Yes, the Long Wharf, with the help of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and New Haven local Donald Margulies, has deliberately set out to bring a new generation into the theater. The full title of Margulies' new play, Shipwrecked! An Entertainment. The Amazing Adventures of Louis de Rougemont (as told by himself), demonstrates his debt to that staple of the modern child's library, the eighteenth-century traveler's tale.

The play, like its title, is a gleeful parody -- more celebration than satire -- of the genre. Louis, a sickly boy "from the wrong side of the Thames" wheedles his way onto the crew of a pearl-diving expedition and into a 30-year whirlwind adventure that includes surviving on a desert island, rescuing an aboriginal damsel-in-distress, and learning how to ride on the backs of giant sea turtles. When he returns to England, Rougemont, first greeted as a hero, later falls out of credibility and favor with the English people. In a brief coda to the play, we see him spend his twilight years defending his honor and trumpeting the subtle power of imagination against the dulling force of narrow rationalism.

The play is quite a feat of storytelling, crisply executed by an energetic cast and an imaginative set of designers. Of particular note is actor Jeff Biehl who brings unstinting aplomb to his roles -- including drunken sailors, slobbery dogs, aboriginal chieftains, and yes, even Queen Victoria (a role for which he will surely win a "Best Use of a Tea Cozy" award). Imagine the sheer energy and raw technique required for such a presto change-o performance, and that will give you a good sense of the production's tone and style as a whole.

This showcasing of naked technique extends into every aspect of the play's production. In what Margulies describes in a program note as an effort to counter the spectacular expectations of the reality TV and CGI generation, Shipwrecked! relies on bald theatrical "magic." All stage effects, whether the creation of an aquatic landscape with two disco balls, the suggestion of a volcano with a straw, a Dixie cup full of water and a microphone, or the shadow-play image of a marauding sea-monster, are staged in full view of the audience, in the grand, old tradition of bare-bones theatricality. The imaginative world of the production comes to life in surprising new ways, thanks to such effects -- but I have to believe that the presence of giggling, inquisitive children in our midst did the most to put me in the right marvelling mindset for them.

What Shipwrecked! gains in gusto through this production, though, it does somewhat lose in consistency and complexity. Perhaps in an attempt to create a self-contained space for this stage 'magic' to occur, Shipwrecked! fails to follow through on its promise for direct address to the audience. For the first few minutes of the play, lights remain up on the audience as De Rougemont speaks to us directly and makes clear that the setting for the play is no fictive cosmos, but rather this very theater. However, the houselights soon fade away and the actors' awareness of the audience dwindles to nothing--except for that highly conventional kind of 'audience address' where it is all too clear that the actor is talking to 'an audience.' An audience that somehow, confusingly, is not us.

Although the production goes out of its way to be 'theatrical,' it doesn't allow the full theatricality of a cast that acknowledges and feeds off of the audience's reactions. If the goal was to celebrate the vibrancy of theatrical form, as Margulies suggests in his program notes, then why not have a little more fun with its liveness?

As for the loss of complexity, don't expect sophisticated postcolonial comment: the "aborigines" are unashamedly cartoonish savages. And don't expect extraordinary emotional texture: Rougemont narrates the abandonment of his aboriginal wife and children with a disturbing lack of emotional turmoil. I realize the play was meant to be 'fun for the whole family,' but as one of the adult cohort, I wish that director Cabnet had tossed a few more pearls our way.

Margulies does, I think, hint at a more complex meaning. Upon his return to London, De Rougemont finds himself in a world who's scientific capabilities and rationalistic mindset are more-than-equipped to "debunk" his tales. Suddenly, we realize that De Rougemont was born a century too late. The kind of swashbuckling traveler's tale he's peddling only made sense in a world less globalized, an England less imperial.

There is, in the script if not in this production, a painful sense of nostalgia. The nostalgia of us adults for the adventure stories of our youth, the nostalgia inherent in the retrospective form of such travel narratives as Shipwrecked!, De Rougemont's nostalgia for the heyday of travel stories in the eighteenth century, and the nostalgia of those same eighteenth-century narratives for the seventeenth century's spirit of global exploration and discovery. But this is not an interpretation that Cabnet and his cast encourage.

Instead, they stick with blurred edges and primary colors. The solution? Bring a child with you. You may find, as I did, that the unique perspective of children can be infectious.