Who would have thought a stage version of a classic 19th-century novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne would also work as a commentary on our recent politics? Certainly not me, who took the opportunity to view “The Scarlet Letter” (running through Nov. 26 at Sag Harbor’s Bay Street Theater) as a respite from election exhaustion.

This new adaptation, however, was written specifically for this production by Scott Eck and the play’s director, Joe Minutillo, and while it loses no opportunity to allude to the rhetoric of our president-elect, it is careful not to overwhelm the spirit of Hawthorne’s masterwork.  

Of course the material is rich for contemporary analogies, with its themes of sin, sanctimony, and forgiveness. “The Scarlet Letter,” many will remember, is set in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the mid-1600s, where Hester Prynne has been accused of adultery and must wear a scarlet A stitched to the front of her dress. As the play begins, she is forced to stand in the stocks in the town square, where its residents heap scorn upon her. When she is asked to name her lover, she refuses. 

Among the crowd is her former husband, who now calls himself Roger Chillingworth, and the town minister, Arthur Dimmesdale. Much of the plot is generated by Chillingworth’s pursuit of the identity of his wife’s paramour, and by the minister’s need to conceal the fact that it’s he who is Hester’s lover and the father of her daughter, Pearl.

Was it really adultery? When their affair began, Hester apparently believed her husband had been lost at sea. Not that it mattered either way to Hawthorne, whose real theme is not fidelity but the folly of sanctimony and the danger of casting aspersions. 

Chillingworth, for example (played with measured agony by Nick Gregory), becomes physically misshapen in his pursuit of vengeance; and the mystery of Hester Prynne’s lover, which consumes the colony for seven years, has literally torn the town to shreds by the story’s end. The bitter irony is that simple forgiveness might have healed them all long ago.

Local audiences are by now familiar with the lead actress, Chloe Dirksen, who was brilliant in last year’s “This Wide Night” at Guild Hall, and who acquits herself well here as Hester, portraying her with a gentle but defiant dignity. Also notable is Kathleen Mary Carthy as Mistress Hibbins, the governor’s eccentric sister, who injects much-needed energy and humor into the play with her Gothic, operatic style. And Dakota Quackenbush as Pearl brings added light to what at times can seem like a gloomy melodrama.

Missing from this adaptation is the dense grandeur of Hawthorne’s prose, which may be rivaled in American literature only by Melville’s “Moby-Dick.” But there’s no denying that there is pleasure in a production that hits all the thematic touchstones of a classic in under two hours. Mr. Eck and Mr. Minutillo wrest all the drama from the novel, and they have preserved its dialogue whenever possible.  

Whether Dimmesdale actually says in the novel that “we can choose fear and hatred, or love,” as he does here, or whether that is a paraphrase meant to comment on Donald Trump’s immigration policies, I cannot say — like most of us, I haven’t read the novel since high school. But certainly this production has Mr. Trump on its mind. When the newly elected governor, for example, is asked about his pre-election promise to build a road from the town to the city of Boston, he admits that he didn’t have an actual “plan,” and now it’s up to the voters to figure it out. And the hissing cries of the “goodwives” — “Sinner, sinner, sinner” —  as Hester stands in the stocks, seem uncomfortably reminiscent of the blame-and-shame rhetoric from both sides during this mind-boggling campaign.

It is the measure of Hawthorne’s true genius, when a nearly 200-year-old text can still have contemporary resonance. In a world where few have the time to revisit a classic novel, this adaptation is a satisfying shorthand, and one can only hope that local students will get a chance to see the play. In a nation so deeply divided, its themes of love and forgiveness have never been more poignant.

Bob Dylan, always enigmatic, kept the world guessing for 17 days after he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. 

The prize committee honored Mr. Dylan, the first songwriter to receive the award, “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition,” on Oct. 13. Days later, efforts to reach him had not borne fruit, and the world began to wonder if the legendary musician would follow in the footsteps of Jean-Paul Sartre, who refused the same honor in 1964. 

