A 12-year-old girl named Jane Hawkins is about to chase pirate gold across the stage of Austin's State Theatre. Treasure Island Reimagined: Jane Hawkins and the Pirate's Gold premieres Friday and Saturday, recasting Robert Louis Stevenson's classic adventure with a female lead and a storytelling format three decades in the making.
Director and writer Jason Neulander built the show around a tribute to his own daughter, Scarlett, who first read Treasure Island with him when she was 9 and later, at 18, suggested he adapt it for the stage, according to The Beat. Renaming the protagonist Jane rather than Jim let Neulander explore themes of girl power and agency inside an 18th-century pirate tale, per the same account. As The Austin Chronicle reports, Neulander has said the show is meant to speak to “the 12-year-old in everybody,” and the story still centers on gold, a mysterious island, and Long John Silver reimagined as a treacherous corsair.
Three Actors, Two Dozen Voices, and Live Foley
Onstage, the entire production rests on just three performers: Cheyenne Gibbs, Dane Parker, and Neulander himself, who together voice more than two dozen characters while also generating all of the show's live foley sound effects, according to CTX Live Theatre. Those sound effects trace back to a technique Neulander's longtime collaborator Buzz Moran designed, letting actors create the effects themselves rather than relying on prerecorded audio, per the Chronicle's reporting. The two-hour performance syncs those live voices and sounds with more than 1,200 hand-drawn comic book panels illustrated by Johnny Dombrowski, colored by Lee Duhig, and set to an original orchestral score composed by Austin-based composer Sam Lipman, according to the Performing Arts Center at Purchase College.
The Chronicle's reporting notes that Neulander and Moran are marking 30 years and one month of working together, a partnership that began in 1996 when Tony Nozero asked Moran to join the first rehearsal of The Intergalactic Nemesis. That earlier project, which Neulander helped create, evolved from a radio play into what became known as the “live-action graphic novel” format, eventually touring the world and playing on Broadway, per the Chronicle. The Austin Chronicle's separate history of the format adds that Nemesis also reached the Kennedy Center and the Edinburgh Festival Fringe as it built the template Treasure Island Reimagined now follows.
From Alamo Drafthouse Workshops to a National Tour
Before its formal premiere, Treasure Island Reimagined went through workshop presentations over the summer, paired at Alamo Drafthouse Mueller with classic action films including The Adventures of Robin Hood and The Terminator, according to the Chronicle. What began as one planned performance grew into three, and the show also got a local sneak preview during the inaugural CABAM! Con pop-culture convention at the Austin Central Library, as Hoodline previously reported.
A companion graphic novel version of the story is set for publication this month, lettered by David Hutchison, per the Chronicle. Neulander has also developed a 55-minute abridged version of the show aimed at daytime school performances for students in fifth grade and up, along with an educational guide connecting the material to national core standards, the Chronicle reports.
After its Austin run, the production heads out on a 19-city national tour beginning in October, opening at the Alden Theatre in McLean, Virginia, and eventually stretching from New York to Alaska, according to the Chronicle. The Performing Arts Center at Purchase College separately lists Virginia, New York, Kansas and Alaska among the tour's stops. The show is produced in partnership with Chemistry Laboratories and Shaw Entertainment Group, per that same account.
Modern Greed Dressed in Pirate Gold
Neulander has framed the pirate gold at the center of the plot as a stand-in for contemporary excess, estimating in an interview with Fanbase Press that the treasure would equal roughly $350 million in today's money. That scale of wealth, he suggested, reflects how corruption and greed tempt both heroes and villains regardless of century.
The world premiere lands at a historic address for Austin theater. The State Theatre on Congress Avenue opened on Christmas Day in 1935 as the city's first purpose-built movie palace, later merging operations in 2000 with the adjacent 1915 Paramount Theatre under the nonprofit Austin Theatre Alliance, according to ARQA. In November 2025, the alliance launched a $65 million “Shine On” capital campaign, which had already raised $27 million before its public launch, to fully restore the Paramount and reconfigure the 90-year-old State Theatre with flexible seating for up to 500 patrons, according to KVUE.
Treasure Island Reimagined: Jane Hawkins and the Pirate's Gold runs Friday and Saturday at the State Theatre, according to the Chronicle, before the cast and crew pack up for their multistate journey. For Neulander, the show closes a loop that started decades ago with Moran and, more recently, with his daughter's suggestion that he give Stevenson's tale a new hero.
