Nobody's Quite Themselves Right Now

Two plays. Ten miles apart. Both about men who decided to stop being themselves — one ends in prison and war, the other in a marriage argument over a name. Neither scheme goes the way they planned. Both are running right now.

Right now on the Lower Cape, two sets of young men are on stage pretending to be somebody else. Nobody coordinated this.

In Brewster, they're swapping draft cards in a 1967 bar. In West Harwich, they're inventing fictional alter egos to escape their aunts. The stakes couldn't be more different. The theme is exactly the same.

The bar. The deal. The reckoning.

Cape Rep's 9-Ball, running through May 31 in Brewster, is the dark half of this accidental pairing.

Playwright Art Devine based the story on true events: in 1967, two young men facing opposite problems made a deal over a game of pool. Larry Doucette had been drafted into Vietnam and was afraid to go. Richie Feinberg wanted desperately to serve but was blocked by a criminal record. The solution seemed straightforward. Driver's licenses were paper back then — no photo, no verification. You just became someone else.

"It was easy to swap identities then," Devine told the opening night audience. "There was no photo."

It does not go well.

Devine wrote 9-Ball twenty-five years ago. It premiered at Cape Rep in 2001 — Devine's first play, and the first of his three world premieres there — and came back again in 2013. Now it's back for the 25th anniversary, with Devine directing again. He brought everything: the original set, built by designer Dan Joy and held in storage between productions; the original sound design by Tim Healy, late 1960s and early '70s music running underneath every scene; and a cast deliberately young — some of them 17 and 18 years old, genuinely the ages of the characters.

He also cast his son.

Macklin Devine plays Richie Feinberg — the brash one, the one who wants to go to war and has no idea what that actually means. Art Devine wrote this character before his son existed. He is now directing his son through a story about a young man who made one irreversible decision in a bar. Elijah Corbin plays the other half of the swap, the nervy, brainy Doucette, and the contrast between the two is what the play turns on — two very different people discovering that the identity they borrowed comes with a whole life attached.

The ensemble — Izaak van der Wende, Ju'el Martin, Jimmy Sawyer, Cam Torres, Jakov Schwartzberg, Zack Johnson, Hugo William Ceraldi — carries three or more roles each, switching between a prison and a military base with enough clarity that you're never confused about which disaster you're watching. Just shaken by both.

The Cape Cod Chronicle called it "a powerful play worth seeing again." That's the short version.

Two hours with intermission. Not suitable for children. Will stay with you for days.

→ Get tickets at caperep.org | 508-896-1888

The drawing room. The scheme. Lady Bracknell.

Cape Cod Theatre Company/Harwich Junior Theatre's The Importance of Being Earnest, running through May 24 in West Harwich, is the lighter half — though not by much, if Xavi Villejo is in the room.

Oscar Wilde's 1895 farce follows two young men who have each invented fictional alter egos to escape their social obligations. Jack has a wicked brother named Ernest. Algernon has a perpetually ailing friend called Bunbury. When those inventions start colliding with the women who love them — both of whom have independently decided they could only ever love a man named Ernest — everything unravels at speed.

Directors Nick Nudler and Kirsten Peacock have taken Wilde's exquisitely mannered dialogue and surrounded it with physical comedy that is genuinely unhinged. The text is intact. The bodies are doing something else entirely. It works — because the text was already absurd underneath all that propriety, and Nudler and Peacock just let it out.

But the thing people are talking about is Villejo as Lady Bracknell.

The character is the imperious Victorian gatekeeper of marriages, origins, and social standing — the one who decides who is an acceptable person and who is, regrettably, not. Villejo plays her with vocal inflections that make every syllable sound like a verdict, and facial gestures so precisely calibrated that the opening night audience did not so much laugh as simply give up. The performance lands with full Victorian authority — and then some.

TJ O'Leary and Camille Branch play the scheming pair with timing that makes 131-year-old dialogue feel like it was improvised this morning. Jasmine MacDonald and Emma Miles commit to their Ernest obsession with the kind of conviction that makes the absurdity feel inevitable. Nansea Flynn steals scenes on the way in and on the way out, every time.

The theater itself is worth noting. The theatre's home at 105 Division Street is the old Ocean Hall building, built in 1865 according to CCTC's own history — it's been a gathering hall, a movie house, and since 1965, when Harwich Junior Theatre purchased it after their original home was razed, a stage. Betty Bobp founded HJT in 1951. In the summer of 1952, the new theatre staged Cinderella, Tom Sawyer, and The Ghost of Mr. Penny on a total budget of $100. She passed away in 1997, just short of the organization's 50th anniversary. The building is still full.

Earnest closes May 24. There are only two weekends left.

→ Get tickets at capecodtheatrecompany.org | 508-432-2002

9-Ball runs through May 31, with Saturday matinees on May 16, 23, and 30. The Importance of Being Earnest closes May 24. Two plays, ten miles apart, making the same accidental point: pretending to be someone else goes exactly as well as you'd expect.

📍 Cape Rep Theatre — 3299 Route 6A, Brewster 9-Ball | Wed–Sat 7:30 p.m. | Sun 2 p.m. | Through May 31 Saturday matinees: May 16, 23, and 30 at 2 p.m. 508-896-1888

📍 Cape Cod Theatre Company/HJT — 105 Division Street, West Harwich The Importance of Being Earnest | Fri 7 p.m. | Sat–Sun 4 p.m. | Through May 24 $32 adult / $30 senior / $21 youth (Confirm times with box office before publishing as a hard calendar listing) 508-432-2002