Save for a cryptic and quickly deleted reference on his website, it was not until Oct. 30 that Mr. Dylan said that he would attend the Dec. 10 award ceremony in Stockholm, “if it’s at all possible.” At 75, he maintains an active schedule, presently on tour in the South. This week, he wrote the Swedish Academy, which awards the prizes, a letter stating he would not attend the ceremony due to prior commitments. 

News of the prize has spurred recollections of Mr. Dylan’s time in East Hampton in the 1970s. Though details are understandably hazy among South Fork residents who encountered him, the artist himself wrote of the period in his 2005 memoir, “Chronicles: Volume 1.” 

“My face wasn’t that well known,” he writes, “although the name would have made people uncomfortable.” 

“Bob Johnston, my record producer, was on the line,” Mr. Dylan writes. “He was calling me from Nashville and had reached me in East Hampton. We were living in a rented house on a quiet street with majestic old elms — a Colonial house with plantation-shuttered windows. It was hidden from the street by elevated hedges. There was a large backyard and a key to a gated dune, which led to the pristine Atlantic sandy beach. The house belonged to Henry Ford.” 

According to a 2008 issue of Deeds & Don’ts, a publication of Cottages & Gardens magazine, the house is on Nichols Lane, landward of the property owned by the late William Clay Ford Sr. Leonard Ackerman, an attorney who represented the artist in a matter — the details of which he does not recall — remembered a hammock hanging in the living room. “They had a problem, some issue I had to resolve,” Mr. Ackerman said. “I had to go to the house. Maybe a zoning violation, but I don’t remember. But I do remember, whoever I spoke to — I believe it was his manager — said, ‘Do you know whose house this is? This is Bob Zimmerman, a.k.a. Bob Dylan.’ ”

Bruce Harry, who grew up in East Hampton and now lives in East Quogue, was a second chef at Roger’s Restaurant, now Townline BBQ, in the early ’70s. “Someone said, ‘Bob Dylan’s sitting in the dining room,’ ” Mr. Harry recalled. “We had other people — I remember Cheryl Tiegs, Marlo Thomas, Craig Claiborne, a bunch of other people.”

“I always try to perfect what I do,” Mr. Harry said, “so I tried to make a perfect order of flounder” for Mr. Dylan. After the meal, “He popped his head in and said, ‘Thank you very much, that was a great meal.’ I was all dirty and greasy, so I didn’t shake his hand.” 

The house was rented in the name of Mr. Dylan’s mother, the artist wrote in “Chronicles,” and he was able to maintain a low profile in the town. “I started painting landscapes there,” he writes. “There was plenty to do. We had five kids and often went to the beach, boated on the bay, dug for clams, spent afternoons at a lighthouse near Montauk, went to Gardiner’s Island — hunted for Captain Kidd’s buried treasure — rode bikes, go-carts and pulled wagons — went to the movies and the outdoor markets, walked around on Division Street — drove over to Springs a lot, a painter’s paradise where de Kooning had his studio.” 

“Dylan is a master of hiding in plain sight — ‘Don’t bother me, I’m a recluse but I’m here.’ He’s got that going,” said Michael Weiskopf, a musician who fronts the Complete Unknowns, a band that performs Mr. Dylan’s music. Mr. Weiskopf, who lives in East Hampton, was speaking of Mr. Dylan’s long silence on the Nobel Prize, but the observation applies equally to his time in East Hampton. 

Mr. Dylan’s description of East Hampton is as poetic as many of his song lyrics. “East Hampton, which was originally settled by farmers and fishermen, was now a refuge for artists and writers and wealthy families,” he writes in “Chronicles.” “Not really a place but a ‘state of mind.’ If your balance had been severely disrupted, this was a place where you could get it back. Some folks there traced their families back three hundred years and some houses dated back to 1700 — there’d been witch trials there in the past. Wainscott, Springs, Amagansett — green expanses — English style windmills — year round charm and a unique kind of light approximate to the woods and oceans.” 

