🎭 The Cape’s Boldest Literary Conversation This Spring

On Tuesday evenings this March, inside Nauset Regional Middle School, a group of Lower Cape readers will sit down with Hamlet.

And then proceed to dismantle him.

Hamletcetera, led by Brewster’s own Bob Chibka — longtime Boston College English professor turned Cape resident — isn’t a performance. It’s a sustained literary excavation.

Seven Tuesdays.
March 3 through April 14.
5:00–6:30 PM.
$80.

And the question at the center is deceptively simple:

What happens when tragedy gets flipped?

The Flip

Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (1601).

Then:

• Tom Stoppard’s absurdist Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
• James Ijames’ Pulitzer-winning, queer Southern reframing Fat Ham
• Lauren Gunderson’s feminist re-imagining A Room in the Castle

Minor characters become central.
Masculinity gets interrogated.
Women seize narrative control.
Revenge turns sideways.

It’s fan fiction with literary muscle.

It’s the long arc of cultural revision playing out in paperback copies around a school classroom table in Orleans.

Why This Feels Different

This isn’t a casual book club.

Participants will need to purchase three paperback plays plus a PDF.

There’s homework.

There’s structure.

There’s intellectual weight.

And yet it’s happening in the same building where kids line up for dismissal and basketball practice.

That contrast is part of the charm.

Serious, evolving literary conversation — not in Cambridge, not in Boston — but here, on the Lower Cape, on a Tuesday evening.

The Instructor Matters

Bob Chibka spent three decades in the Boston College English Department (1984–2015). Essays. Fiction. A novel.

Now he lives in Brewster — “happily ever after,” as the bio puts it — still enjoying “being pushed around by sentences.”

There’s something quietly Cape about that.

Retired doesn’t mean done thinking.

The Details

🎭 Hamletcetera
📍 Nauset Regional Middle School, Orleans
🗓 Tuesdays · March 3 – April 14, 2026
⏰ 5:00 PM – 6:30 PM
💵 $80
👤 Instructor: Robert (Bob) Chibka

Class dates: 3/3, 3/10, 3/17, 3/24, 3/31, 4/7, 4/14.