Changing Roles: 9-Ball at the Cape Rep

We’ve all wondered what would happen if we just walked away from our lives, took on a different identity, left our hometowns and escaped whatever future felt inevitable….

Some people do it. Some people live to regret it.

It’s the terrible choice made in Art Devine’s 9-Ball by two young men in 1967: swap identities for five years, then reunite to end the charade. Try on someone else’s life. But here, there’s a catch: one of them has been drafted to Vietnam, and the other is about to go to prison.

Which alternative is worse?

It’s Larry Doucette (Elijah Corbin), a diffident young man in town, who at the beginning finds himself in a rough-and-tumble pool hall, looking for gangster-wannabee Richie Feinberg (Macklin Devine). Doucette has clearly done his homework and seems to know already that Feinberg will agree to switch roles and go to Vietnam; presumably he thinks prison is the better alternative.

And from that moment on, the play absolutely explodes with action, with pathos, with sound. The oldest cast member is 24, so audiences get a real feel for the testosterone, naïvete, and bravado that belong to young men—and especially to young men in such extreme situations.

Dialogue, set changes, and competing parallel scenes move at a whirlwind pace. Doucette finds his facility with numbers to be his ticket to a powerful position in the prison system; Feinberg is combative before he’s ever shipped overseas, but earns the trust of those around him. Perhaps surprisingly, they both survive.

Every member of the cast is exemplary; with the exception of the two leads, every actor plays a dizzying number of roles. Cape Rep veterans Jimmy Sawyer, Cam Torres, and Jakov Schwartzberg are joined by newcomers Ju’el Martin, Zack Johnson, Izaak van der Wende and Hugo William Ceraldi, and every one of them is pitch-perfect—which is strikingly hard to do as they are constantly switching roles, from the pool hall to the prison to the insanity of Vietnam. And they’re all superb, and almost frighteningly physical.

There’s one scary-crazy guy in every Vietnam play or movie, and Cam Torres is that guy here. And I have to call out Izaak van der Wende’s portrayal of a prison junkie, who in his hands becomes both frightening and pathetic.

But it’s the parallel lives of Richie and Larry that allow for fully developed characters to speak to an era that may have forgotten its past. Actor Devine exhibits explosive energy—he reminded me of a young Chris O’Donnell—and Corbin gains assurance as he enters into the economy and society of Upstate.

At the end of the day, neither alternative is good, and writer/director Devine isn’t shy about underlining the poor choices afforded by the era to those who didn’t have the cushion of money, prestige, or education.

The past may well be a foreign country where they do things differently, but Devine—aided by brilliant set design by Dan Joy and fight choreography by TJ Glenn—takes audiences on a tour that’s anything but nostalgic… with the exception, of course, of the music, familiar and evocative to those of us who grew up listening to it.

One trigger warning: Devine doesn’t soften anything. The pain of the characters is sometimes difficult to watch, and the profanity, racial slurs, violence, and noise that were common to the era and the ages/class of the characters are pretty constant.

That said, this play is both brilliant and disturbing, and is very much worth audiences’ time and emotion.

photos by Bob Tucker/Focalpoint Studio

review by Jeannette de Beauvoir