In addition to painting, Mr. Dylan composed music during his stay here. In a 2004 interview preserved on YouTube, Jacques Levy, the late director and songwriter, recalled traveling from Greenwich Village to East Hampton, where the two of them spent several weeks writing songs, many of which would appear on the 1976 album “Desire.” 

“Sometimes we would go out for a drink late at night,” Mr. Levy said. “After we finished the first song, we went out to a bar. He had this sheet with him, and he’d sit in the corner of the bar. He’d get someone who was sitting there, and said to this person, whoever it was, ‘Would you like to hear a new song I just wrote?’ You can just imagine, can’t you? The person sat there, and he pulled out this lyric sheet, and with great intensity he’s reading this lyric to the person. . . . It was a very funny moment to me.” 

Throughout a five-decade-plus career, Mr. Dylan has been nothing if not controversial, and the Nobel Prize announcement has maintained that tradition, setting social media abuzz with shock and no small amount of criticism. Some authors offered praise. Others were disparaging, some of them citing Philip Roth, who was widely expected to be given the prize this year. 

“There’s nothing wrong with a musician getting the prize,” said Steven Gaines, the author of books including “One of These Things First” and “Philistines at the Hedgerow: Passion and Property in the Hamptons,” who lives in Wainscott. “But I’m not sure ‘Lay Lady Lay’ is appropriate fodder for a prize for literature.”

Mr. Weiskopf is decidedly with those applauding the Nobel committee’s decision, blasting “all the Mr. Joneses that came out of the woodwork that say he didn’t deserve this. Has Philip Roth had as much impact on the culture? I don’t think so.” 

The announcement, after all, referred to the artist’s work within the American song tradition, he said. “How could you argue with that? There are a handful of artists that, maybe, deserve that kind of recognition. These are the people that give peace prizes to Henry Kissinger, so figure that out. I think they finally got something right.”

This article has been updated from the print version to include the news that Mr. Dylan will not attend the Nobel Prize awards ceremony in December.

The Southampton Cultural Center will celebrate Veterans Day with a piano concert featuring American composers tomorrow evening at 6. Ellen Johansen and Marlene Markard, classically trained East End pianists, will perform music by Barber, Corigliano, Gershwin, and Copland. Tickets are $20, but students under 21 will be admitted free.

The center’s Dance Fusion series will feature FJK Dance, a contemporary dance company founded in 2014 by Fadi J. Khoury and Sevin Ceviker, on Saturday. Mr. Khoury will lead an open level dance workshop for ages 9 and up from 3 to 5 p.m. The company will perform at 6.

The workshop fee is $35. Participants 21 and under will be admitted free to the dance performance. Workshop participants who are not students will pay $20 for the performance. Tickets for the general public are $40, $20 for students.

Between 1950 and 1990, the Eastman Kodak Company installed 565 color transparencies 18 feet tall and 60 feet long in New York City’s Grand Central Station. The images, known as Coloramas, portrayed a Norman Rockwell-like, predominantly white idealization of American life, while also advertising various products and activities.

“Colorama,” an exhibition of 36 panoramic prints of those images organized by the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, will open tomorrow at the Southampton Arts Center and remain on view through Dec. 31. A public reception will take place Saturday from 4 to 6 p.m.

As a major corporate and aesthetic undertaking, the production of Coloramas involved Kodak’s marketing and technical staffs and scores of photographers, among them such notables as Ansel Adams, Ernst Haas, and Eliot Porter.

During the 40 years of the images’ display, America went through the Cold War, the civil rights movement, the 1960s rise of the counterculture, the Vietnam War, and Watergate, but the images continued to present an idyllic picture of the country’s landscapes, villages, and families. Ronald Reagan tried to return America to its traditional values, to bring image and reality together, but time has shown the impossibility of that dream.

