I have been fortunate in going down the full route of the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, Lee's Ferry through Lava Falls, twice in my life. My reading group has read the history and geology of the Grand Canyon and the Colorado River.
This play was about Powell's exploratory, first trip down the Green River and the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. There were virtually no props other than 4 partial boat bows used to indicate the boats.
The play was historically accurate and it was funny! Really creative.
"The cast of this play recreates an 1869 expedition down the Green and Colorado Rivers at the Wild Project in the East Village."
Richard Termine for The New York Times
"Ten explorers. Four boats. One Grand Canyon. Men On Boats is the true(ish) history of an 1869 expedition, when a one-armed captain and a crew of insane yet loyal volunteers set out to chart the course of the Colorado River. This thrilling and widely acclaimed new play by Jaclyn Backhaus returns this summer for a limited engagement at Playwrights Horizons."
“You will surely want to spend time with the hearty title characters of Men on Boats. …A rollicking history pageant…Backhaus’s lively script…brought to infectiously vivid life [by] Will Davis’s highly ingenious direction … The cast, the director and the design team…delightfully recreate the rhythms, rush and terror of life on the water…Rendered in a carefully exaggerated style that both teases and cozies up to the clichés of the archetypal hero adventurer.”
CRITIC’S PICK! – Ben Brantley, The New York Times
Review: ‘Men on Boats’ Blurs Genders in Recalling John Wesley Powell’s Expedition
If summer has you hankering for fitness-testing excursions through the dangerous outdoors, you will surely want to spend time with the hearty title characters of “Men on Boats,” who are churning up bright clouds of testosterone hovering over the Wild Project in the East Village.
The inhabitants of this rollicking history pageant by Jaclyn Backhaus, which opened on Monday night as the final offering of Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks festival of new plays, are fellows who are always up for shooting the rapids, the breeze and edible wildlife. They hail from the United States of the mid-19th century, when assertive, unquestioning masculinity was something that stood tall and unchallenged.
Oh, and just so you know, there isn’t a man in the 10-member cast of “Men on Boats,” at least not according to the strict anatomical definition. On the other hand, as we have plenty of reason to think these days, gender can be as much matter of perception as of chromosomes.
Long before Chastity Bono became a guy named Chaz and Bruce Jenner transformed into Caitlyn, stage performers were regularly changing their sexes, demonstrating the fluidness of the boundaries between male and female. Taboo-flouting drag shows have been a naughty staple of downtown New York theater for many a decade.
But “Men on Boats” is no antic drag show, though it definitely has its antic side. Nor is it a work of sexual politics, in any obvious sense. Ms. Backhaus’s lively script and Will Davis’s highly ingenious direction leave no room for nudging references to any gender gap between cast and characters.
Yet it’s hard to imagine this 90-minute account of a pioneering journey through virgin Western territory in 1869 being nearly as effective, or entertaining, with an ensemble of men. Based on the journals of John Wesley Powell, who led a geological expedition down the Green and Colorado Rivers into the (then) great unknown called the Grand Canyon, “Men on Boats” makes canny use of the obvious distance between performers and their roles to help bridge the distance between then and now.
You see, imagining life in another, distant time always requires a leap of faith. The past has its own language, customs and sense of the human place in the world. Whenever screen and stage artists try to summon what life must have been like long ago, we’re too often conscious of jarring inconsistencies, of the anachronisms that are allowed to slip in.
“Men on Boats” starts from the realization that we can never recreate exactly how it was. This play’s perspective is that of a contemporary reader filtering accounts of another age through her own latter-day sensibility. (It’s not unlike what Lin-Manuel Miranda is doing in his splendid hip-hop musical, “Hamilton,” which opens on Broadway in August.)
That women — embodying 19th-century mores while speaking in a 21st-century vernacular — are portraying men here weaves this point of view into the very fabric of the performance. And I have the feeling that it may be easier for them than it would be for male actors to grasp the artificial constructs of masculinity from Powell’s time.
(For the record, not all the ensemble members identity as belonging to a single gender; so excuse any hedging use of pronouns.)
Not that you’ll be thinking in such meta-theatrical terms while you’re watching “Men on Boats,” once you’ve grown accustomed to its style. The tone is comic, but never cute or camp. And ultimately, you feel, the play respects its bold if fallible pioneers, in all their natural bravery and fearfulness.
The story stays close to “The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons,” Powell’s published record of the historic journey he organized for the United States government. We follow Powell (a crisp Kelly McAndrew), a stately one-armed army major, and his expedition crew as they wend their way through perilous waters to create the first official map of the region.
Along the way, they bond, scrap, joke, reminisce and argue about directions, rather like any group traveling together. The stakes, though, are mortal. Several of the team come close to death when boats capsize. Food rations and surveyor’s instruments are lost to the river. The play begins with 10 men in four boats. By the end, that ratio is six to three.
Continue reading the main story
How this occurs is brought to infectiously vivid life. You could even call “Men on Boats” an action play in the sense that the 1994 Meryl Streep vehicle, “The River Wild,” was an action movie (well, sort of). The men, after all, spend most of their waking hours on the coursing rivers.
And the cast, the director and the design team — which includes Arnulfo Maldonado (sets), Ásta Bennie Hostetter (costumes), Solomon Weisbard (lighting) and Jane Shaw (whose sound design makes room for sweeping cinematic epic music) — delightfully recreate the rhythms, rush and terror of life on the water. This is achieved with four portable prows (standing in for full-bodied boats), some rope and wittily synchronized body movements.
And then there are the men themselves, rendered in a carefully exaggerated style that both teases and cozies up to the clichés of the archetypal hero adventurer. They include the officious Dunn (Kristen Sieh), who not so secretly feels he should be the team leader; Sumner (a marvelously forthright Donnetta Lavinia Grays), a Civil War veteran who dreams of finding a tree to climb and sleep in for days; and Old Shady (Jess Barbagallo, hilarious in a Walter Brennan-esque performance), Powell’s slightly simple-minded brother.
The cast is rounded out by Becca Blackwell, Hannah Cabell, Danielle Davenport, Danaya Esperanza, Birgit Huppuch and Layla Khoshnoudi, and they’re all good company. And while the stage they inhabit is as small as most studio apartments, they are improbably able to make us believe they are indeed roaming wide-open spaces where it’s all too easy for a man, of any persuasion, to get lost forever.
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