THE 492- foot-long vessel known as the Artship is moored at a berth near Jack London Square. If only the sailors and troops conscripted aboard her during World War II, when she was the USS Crescent City, could see and hear what goes on here now.

You climb the metal gangplank to be greeted by the Captain, who's decked out in the full regalia befitting his office. There's a liability waiver to sign your life away, and then the Captain is leading you and a couple dozen shipmates down to a cargo hold that's been converted into a small theater.

Built in the late 1930s as an art deco luxury liner, the ship was originally known as the Del Orleans. Before it went military in 1941, it cruised the South Seas, picking up exotic fruits while its wealthy passengers tangoed in salons ornamented with carvings of monkeys and parrots. Some of this old glamour has been exhumed and restored by careful hands at the Artship Foundation.

But there's no time for gawking.

Like Alice following her rabbit, you have to keep sight of the Captain ahead. You pass through a deserted galley, where the tables are laden with architectural sketches, maps, and other artifacts from the ship's seafaring past. Finally, you emerge three stories above a large open space. Down below you can see the shapes of four stock-still human figures lying disconcertingly frozen under a single white sheet.

The stage is set.

Even after you descend to the floor of the cargo hold – the theater – it's a challenge to get your bearings. Are the enormous ropes, nets, and riggings dangling from the walls and upper balconies props for the show, or just detritus from the ship's many former lives?

The floor is just slightly off-kilter, or maybe it's something with the angle of the walls. And, down here in the hole, there's no natural light. When the house lights go down for the show to begin, you can't see your own hands clutched in your lap.

The play, Ship Remembers, written by Jakob Bokulich, who also plays one of the main characters, is a series of impressionistic scenes imagining wartime life on the ship. There's a lot about haunting – we are introduced to the ghost of a kamikaze pilot and the lovelorn Marcella d'Alba-Aosta, who dances perpetually in port bars forever seeking the captain who left her behind, not to mention the memories of the sailors' own wives back home.

When the play ends, the sense of unreality lingers.

While you've been immersed in tales of the long-gone sailors, maybe the ship has actually set sail. Perhaps the "audience members" have all been carefully selected to form the makings of a new society on some far-off island – you see a nurse, a carpenter, a scribe, a smattering of women of child-bearing age. Are you the only one who isn't in on the joke?

The Captain leads the assembled back up the ladders to one of the Artship's restored salons, where someone named Jack London George is already at the piano. With the lounge doors open to the night air and the deck, it's clear that you're still docked in Oakland, not floating at large in the Pacific. The actors join the party, some of them still in costume, one of them now wearing a "Free Martha" T-shirt featuring a cartoon drawing of the recently indicted domesticity billionaire.

Down below, a painter, a musician, a tantric sex instructor, and a man who says he's been an art dealer for "three weeks now" admire the painter's latest work while debating the pros and cons of cheese made out of human breast milk. The painter is thinking of making some and selling it at his next opening as a radical representation of the commodification of the body. The art dealer is against the idea, saying he's sure it's been done before.

Back in the salon, you're offered tea, cookies, strawberries, and a little fundraising opportunity. For $20, you can buy an Artship pin to help the foundation that owns the vessel raise a few more hundred thousand dollars – the price of a nice garage in Palo Alto – to bring it up to code. Then, the foundation will be allowed to properly advertise its events to the public, for anyone who wants to come.

The artists behind the Artship have other big plans for it: to convert its other cargo hold into a much larger performance space, to turn its cabins and staterooms into artist studios. But the ship will likely have to tell its next story somewhere else.

The Artship was welcomed to Oakland with great fanfare as part of the city's much-ballyhooed arts renaissance in 1999, but now it's facing eviction by the Port of Oakland to make way for condominiums.

Couldn't the food temple at the new Ferry Building in San Francisco use a taste of art? Surely there must be a safe harbor there for the Artship. Just think of the cross-marketing opportunities with the breast milk cheese!