THEATER : A Tale of Two Times : Mark Lee’s ‘Pirates’ underscores the relevance of history and the price of personal freedom.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water . . . .

Pirates are on the prowl again in Mark Lee’s “Pirates”--opening tonight at the Road Theatre--the parallel stories of a contemporary history teacher and her 18th-Century counterpart, real-life adventurer Anne Bonney. “It’s about how we disguise ourselves in everyday life,” explains the playwright, 42. “In the 18th Century, women had to disguise themselves as men to get what they wanted. You see that duplication with the (modern-day) character Helen Raymond, who has to swallow her opinions to move through the academic environment.”

One impetus for the story was Lee’s then-18-year-old niece, who admitted that she’d never heard of the Spanish-American War.

“I think if you watch MTV, you begin to think that history, what happened in the past, is not relevant,” says the Santa Barbara-raised, Mar Vista-based writer. “Well, I happen to think that it is. In Los Angeles, flying into the future, we forget there is a meaning in the past.”

To ease the transition, the interior of the Road Theatre has been transformed into a boat--complete with sails and blowing fans.

“The audience forms the configuration around the boat, so they’ll feel very much a part of the play,” says director Brad Hills, who staged “Vig” last year at the theater. “The characters themselves exist on (an unspecified) plane; they sail along and touch each other.”

Hills, who originally staged a reading of “Pirates” four years ago at Circle Rep West, has long lobbied to mount a full production of this work. “It’s very much about freedom,” he says, “the prices people pay for their own personal freedoms.”

One differentiation between the two worlds is the language.

“The pirates speak in 18th-Century criminal slang,” says Lee, who won South Coast Repertory’s California Playwrights Competition in 1990 for this work. “It’s such a rich language. Using characters from another time allows a writer to be more expressive; a lot of times one is captive to contemporary dialogue.”

Yet he enjoys the modern structural freedoms that allow fantastic shifts in time and place. “People often focus on the negative aspects of film and TV. But one positive is that audiences are much more sophisticated in terms of accepting these kind of leaps.”

Lee’s other stage works include “California Dogfight” (which was developed at the Victory Theatre in Burbank and later played at the Manhattan Theatre Club and London’s Bush Theatre), “Rebel Armies Deep Into Chad” (which played at the Long Wharf in New Haven and San Diego’s Old Globe) and a new adaptation of “Moby Dick,” which is scheduled to premiere next year at Trinity Rep in Providence, R.I. Last month, Lee also finished writing his first novel, “The Stork King,” in which Africans and Americans look for the lost tribes of Israel.

A graduate of Yale, where he majored in political science, Lee refers to the late Robert Penn Warren as his mentor. “He taught me it’s possible to be a writer and live a graceful life.” Initially, Lee wrote poetry, some of which was published in the Atlantic Monthly and the London Times Literary Supplement. Then, in the 1980s he worked for the London Daily Telegraph as a reporter in Uganda (the inspiration for his play “Rebel Armies”), where he was ultimately expelled for writing about military atrocities.

“That experience totally changed me,” Lee says. “When I came back to the States, I stopped writing poetry. I needed to express myself through dramatic characters.”

WHERE AND WHEN

* What: “Pirates.”

* Location: Road Theatre, 14141 Covello St. No. 9D, Van Nuys.

* Hours: 8 p.m. Fridays through Sundays. Ends June 5.

* Price: $12.50 general, $10 students and seniors.

* Call: (818) 785-6175.