There is a single line in Jaclyn Backhaus’s Men on Boats, now running at City Theatre Austin through April 12, that cuts through everything: the rapids, rhetoric, gender politics, and anachronistic slang. John Wesley Powell, the one-armed Civil War veteran leading the first U.S. government-sanctioned expedition down the Colorado River in 1869, hits his lowest point on stage and announces, “Others were here beforehand.”
That should be the whole play.
Men on Boats premiered in 2015 at New York’s Wild Project as part of Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks Festival, earning a New York Times Critics’ Pick before transferring to Playwrights Horizons. The Village Voice’s praise described it as “a smart, funny, poignant meditation on gender and historical memory.” It arrives in Austin with considerable pedigree and a premise that still carries a charge: ten explorers, four boats, one canyon that was never, in any meaningful sense, undiscovered.
Backhaus’s central casting note requires that people who are not historically cisgender white males, including women, nonbinary, trans, and gender-fluid actors, play the entire crew. The intention is to hand the mythology of male conquest to those historically excluded from it.
I spoke with a few audience members at the March 27 opening about this choice. They thought the device was unnecessary, and questioned if it pushed the material so far in one ideological direction that it obscured the more interesting argument the play actually makes: that Powell and his crew embodied the arrogance of men in power who believed they could rename canyons, cliffs, and geographic formations millions of years old simply because they were the first white settlers to cross them. That argument is the play’s genuine subject. When it surfaces, the material earns itself entirely.
Director Andy Berkovsky’s production staging decision is unambiguously right. The four boats are simple wooden frames, carried and repositioned by the actors throughout to indicate movement across the river. No set required. The bodies do the work, and the effect is clean and immediate.
Allison Fifield as Powell commands the stage with authority, arrogant and earnest in the right proportions. Mackenzie Allen as Old Shady, Powell’s brother, holds the one relationship the script gives us any real context for. A long-haired blonde aboard the Maid of the Canyon, handy and capable of cooking fresh fish from the river, delivers the evening’s most grounded and fully inhabited performance.
But structural problems follow the script to Austin. The four boats and their crews exist largely in isolation from one another over two hours, raising a question that never gets answered: what are the backgrounds of these people, and why were they assigned to these particular boats? Powell named the Emma Dean for his wife, which we know. We never learn who Kitty Clyde is. The No Name explains itself. The Maid of the Canyon does not.
The mixing of period diction with modern slang and casual profanity raises its own questions. Why collapse two centuries of language into one theatrical register? The history itself does not require that kind of assistance. When the No Name capsizes and its crew must redistribute across three remaining boats that are visibly too small to hold them, the physical logic breaks down entirely. Small choices add further confusion: one nonbinary actor performs in lipstick while no other actor playing a man does. In a production built on intentional incongruity, unexplained incongruity becomes a distraction.
The play’s bias is well-founded. It takes the better part of the evening for crew members to relate to one another, mirroring perhaps the fractured communication across four boats that had brief contact with one another for the duration of the actual expedition.
What history records is sobering. Three men who abandoned the expedition just before the final rapids, convinced they could not survive, met a fate the play wisely leaves the audience to discover on their own. Powell and the five who stayed pushed off into the current and emerged from the canyon two days later. Centuries before any of them arrived, people inhabited and named the terrain they crossed.
That is a story worth telling. When Men on Boats tells it, you hear it clearly.
Men on Boats runs through April 12 at City Theatre Austin, 1507 Wilshire Blvd., Unit #1, Austin 78722. Tickets and information: info@citytheatreaustin.org or 512-470-1100.