Department of Theatre & Drama

Written by Jaclyn Backhaus
Directed by Emily Lyon (BFA ‵13, directing)

In 1869, a team of 10 men led by naturalist John Wesley Powell set out on an expedition to catalogue the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon—the first white settlers to do so. In 2015, playwright Jaclyn Backhaus set out to satirize the expedition and its bold yet arrogant explorers in a comedic tour-de-force that Time Out New York called a “thrilling, gender-flipped slice of manifest destiny.”

With a cast made up entirely of women, Men on Boats pokes fun at what New York Magazine calls the explorers’ “cockiness and cluelessness” in their attempts to exert their control on an unfamiliar (and already populated) environment. “The tone is comic, but never cute or camp,” says the New York Times. “And ultimately, you feel, the play respects its bold if fallible pioneers, in all their natural bravery and fearfulness.”