ENTERTAINMENT

New play explores love between a Whydah pirate and Wellfleet 'witch' + 6 more shows at Cape Cod theaters

This week’s new shows feature favorite pop music and Cape Cod's own history and folklore. Cape Rep Theatre in Brewster presents a world premiere about a famous pirate legend, while Cotuit Center for the Arts hosts a sequel to last year's rocking hit.

At our website https://www.capecodtimes.com/entertainment, you'll find reviews of recently opened shows that include those playing at Cape Cod Theatre Company/Harwich Junior Theatre, Harbor Stage Company in Wellfleet, Provincetown Theater, Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater and College Light Opera Company in Falmouth.

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Check those out when choosing your entertainment, and for new shows, take a look:

Anthony Teixeira, left, sings mainly Billy Joel songs, and John Connelly sings mainly Elton John tunes in the sequel tribute show "Piano Men II" at Cotuit Center for the Arts.

Elton and Billy return

The piano men are back — Cape Cod’s version, anyway. Just weeks after Elton John rocked Gillette Stadium, Cotuit Center for the Arts and Michael Dunford present “Piano Men II: A Musical Tribute to Billy Joel and Elton John.” The show, conceived and directed by Dunford, is a sequel to his hit show last year featuring the tunes made popular by the two iconic singers.

Performances are at 7:30 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays and 4 p.m. Sundays Aug. 18-Sept. 4 at the Cotuit center, 4404 Falmouth Road (Route 28). Tickets: $45, with discounts available; artsonthecape.org or 508-428-0669, ext. 0.

This show again stars Anthony Teixeira as Joel and John Connelly as John with their top-notch stage re-creations of the two music performing top hits. They’re joined on stage by Emma Fitzpatrick and pianist Misao Koyama with The All Star Band.

Cape Rep tells stories 'From the Heart of the Wreck'

When Kirsten Peacock and Nick Nudler were looking for a play to write, they found a pirate, a supposed witch, a doomed love and multiple versions of the same Cape Cod legend.

The world premiere of the resulting production, “From the Heart of the Wreck,” focuses on the romantic and tragic background behind the sinking of the pirate ship Whydah 300 years ago off the Outer Cape. The new play will be presented Aug. 17 through Sept. 10 at Cape Rep Theatre, 3299 Route 6A, Brewster. (Tickets and information: https://caperep.org/.)

Kirsten Peacock is a co-creator and actress in "From the Heart of the Wreck," having its world premiere at Cape Rep Theatre in Brewster.

Both Peacock and Nudler have performed at Cape Rep in recent years, and the couple created short works as part of the company’s virtual “The November Project” show in 2020. They say they had talked with Cape Rep leaders about wanting to create a full-length play there, and, based on themes they’d been pursuing, producing artistic director Janine Perry and associate artistic director Maura Hanlon suggested that the story of  Bellamy and Hallett might fit.

It was a story the two off-Capers had never heard.

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“They sort of pitched it as ‘Just have a look and see what you think, no pressure’ … and of course we looked at it and (thought) ‘This is incredible!’” Peacock says in a joint phone interview. “The next time we chatted they were, like, ‘So what do you think?’ and we were ‘Great, here’s the plan of what we want to do.’ So we sort of hit the ground running and they’ve been really supportive of us.”

Research came first, and the two delved into the many varying versions out there — as, so often happens in folklore, Peacock notes — about the dark-haired young man who became pirate Black Sam Bellamy after falling in love with a Wellfleet woman. Goody Hallett's actions and their love went against Puritan traditions that ruled the time and she was ostracized while Bellamy sought the riches to build them a life. He returned successful in the Whydah, but it was wrecked in high seas, proof of which was found nearly 40 years ago in Cape waters by explorer Barry Clifford.

