War and trumpets Pugilist Specialist and Ambassador Satch BY IRIS FANGER

The distance in artistic intent between Cape Playhouse, sitting in historic splendor on its manicured lawn in Dennis, and the funky beach shack that houses Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater is greater than the drive up Route 6 that separates the two venues. Cape Playhouse aims to please its neighbors, a habit cultivated over 78 summers of entertainment. The feisty WHAT has something different in mind.

Adriano Shaplin’s taut but confusing military polemic Pugilist Specialist is getting its New England premiere at WHAT (through July 16). Conceived, written, and performed by Shaplin and the Riot Group, which was founded in New York in 1997 to generate new writing for the stage, the play won a coveted Edinburgh Fringe First in 2003. But you have to wonder whether the timeliness of its topics — think Abu Ghraib and Lynndie England — and its subtext of American brute force run amok didn’t turn the critics’ heads. At Wellfleet, under Wesley Savick’s brisk direction, the play’s Orwellian vision of Marines as obedient servants riled by a woman grunt who protests left many in the audience scratching their heads as they tried to sort out the plot from the variety of hot-button issues. It doesn’t help any that Shaplin’s soldiers speak mainly in political mumbo-jumbo and philosophical discourse, along with the requisite four-letter outbursts.

The plot has four Marines — three white men and one smart-ass woman — planning to take out a high-level person, code-named "The Bearded Lady," in some unnamed Middle Eastern country; their mission also includes killing his six sons and six daughters, just because they’ll be in the room. Who gave the order and why is never made clear — a Pinteresque detail that further obscures the arc of the action. Dan Joy’s blank-walled setting, which is furnished only with several benches, the unisex fatigues worn by the actors, and their in-your-face relationship to the viewers in the tiny theater all add to the No Exit claustrophobia.

Lieutenant Emma Stein is the munitions expert who’d gone public on some unspecified complaint earlier in the year and made the front page of the New York Times; no surprise that she’s persecuted. Mandy Schmieder plays her as an ambitious soldier burdened with testosterone envy that’s leavened by smarts. The trio of men — Gabriel Kuttner as the subservient communications specialist, Rick Gifford as the trigger-happy sniper, and Tom Kee as the hard-nosed Colonel Johns — form a familiar but effective male front. It’s not that the political manipulation of soldiers in a war zone and the insistence on following orders no matter what aren’t matters for consideration. But the scattershot script and an ending that’s melodramatic beyond belief overwhelm the intelligence of Savick’s production.

Back across the Orleans rotary, Cape Playhouse offers the broadly appealing musical revue Ambassador Satch: The Life and Music of Louis Armstrong (through July 2). Written by James P. Mirrione and three-time Tony nominee Andre De Shields, who also plays the title role, this show can expect to have the audience up on its feet and cheering by the end. The estimable Stanton Davis on trumpet heads up a swinging quintet, and they’re abetted big time by the hot and sassy Harriet D. Foy as a quartet of Armstrong’s wives. But the script is little more than a hanger for De Shields, one of Broadway’s most charismatic performers. Whether the big grin and the pushed-out eyes he sometimes affects convince you he’s Armstrong hardly matters; it’s worth the ticket price to see him in action. And I doubt that anyone on Cape Cod or elsewhere this summer will stage a more rousing arrival than the New Orleans–style Dixieland parade that serves as his first entrance.