Director and playwright Mary Zimmerman is something of a legend at Berkeley Rep, having brought her stunning Metamorphoses there in 1999 before going on to win a Tony Award for direction after taking the play to Broadway. She is both a scholar of myths and a magician of old-fashioned stagecraft — and recent Berkeley Rep audiences will recall her 2012 production The White Snake, based on an ancient Chinese legend, which was a moving adaptation rendered mostly through low-tech means, like waving bands of fabric that become, with the right lighting, the sea. She also took on the children's story of The Arabian Nights in a 2008 production, something that was near and dear to her as a child. She has taken similar care in evoking the the world of 19th Century pirates and buried treasure in her adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, which like her other pieces is a coproduction with Chicago's Lookingglass Theatre, and had its West Coast premiere last night in Berkeley.

Treasure Island was the OG pirate story, and the one that gave us both the peg-leg character of Long John Silver with his parrot, the phrase "Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum," and the very first treasure map to an exotic island with X marking the spot where it's buried. Zimmerman's version preserves the sense of a young boy's childlike wonder at this thrilling world while also keeping the emotional and intellectual dimensions of the original novel which have been lost in later caricatures of pirates.

Here, Silver (played with great, sneering wit by frequent Rep performer Steven Epp) is arguably evil and quite dangerous, though also attractive and cunning enough that both the audience, and young Jim Hawkins (played by the very articulate and winning John Babbo), who is the story's primary POV character, are entranced by him. We see Jim leave his mother's side helping run a small seaside inn and quickly take a step into manhood as he navigates the dynamic, morally slippery realm of treasure hunting, and the laws of the sea.

Broad, effective performances by Christopher Donahue, in the dual roles of Billy Bones and Redruth, and Matt DeCaro as the Squire, add humor and further anti-glamour to the pirate tale.

And throughout Zimmerman gives us a fully realized fictional world, set firmly in Stevenson's 19th Century and complete with scary villains, violently drunken sailors, and sea shanties. Original music by Andre Pluess helps usher us into that world, played by three roving musicians who spend much of the play onstage and providing the soundtrack.

Equally transporting is the brilliant set by veteran designer Todd Rosenthal, which consists of a large, concave ship deck that juts out into the three-quarter round stage of the Peet's Theater, and that, magically, does not stay stationary when the crew sets off to sea.

Zimmerman says, in discussing why Treasure Island resonated so much with her, "I think we all long for more life, more life, more life, and I don't mean in terms of years, I mean in terms of more adventure, more not knowing what the next day is, what the next wave is, what the weather is, where the ocean is going to take us." That sense of thrilling anticipation is imbued in Zimmerman's telling of this story, in which the audience is introduced the sailors' ribald and insecure world at the same time young Jim is, mouths agape, but ready to sing along.

All told, it's a play for adults that is nonetheless bound to make you feel like a kid again, and is guaranteed not to remind you of Johnny Depp.

Treasure Island plays through June 5. Get tickets here, and be sure to ask for the under-30 discount if you're under the age of 30.