Visiting the Whydah Pirate Museum in West Yarmouth that displays what was found was a revelation, the two playwrights say. “We were astounded by the depth of history there,” Nudler says, and Peacock recounts her feeling almost like she was traveling through time to see objects the Whydah sailors actually used centuries ago.

“Seeing the tangible objects of something that we've been reading so much folklore about was astonishing,” she says. “But the most defining moment was when we walked into a room and there were these pewter plates that had an engraving on (them), but also had the scoring of their forks and knives. It was incredible. I just was so struck by how tangible and real the people on the ship” seemed to be then.

More than one way to tell a story

As they worked, the two say, they just kept getting more drawn into the various aspects of the different versions of the story. “There is this wonderful blend of a traditional hero's adventure journey and also this contemplation on the feminine experience, especially in this time when women were held back by society a lot, and anytime they acted any way out of order, they were called a witch. So for me, it’s a question of agency and empowering women and also it’s a love story,” Peacock says. “With one story, you could easily follow Sam's trajectory, but then when you weave it in with hers, it suddenly becomes a really rich dynamic and a play between different worlds. That’s what excited me the most about it.”

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Nudler says the two also latched on to the idea how, over hundreds of years, different people crafted their own versions of what happened — from the romance to the piracy to the wreck and Hallett screaming as she watched it happen from a high dune.

The playwrights’ challenge, he says: “How do we tell a story while also keeping the richness of folklore steeped within the story?”

The answer turned out to be including three different versions in one play, with Nudler and Peacock playing Bellamy and Hallett and Ari Lew, BT Hayes and Coleman Churchill playing three different storytellers. The couple says creating the work was a fully collaborative project with those actors and stage manager Tori Mondello – with the time from starting the research to presenting the play to audiences encompassing only about five months.

Nick Nudler plays Whydah pirate Sam Bellamy in the world premiere he co-wrote of "From the Heart of the Wreck."

“This is definitely the largest, most involved piece that we've ever created together,” Nudler says of working with Peacock. And in the quickest amount of time, he notes, but "this actually has provided us a really amazing, intensive opportunity to really delve into how we work as theater creators in the room in a very truncated amount of time with a very saturated sense of creativity. So actually it's been a really amazing process, to deal with the time crunch, but also being able to live in the joy and delight of doing this impossible task.”

The choice of staging and Ryan McGettigan’s set design also work into the idea of crafting a story, Peacock says.

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In the piece, “we sort of enter into this (ship) wreckage, of a bunch of different pieces of furniture and crates and platforms, which during the course of the play, the three storytellers (use to) create different worlds, then they break them down and create the next world,” she says.

Not following authoritarian rules

If people know the story at all, they likely know more about the pirate and the wreck than the woman on shore, but Peacock and Nudler say they worked for “parity” between the two stories and how both “pirate” and “witch” chose to live outside society’s rules.

Hallett “has so much agency taken away from her from the very beginning because that's the way that Puritan society worked — that women had no rights and there was no respect given to women at all, and especially not if they were going against the rules of society at the time,” Peacock says. “So we wanted to really speak to her experience and the way that she finds the strength to wrest herself from the society that she was living in and carve something for herself.”

Meanwhile, pirates were creating their own democracy and rules about how they wanted to live “to best serve that community,” she notes. “It's interesting to watch these two humans craft their own worlds in a way, even though it wasn't really her choice.”

These two creators and their collaborators have crafted their own world, too, on the Cape Rep stage, using physical and verbal storytelling, experimenting and improv to fashion a new theatrical look at versions of a centuries-old, Cape-centric tale. The details of all of that were still changing at the time of the interview, and will likely evolve more as performances begin, the writers say.

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“Once we get an audience, (the play is) absolutely going to change because it's so based on this storytelling fashion,” Peacock says. “I think that the audience every night will help inform us on how we tell the story. And there’s something fun about that.”

Contact Kathi Scrizzi Driscoll at kdriscoll@capecodonline.com. Follow on Twitter: @KathiSDCCT.