‘Men on Boats’ Opens Streaming at CMU (Sat., 3/13/21)

MEN ON BOATS by Jaclyn Backhaus. Carnegie Mellon School of Drama, streams March 13-15. 

Alpha males: John Wesley Powell (R), some years after his 1869 expedition, with Taú-gu, Great Chief of the Southern Paiutes. (photo: John K. Hillers, early 1870s)

Who remembers the days of old, when men were men, hearty and bold? New York-based playwright Jaclyn Backhaus read about those days as a girl growing up in Arizona, and she gives them a historically accurate but comically revisionist treatment in Men on Boats. The play is drawn from John Wesley Powell’s journal of his geographic expedition of 1869, in which he and nine others traveled down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. All were rugged, skilled outdoorsmen. The trip was hair-raising, though, as their areas of expertise did not include steering wooden rowboats through ferocious, rock-infested rapids that the local Tribal people knew better than to mess with. Backhaus puts a twist in history by specifying that the expedition’s madly macho men be played by “actors who are female-identifying, trans-identifying, gender-fluid, and/or non-gender-conforming.” Although some modern rugged individualists have walked out of previous productions of Men on Boats, the toughest audience members stay with it and find the play a hoot. Carnegie Mellon’s School of Drama floats an online production March 13 through 15. 

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