Mary Zimmerman likes to adapt old stories.” That’s what it says in the playbill for her latest, a new stage version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. And it’s true, to a point. She likes to take old chestnuts (Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Kipling’s The Jungle Book) and turn them into theater. But when I say true to a point, it understates, with true midwestern effacement, what she really does.
Ask someone to describe a pirate and that person will probably come up with variation of the book’s fictional one-legged, parrot-toting trickster-villain, Long John Silver. Ask what pirates do and there’s a good chance you’ll hear a variation on the central plot of Treasure Island: pirates look for maps that show where they can find buried treasure.
The acting is pitch-perfect, virtuosic without being overmuch. The young man who plays Jim Hawkins, John Francis Babbo, perfectly embodies the pluck and grit of the book’s adolescent narrator. And Christopher Donahue, playing multiple roles, disappears, chameleonlike, into each of them, delighting without showing off.
Through 1/31: Wed-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 2 and 7 PM, Sun 2 and 7:30 PM Lookingglass Theatre Company, Water Tower Water Works 821 N. Michigan 312-337-0665lookingglasstheatre.org $50-$105
