All-female band Ace of Cups back on stage 50 years later.
The first thing you might notice is the sheer number of local female actors onstage: 10, and all with Actors’ Equity contracts. These artists have been the highlights of scores and scores of Bay Area productions, but usually, you only get to see two, maybe three of them at a time, with the bulk of the roles going to men.
The next thing you might notice in “Men on Boats,” which opened Thursday, Nov. 1, at ACT’s Strand Theater, is that those women, playing the crew of John Wesley Powell’s 1869 rowing expedition to the Grand Canyon, get to do things writers don’t normally let women do. Spoiling for a fight, they go chest to chest, like beasts huffing and puffing on each other’s faces. They inspire their demoralized comrades with impassioned, vision-filled speeches underscored with John Williams majesty (Kate Marvin did the sound design). Drunk on the spirit of adventure, overestimating their own abilities, they make stupid mistakes, like leaving themselves dangling from a cliff (giant cutouts of rust-colored maps become
layers of promontories in Nina Ball’s set design).
Nothing inhibits the characters in Jaclyn Backhaus’ play from being their truest selves, no matter how oddball, how craven, how impetuous. It’s like they’re selfishly themselves, in a way female characters don’t always get to be, and director Tamilla Woodard’s cast wrings buckets of comedic juice from those possibilities. Liz Sklar brings a nutty professor vibe to Powell. Not unlike many a contemporary CEO, her leader is so caught up in a vision for the trip, furiously penning poetic descriptors like “vermilion” in a travelogue, that Powell is blithely unaware of what crew members have to do to make the trip possible. Annemaria Rajala, as Old Shady, excels in both disquieting quiet and disquieting song. Bursting into an improvised ditty inspired by a fish dinner, Rajala conjures a whole lifetime’s relationship with the plate before her; it’s like you can see when times were bad for them, but then together she and her fish overcame their obstacles.
ACT master of fine arts student Katherine Romans makes an exhilarating debut as Bradley, the youngest crew member, who’s as compulsively chatty as Zosia Mamet’s Shoshanna in HBO’s “Girls.” Watch as her Bradley declares he’ll take off his pants to create a makeshift rope. It’s with all the patriotic pride as if, by disrobing, he’s saving America.
Sarita Ocón’s Dunn talks about his patented fishnet as if it’s a natural extension of his enormous genitalia. Libby King’s Sumner fantasizes about napping in trees and dying of frostbite with an imaginative abandon as full and as huffy as a little boy’s. When Amy Lizardo’s Hawkins skirmishes with a rattlesnake, the performer so adroitly summons the invisible reptile that you see — and flinch with — its every wriggle and snap.
Even more joyful than individual performances, however, are the ensemble sequences in which the clumsy boats — suggested by oars and a strap-on prow, or only through the actors’ movements — course through river rapids. The way the cast members sway in sync, splay floating appendages or convulse their whole bodies, you see surface swells, underwater currents or blasting waterfalls. (Danyon Davis did the movement coaching.)
Not every roller-coaster-style scream lands with the same impact, though, and sometimes the between-rapids scenes dive only as deep as patter. But on the whole, “Men on Boats” subversively yet joyfully upends our manifest destiny narratives. On American stages in recent years, has any shade been more deservedly thrown than when Ute tribe members Tsauwiat (Lauren Spencer) and the Bishop (Lisa Hori-Garcia) scold the begging expedition members, “We thought you were professional boat people”?