‘Men on Boats’ takes an imaginative approach to adventure.
During my childhood, objects were more than what they were. The floor was lava, my bunk bed was a cannon-armed ship and the shadowy refuge underneath the blankets I draped over the dining room chairs was a castle on the verge of alien invasion.
Like many others, I eventually lost the capacity for imagination. The physical world became literal. Things simply were. I’d like to think not everyone stopped pretending, though — that perhaps the playwrights, poets and singers of the world are simply bunk-bed captains and pillow-fort kings who refused to grow up.
Jaclyn Backhaus’ “Men on Boats” is, on the surface, a historical retelling of the first U.S. government-sanctioned expedition of the Colorado River, which took place in 1869. But it is, in fact, a much simpler and more appealing activity. “Men on Boats,” at Main Street Theater through March 11, is a childlike exercise masquerading as an adult event.
I mean that as a high compliment.
Women wearing wigs and hats hold elongated metal hula hoops around their waists. These are our men on boats, adventurers in a faraway land who look into the audience and describe foaming waters, rattlesnakes and spiky peaks that cut the Utah horizon like a knife.
And what a majestic adventure that takes place entirely in our minds. “Men on Boats” is no different than what a child does as he gallops down the cul-de-sac on the stick that is a horse. It’s no accident, we’re reminded, that we call them “plays.”
Actor Celeste Roberts is a one-armed Civil War veteran named John Wesley Powell leading nine other men down a river filled with waterfalls and whirlpools. You can tell when the danger is coming because the entire group looks ahead in the same direction with wide eyes. Their hula hoops start to clatter and gyrate. Sometimes a crewmember loses an oar. There are no actual oars in this production. But watching the actors react to their invisible surroundings, you can imagine a wooden paddle bobbing in the water as the rowboats push on, down a river that never seems to end.
Powell and his men are in a marathon against death. When night approaches, the men dock their rowboats and make camp, eating for dinner whatever they have left in their stores. After a boat capsizes, the actors toss the hoop onto a section of the set that juts out from the ground. Alas, grain and other provisions are lost. So the crew must use burlap sacks to trap fish in the river. They must boil rotten bacon in an attempt to salvage the river-soaked meat. They even cook snakes.
In the morning, they row on. If a crew is in trouble, they yell
out “line!” (The actors can relate). If the waters are too rocky, they must travel on land, holding their boats over their heads. At least the boats shade them from the sun, one man says. At least we salvaged the whiskey, says another.
Doesn’t this sound nearly impossible to stage? Plays, by and large, take place in one location and move their stories along through dialogue. Actionoriented productions typically use lights, puppets and moving scenery to convey to a poor approximation of cinema.
But “Men on Boats” refuses to let physical limitations dictate the kind of story it wants to be. It does not use any special effects. Nor is it a drama. It is simply an adventure story, a classic Western tale about man versus nature that takes place over thousands of miles of river and desert. And it works.
The play, in other words, relies on the assumption that part of each audience member is still a child. That’s why the decision by Backhaus to have the play performed by only women functions so well — it furthers her thesis that theater is an art form of open-minded possibility. Being pro-diversity, the play suggests, means being pro-imagination.
Which also means that the Main Street production, directed by Philip Hays, is a great showcase of Houston’s actors, featuring inventive, often physical performances from Roberts, Patricia Duran, Mai Le, Lydia Meadows, Candice D’Meza and others. When someone asks you to be a man in a boat in the 1800s, you must sell it. These performances are funny, light and appropriately anachronistic — TLC’s pop song “Waterfalls” plays in the background during intermission — yet “Men on Boats” never feels cheesy.
And certainly it doesn’t when a crewmember looks upward after a life-threatening ride down a waterfall and sees a giant wall of rock, bursting from the earth on both sides. We see red lights and hear “in-thepresence-of-God”-style music, but beyond that we see the faces of these men on boats. Their expressions are like mirrors. The actors are in awe, marveling at something they cannot literally see but can certainly picture in all its glory. They convince us to do the same.