Amy Kirwin, director of programs at the arts center, said that “each Colorama in the exhibition so beautifully represents a time of great optimism, purity, and joy. We can’t think of a better compilation of work to close out 2016 at the Southampton Arts Center. We feel confident that every visitor will leave with a smile.” 

The Neave Trio will be the guest artists at the first of the fall and winter Music at St. Luke’s recital series on Saturday at 5 p.m. at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in East Hampton. The program will include music by Dvorak and Korngold.

The chamber ensemble has performed at venues throughout the United States, toured England, Spain, and Germany, and been broadcast on WGBH FM in Boston, WNYC FM in New York City, and was featured on the McGraw-Hill Financial Young Artists Showcase on WQXR FM.

Admission is $20 at the door; students under 18 will be admitted free.

Dilapidated buildings on urban streets, flora overtaking abandoned gas pumps on a country lane, the evanescence of a hazy Venice sunset.  At Ashawagh Hall, the eyes moved from theme to theme and from subject to subject, witness to how another set of eyes saw the world and committed it to paper and canvas.

Last weekend’s exhibition and celebration of the life of Francesco Bologna could have been a somber affair. Instead, the vitality of the paintings and other artworks and the energy of his family made the show feel as festive as it was intended to be.

Mr. Bologna was 89 when he died in August. Judging by the number of works on the walls, in itself a small sampling, he had a prolific career. He was also well traveled, both internationally and on the South Fork. The subjects ranged from early academic drawings to paintings in New York, then Lucca and Venice, and, finally, East Hampton.

The artist was a realist, in the tradition of true realism, as practiced by predecessors such as Caravaggio, Manet, and Bellows. They painted what they saw, choosing subjects not from the drawing room or the cardinal’s quarters, but the life out there in the streets: the dirty feet, the toothless grins, the prostitute’s room, and the boxing ring. But unlike his predecessors, Bologna wasn’t trying to tweak elite and bourgeois sensibilities. Instead, he saw the “beauty in the mundane.”

In a landscape of stunning vistas, his brushes elevated the simple and the overlooked. There were examples of how development ruined the landscape and how the landscape reclaimed itself, despite the best efforts of humans. Robert Long, writing in The Star, called it an intensity of seeing what was in front of him. He treated the ruins not abjectly, but more like totems or icons.

In Venice, one of his subjects was an American crane on a barge in the Grand Canal, with the usual sites playing a background role. In East Hampton, too, he portrayed a similar piece of heavy equipment, set adrift in a field, next to a rusting oil drum. If Tiepolo and Rubens (the artist’s tribute to Rubens was in the show) were his favorite painters, he must have reserved them for pure enjoyment rather than much of an aesthetic model. 

Another compelling tribute is an early still life inspired by Cézanne. The patchily painted greenish-gray interior has a Cézanne-esque painting on the wall with a compote full of peaches and grapes, more fruit on a folded tablecloth, and a wine glass, all set on a proto-Cubist table. They are depicted at such an angle that they would clearly roll off if found in real life. Mr. Bologna replicates the painting, using objects from his own household, putting white wine in a Libbey pint glass, the fruit in a square Corningware casserole dish, using a facsimile of the wallpaper in the painting as his background. His tablecloth is painted in places with a thick impasto. Rather than the relatively neat folds of its inspiration, his takes on a more rippled effect, as if the fruit left out of the bowl had capsized into the whitecaps of a roiling sea. His apples and grapes look worthy of Zeuxis, an ancient Greek said to have painted a bunch of grapes so realistic that birds flew toward it to take a nibble, and would surely fool any bird who might fly in today to see the display.

In the foyer of Ashawagh Hall, his family placed some of Bologna’s more public subjects, two views of the Springs General Store and the front window of The Star’s offices. After observing that painting for several years, it was invigorating to see it in this context. The reflections of Guild Hall and the trees in front of the window might have easily been edited out by a different painter, a Renoir perhaps, who would have seen them as flaws. A painter like Manet or Bologna, however, who witnessed and understood what a mirror on Main Street that window is would want to replicate it just as he saw it.  I’ll never look at that painting the same way again.

