The Garden of American History: When the "Men on Boats" Are Mostly Women

            How do you write a play about some historical event important in its time, of interest today because of its time, without the naive celebratory tone of the history textbook or a neo-Marxist condemnation of the entire enterprise on ideological grounds? And also without limiting your cast of characters to the brave, occasionally squabbling 19th century white men who did the deed?

            The SpeakEasy Stage Company's production of  "Men on Boats" by Jaclyn Backhaus meets all those challengers. Directed by Dawn Simmons, the production fills the play's boats -- manned in 1869 by army veterans, adventurers, a lone English tourist (in over his head, so to speak) and led by a one-armed river-running specialist and Civil War casualty John Wesley Powell -- with a racially mixed cast of young actors and, mainly (eight out of ten), actresses.

            This bold casting choice means that the play is not merely a tale of what happened when Americans first succeeded in exploring the length of the Colorado River from Wyoming through the magnificently walled Grand Canyon. It's also a tale of who we are today, with women and African-Americans (and immigrants from everywhere else) doing their share, and then some, of rowing our boats and keeping us all afloat.

            The Powell expedition was a product of particular moment in American history. The four boats were carried by train from Chicago to a convenient disembarkation point in Wyoming in May of 1869, just two weeks after the Transcontinental Railroad was completed. Seven members of the expedition were Civil War veterans. Most of the crew was recruited by Powell among the mountain men he encountered en route to his starting point. Powell lost his right arm after being shot in the Battle of Shiloh in 1862. A professor of geology, he had explored rivers from childhood, rafting the Mississippi River and its tributaries.

            A scientist with a youthful sense of adventure that struck playwright Backhaus, who draws on Powell's journal for her play's factual basis, as remarkably and rather wonderfully childlike in a man who has seen and suffered from that worst of adult inventions, war. Her play's playful tone "sprung from a place of childhood" she discovered in his journal, the only preserved acciubnt of the expedition. "He taps into that kind of role," Backhaus states in an interview that appears in the SpeakEasy program notes, "because there's a natural childlike curiosity to wanting to know more about the world."

            When, as playgoers, we think of what to expect from a play about a historical event, we are likely to picture a few drawn-from-life figures in the role of the play's main characters, whose differing ideas or ambitions or world view or other conflicts will carry the plot toward some sort of crisis and resolution.

            But in "Men on Boats," the occasions of conflict between Powell and navigator William Dunn, are a secondary element, though they lead to a dramatic confrontation before the

river journey's triumphant conclusion. Instead, the piece's principal action and much of its charm lies in the crew's vigorously theatrical confrontation of a river we cannot see. Its spirit, humor, and the expression of that youthful wonder Backhaus found in Powell's journal lies in the cast's ability to make their characters transparent and their embrace of the challenge of riding a wild river play as a species of life-threatening fun. They are, in some sense, though danger threatens at every turn in the river, and hunger sticks in its own oar, kids on an truly excellent adventure.

            Interestingly, "Men in Boats" has been compared to "Hamilton," the interview tells us, because the racially mixed and mostly female casting raises the question of who gets to tell our country's stories. Backhuas says her play raises the question "What men and women and people do we want as part of our collective history?"

            Her play also provides for an encounter with local Native Americans, giving those who suffered from a white nation's drive to explore an entire continent -- their home before the Europeans came -- an opportunity to cast a cold eye on the "government" that sponsors this expedition. 

            The chief take-away for the audience, to my mind, is the pure pleasure of experiencing a brilliantly imaginative theater piece delivered by a lively and talented young cast that manages to convey that childlike sense of wonder in a spectacular, death-defying journey.