in Keanu Reeves’s Malibu beach house. A tribute to beach culture and teen surfer films of the 1980s and 1990s, it features big names of that era like Molly Ringwald, Rosanna Arquette, Pamela Anderson, and Mr. Reeves. Goldie Hawn narrates.

The screening will be followed by a discussion between Mr. Israel, who lives in Los Angeles, and Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan of the cinema arts center’s programming committee. Tickets are $10.

A post-screening cocktail reception with hors d’oeuvres and a margarita bar will take place from 7:30 to 9:30. The cost is $150 for the film and reception, $75 for people 30 and under. Proceeds will benefit the construction of the cinema arts center.