Minerva Perez is not an absolute newcomer to the OLA Latino Film Festival, having been involved in its setup in 2007, but this year’s, the 13th iteration presented by the Organizacion Latino Americana, is the first she has put together as that organization’s executive director, a post she assumed in February.

The festival will present “Un Tango Mas (Our Last Tango),” a relatively big-budget film from Argentina directed by German Kral and executive produced by Wim Wenders, tomorrow ev­en­ing at 7 at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill. The screening will be preceded at 5:30 by a bilingual docent tour of the exhibition “Art­ists Choose Artists” and, at 6, by a reception with Dona Sarita Mezcal, which is imported by the Kiembock family of East Hampton.

Saturday the festival will move to Guild Hall in East Hampton, where an Ecuadorian feature, “Vengo Volviendo (Here and There),” will be screened along with two shorts, “Tereza,” a film by Natalie Camou, a Mexican-American filmmaker, that deals with domestic violence, and “Normal,” the Venezuelan director Vadim Lasca’s film about the relationship between a Chavista and an anti-Chavista that reflects that country’s political division.

Another mezcal tasting, this with the producer and director of “Vengo Volviendo,” Gabriel Paez and Isabel Rodas, will take place at 5, the film will play at 6, and the producer and director will answer questions following the screening.

Ms. Perez took a new approach to this year’s festival. “I actively sought out independent and new filmmakers from across the globe,” she said, “putting out a call for Spanish-language, English-subtitled films through a well-known means, Without a Box. ‘Vengo Volviendo’ came back from that call, and it was a find. When I saw it, I thought, ‘Wow, this is something special!’ The camerawork is beautiful, and it’s visually like a love letter to a large area in Ecuador called Azuay. Many people in the Hamptons come from that region.”

“Vengo Volviendo,” which won the audience award at the second Ecuadorian Film Festival in New York City in June, tells the story of Ismael, a 22-year-old determined to immigrate to the United States. After he agrees on a price with a coyote, his best friend returns after eight years abroad, and they set out on a tour of their province, where they encounter the beautiful landscape and the people, stories, and legends of the indigenous culture.

While that film was made by professional filmmakers, “they chose to create very organically a team to learn the art of filmmaking and to be involved in working on the picture, some on sound, some on camera, some as actors,” according to Ms. Perez. “Working with rural communities, they built a company to create and distribute this work.”

“Un Tango Mas” is the story of Maria Nieves Rego, 80, and Juan Carlos Copes, 83, the two most famous dancers in the history of tango. The couple danced together for nearly 50 years, during which they alternately loved and hated each other, separated several times, but always reunited, until he left her for a younger woman.

The film brings them together for one last time onstage, and both are interviewed, although Ms. Rego does most of the talking, “offering a loved-and-abandoned perspective more suitable for tango’s melodrama than that of Copes,” according to a Hollywood Reporter review by John DeFore.

The principals tell their story to a group of young tango dancers and choreographers from Buenos Aires, who transform the most beautiful and dramatic moments of Mr. Copes’s and Ms. Rego’s lives into beautifully filmed tango-choreographies.

Speaking of the film festival’s audience over the years, Ms. Perez said, “It’s typically been half Latino, half Anglo, and we like that because a lot of what OLA wants to do is act as a cultural bridge in as many ways as possible. Art is one of our key ways to really celebrate the riches we have here from all the different countries and communities.”

Tickets to tomorrow’s program at the Parrish Art Museum are $10, free for members and students. Ticket to all three Guild Hall films are $15, while $10 will admit one to either the feature or the two shorts.

Lots of Locals at Ashawagh

“Uncommon,” a group exhibition presented by Hampton Photo, Arts, and Framing in Bridgehampton, will open at Ashawagh Hall in Springs with a reception on Saturday from 5:30 to 11 p.m. and continue on Sunday from 10 to 3.

