Queen Elizabeth Park might not be the first location that comes to mind for a class rebellion in Vancouver, but it’s where audiences will have a chance to see wealth radically redistributed when Itsazoo Theatre presents its new adaptation, Robin Hood, which opens tonight (August 5).

It’s the third summer in a row that the company has taken audiences on a theatrical journey through the scenic heart of the city. Itsazoo’s last two productions here, Grimm Tales and The Road to Canterbury, were also contemporary retellings of older stories, but Robin Hood marks the first time that the park will play itself, as it becomes the site of a standoff between the police and the outlaws in a city where there’s not enough money or housing to go around.

“I wanted to make it contemporary, to take this classic story and look at it through the contemporary lens to see what’s changed and what hasn’t,” explains playwright Sebastien Archibald in his sunny East Vancouver living room. “As the ideas started coming into place, it became more and more exciting to address Vancouver issues, to address things like the Olympics and the Downtown Eastside, with a bit of distance and abstraction, and with the use of social satire to keep the entertainment there.

“And then the notion of the tent city arose,” he continues. “Like, ”˜What if we turned Queen E. Park into a tent city?’ ” At that point, Archibald got in touch with Pivot Legal Society, whose Red Tent Campaign, launched this past January, aims to raise awareness of homelessness and pressure the federal government to fund a national housing strategy.

“They were awesome enough to donate five or six of their red tents to our show,” Archibald relates, “so that we could build a tent city with their tents, which relates directly to Vancouver without beating people over the head with it.”

That same impulse to create a direct but not overt reference to our city’s experience informs Archibald’s version of the Olympics. “The reason why we didn’t single out the Olympics by name—it’s called the International Big Deal, and it’s a combination of sports and commerce being fused together—was to abstract it,” he explains. “Because it’s this abstraction, you can talk about ideology as opposed to talking about the specific events.” That ideology is pretty clear in Archibald’s hilarious “monetary games”, in which athletes representing multinational corporations compete to max out their credit cards or shovel cash into a flaming pit.

Archibald cites political-theatre pioneer Bertolt Brecht’s strategy of alienation as one of the influences on Robin Hood’s style; some of the others are more contemporary. “We’re drawing influences from people like Jon Stewart and The Daily Show, Stephen Colbert, South Park,” he says. “We’re taking all those things and Robin Hood and commedia dell’arte and clown and kind of putting it in a blender.”

When asked what he wants audiences to take from the show, Archibald stresses the play’s fun as much as its advocacy. “I think that the greatest thing that we can do with this production is to bring like-minded members of our community together to be entertained by this piece, but to be challenged and thinking about the issues at the same time,” he says. “What we don’t want to do is preach at the choir, because they already know, right? What we want to do is we want to sing with the choir. We want to create this sense of community and build that level of community.”

As for effecting change, Archibald says, “I don’t seriously expect anybody to watch Robin Hood and then run out and rob some lawyer or university professor and then run down East Hastings, handing out hundred-dollar bills. Although,” he adds with a laugh, “that would be one hell of a thing if it did happen.”