arts&life

theater

PHOTO BY LYNDA CHURILLA

Adventure
Ahoy!

Juan Chioran stars as Long John Silver in Treasure Island.

SUZANNE CHESSLER CONTRIBUTING WRITER

Innovative director

Mitchell Cushman

sprinkles his magic

on the classic

coming-of-age action

novel Treasure Island,

updating it for the

Stratford Festival.

details

Treasure Island runs through Oct. 22
at the Stratford Festival in Canada.
See the sidebar for this year’s other
productions. For full information,
including travel accommodations,
call (800) 567-1600 or visit
stratfordfestival.ca.

46

May 11 • 2017

M

itchell Cushman has
established a theater
career in Canada
without any negative comments
from one of the country’s go-to
stage critics — Robert Cushman,
his dad, whose reviews have
appeared in the National Post
since its start in 1999.
Of course, to avoid any con-
flict of interest, the father can-
not write about his son, but
that doesn’t mean there is any
absence of attention to the plays
Mitchell Cushman has written
or directed.
“My father comes to see
my work, and we chat about
it off the record,” explains the
writer-director-educator, who
has been recognized by a group
of reviewers with a Toronto
Theatre Critics Award for Best
Director in 2013 and is consid-
ered something of a wunderkind
in Toronto’s theater world. “My
parents are my biggest fans and
incredibly supportive. They’ve
never been anything but cheer-
leaders for what I do.”

jn

This year, as the Stratford
Festival launches its new sea-
son, Cushman’s parents will get
a chance to watch an updated
version of Treasure Island as
directed by their son, who
came up with contemporary
twists. It runs through Oct. 22
among 13 other productions.
(See sidebar.)
“The play was newly com-
missioned with an adaptation
by Nicolas Billon, one of our
leading Canadian playwrights,”
says Cushman, 30, who was
raised and continues to reside
in Toronto. “It looks at Robert
Louis Stevenson’s [1883] story
from more of a 2017 vantage
point,” Cushman says of the
swashbuckling adventure novel
that has inspired every pirate
story since.
“Our story begins with a
father reading the story of
Treasure Island to his young
son and daughter, and it
quickly unfolds into how these
young children imagine the
story will unfold.

“In the novel, almost all
the parts are male, but our
cast is half female. A lot of the
characters, including the doc-
tor and Ben Gunn, are being
transformed into very dominant
females. The character of Ben
Gunn becomes a young girl
who lives in the trees, and we’re
working with a circus aerial per-
former who spends the whole
show dangling on silk.”
In earlier Stratford seasons,
Cushman has directed Breath of
Kings, a cycle of Shakespeare his-
tory plays, and Possible Worlds, a
fantasy about alternate univers-
es. He has been assistant direc-
tor for The Beaux’ Stratagem and
The Merchant of Venice.
“I grew up going to Stratford
among other places because
of my father’s work,” says the
director in his fifth season at
Stratford. “From a very early age,
I knew I wanted to be involved
in theater.”
Cushman started as a play-
wright before completing a mas-
ter’s program in directing at the

University of Alberta.
“I founded my company,
Outside the March, so I could
create work I wanted to see and
didn’t think there was enough of
in Toronto,” he says. “I followed
my passion from one thing to
the next.”
Outside the March, an
immersive and site-specific
company, creates innovative
audience experiences. The com-
pany, started in 2009, is not for
profit, receiving funding from
government grants, individual
donations and sponsorships in
addition to ticket sales, and it
has developed 10 mainstage pro-
ductions, a national tour and a
feature film.
The core idea is to put view-
ers, especially young people,
in the center of the action,
and that goal is brought into
Treasure Island.
“Before the show, the kids
are invited to come on stage
and look through Billy Bones’
spyglass and find pirates,”
Cushman explains. “We’ve