Treasure Island by Michael Gene Sullivan (review)

Swindlers, buccaneers, corsairs: descriptors for marauders on the high seas, and, according to the San Francisco Mime Troupe, developers looking to build high-rise condos with sweeping views of those high seas. Taking inspiration from the Robert Louis Stevenson classic of the same name, the troupe's 2019 production Treasure Islandfocuses on real-life Treasure Island in the San Francisco Bay, an old naval base, exposed in recent news stories as a place riddled with radioactive contamination due to botched clean-up efforts by the US military. Treasure Island is also currently home to residents who cannot afford the enormous housing price tags of the city they gaze upon across the Bay and who most likely will be displaced again when a project for a ferry terminal, shops, and 8,000 homes, already in motion, comes to fruition. Treasure Island also promises to be a place hard hit in the wake of climate change and rising water temperatures. By linking these social and environmental crises to the familiar story of Treasure Island, the troupe demonstrates that a new kind of pirate and a new kind of island danger are no longer relegated to the pages of fiction, but rather are alive and well in the City by the Bay and thus deserve attention and action.

With serious and significant problems plaguing Treasure Island, a poignant drama or even an opera might seem appropriate genres to tell the tale of this doomed locale. However, for the past sixty years, the troupe's Tony Award–winning recipe for inspiring action and social change is humor, over-the-top antics, catchy and original music, and melodramatic staging in a crisp, seventy-minute free show designed for their outdoor park audiences. The troupe's productions have investigated American policies abroad in The Dragon Lady's Revenge(1971) and Making a Killing(2007); feminism and gender equality in The Independent Female: A Melodrama(1970) and Knocked Up(1993); electoral politics in 1985(1984) and Red State(2006); and the changing dynamics of its home city of San Francisco in San Fran Scandals of '73(1973) and City for Sale(1999).

Treasure Islandcertainly includes the troupe's distinct blend of elements: a song lyric includes "Pirates? Aye, and developers, one and the same, lad!"; and developers complain about being "stabbed in the portfolio" while they clash city plans instead of swords. The production also benefited from superb acting and inventive sound and costume design as it sought to blend Stevenson's classic tale with real-life crises. In its use of pointed humor and examination of problems that are far from over and thus need audience engagement and help, Treasure Islandis a proper 60th anniversary show. The troupe has long believed and demonstrated with its productions that humor is a tool of uniting an audience, for if spectators can laugh together, perhaps they can solve big social problems together too. Treasure Islandcertainly connects to the long legacy of significant political performance by the troupe.

Michael Gene Sullivan wrote this year's production, with assistance from troupe members Ellen Callas and Marie Cartier. The tight and swiftly moving play, directed by Wilma Bonet, contains an array of characters who share names and characteristics to those in Stevenson's novel. Treasure Islandcenters on Jill Hawkins, an earnest civil servant in the office of San Francisco's Housing and Urban Development run by Ms. Livesey. Hawkins is startled when developers, with quite a bit of pirate bravado and swashbuckling, burst into the office, each demanding the support for their respective projects from Livesey. There is one project in particular that intrigues Livesey: residential units on Treasure Island. She assigns Hawkins to assess the viability of the project with a trusted land-use consultant named, piratically enough, L. J. Silver.

Hawkins's trip to the island is full of adventure as she accidently meets a group of residents who describe the near-poverty conditions in which they live and discovers that Silver is really...