The exhibition, organized by Franki Mancinelli, will feature more than 35 “unconventional” artists, among them Scott Bluedorn, Carly Haffner, Peter Ngo, Adam Baranello, and Miles Partington. The reception will include food, cocktails, and music by William Falkenberg.

The Leibers in Chelsea

“The Artist and Artisan,” an exhibition of work by Gerson and Judith Leiber, will open today at the Flomenhaft Gallery in Chelsea with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m. The show will run through Dec. 30.

The artists, whose work is on view at the Leiber Collection in Springs from Memorial Day through Labor Day, met in 1945 in Budapest, and married and sailed to the United States a year later. 

Ms. Leiber’s handbags, which are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institution, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and many others, have been carried by first ladies to most inaugural balls since 1953.

Mr. Leiber, a noted painter and printmaker whose work is included in the collections of more than 60 museums, is also the creator of seven acres of garden “rooms” on the Springs property.

Mixed Media in Brooklyn

The A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn will present “Overlap: Life Tapestries,” a group exhibition of photographs, fabric collage, clothing, video, paintings, and drawings by eight artists, from next Thursday through Dec. 18. A reception will be held next Thursday from 6 to 8 p.m.

The show will include three East End artists — Alice Hope, Bastienne Schmidt, and Linda Stein — and Sascha Mallon, Michela Martello, Shari Wechsler Rubeck, Martha Wilson, and Kumi Yamashita. A conversation among Vida Sabbaghi, curator of the exhibition, Karen Keifer-Boyd, a professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Penn State, Ms. Schmidt, and Ms. Stein will follow the reception.

Helen Harrison in London

Helen A. Harrison, director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in Springs, will be among the lecturers this weekend at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in connection with the exhibition “Abstract Expressionism: Expressions of Change.”

Her talk, “Inside the Abstract Expressionist Studio,” will consider the practices of a representative group of artists and how their approaches define or contradict what we now call Abstract Expressionism.

At Halsey Mckay N.Y.C.

The second installment of Ben Blatt’s “Hovering” will open at the Halsey Mckay Gallery’s New York City space at 56 Henry Street with a reception on Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m. 

Mr. Blatt’s new paintings, his most abstract to date, explore the limitations of the pixelated image and the illusion of reality in the digital landscape. A previous iteration of “Hovering” took place at Halsey Mckay in East Hampton in September.

Guild Gatherings, an ongoing collaborative program designed to engage, cultivate, and connect artists, professionals, and the public on the East End, will take place tomorrow from 7 to 9 p.m. at Guild Hall. Presented in partnership with the East Hampton Arts Council, the evening will include presentations by four artists followed by a reception. 

They are Darlene Charneco, a mixed-media artist whose work draws on network theory, microbiology, virtual worlds, evolutionary theory, and educational tools; Lukas Ortiz, a poet whose interests include fiction, cultural studies, history, current affairs, and memoir; Brian Schopfer, who builds custom surfboards and develops new surfboard shapes in collaboration with some of surfing’s iconic figures, and Steve Roux, a writer and Jack Kerouac archivist who lives in East Hampton. Admission is free, and reservations have been encouraged.

The Southampton Arts Center on Job’s Lane and the Jam Session will present “The Music of Mali,” featuring Yacouba Sissoko and LUMA, on Saturday at 7:30 p.m.

Mr. Sissoko is one of the world’s foremost players of the kora, a 21-string lute-bridge-harp used extensively in West Africa. He has performed as a soloist and with his band, SIYA, toured with a variety of well-known artists and recorded with Harry Belafonte, Paul Simon, and Abdoulaye Diabate.

LUMA, featuring Dan Lauter on saxophone, Jeff Marshall on bass, Claes Brondal on drums, and the singing of Natu Camara, has brought its music rooted in the funk and groove tradition to high-profile events on the South Fork and beyond.

Tickets are $10, $5 for children and students. For those unable to make the concert, it will be recorded live for broadcast on “The Jam Session Radio Hour” on WPPB 88.3 FM.