Larger significance

WHy this play now?

Jaclyn Backhaus, who was raised in Arizona, heard of Powell’s expedition in her childhood and wanted to adapt it for the stage. She realized that she was so intrigued by the story for two reasons. One, she felt that she would never be able to play the part of a nineteenth-century explorer, and two, writing it was her way of experiencing their great adventure.

At first glance, the cast of Men On Boats doesn’t appear to match the title. The ten historical figures represented in the play were in fact cisgenger, white, males, but Backhaus’s cast is anything but. The casting note at the beginning of the script reads, “The characters in Men On Boats were historically cisgender white males. The cast should be made up entirely of people who are not. I’m talking about racially diverse actors who are female-identifying, trans-identifying, gender-fluid, and/or non-gender-conforming.”

The non-traditional casting approach is a dominant force in the play, challenging traditional exploration and leadership archetypes. Writing female-identifying, trans-identifying, gender-fluid, and/or non-gender-conforming actors into these roles, highlights the performative nature of masculine, authoritative, and adventurous behavior in a historically male-only space. The idea of male conquest, in the hands of racially diverse women and gender-nonconforming individuals, implores the consideration of the stories we aren’t being told and speaks to the importance of revisionist history. Backhaus remarked in an interview, “If we were forced to keep that sort of accuracy in the main stream of history, we would really only be learning the stories of a select few individuals. It would just limit our scope entirely.”

An additional noteworthy outcome of placing male conquest in new hands is the level of introspection the characters take on unknowingly; their ability to reflect and strategically comment, on their own furthering of the United States' imperial and settler-colonial goals displays the constructed nature of masculinity, exposing imperial ambition not as an inherent destiny of ‘great men,’ but as a performed ideology sustained by myth, privilege, and national self-deception. Throughout the play, the characters critique their own actions, and make comments that seem to guide the audience along with Backhaus’s goal.

So, why this play now?

Discussions of gender are always relevant; as long as the patriarchy is a dominant force in our world, as long as there’s a wage gap, as long as there are laws being passed against transgender people, etc., gender will be relevant. Men On Boats speaks to current cultural conversations about history, identity, power, and storytelling in a way that is humorous, self-aware, and intentionally disruptive. It invites audiences to decenter canonical narratives and to see familiar historical events as constructions that can be examined, questioned, and re-imagined. The play feels especially important right now because it challenges the myths that shape American identity at a time of intense political polarization, human rights debates, and international conflict.

Through the rise of Donald Trump and the nationalist rhetoric pushed by his administration, public debates have greatly increased around immigration, border control, and the “America First” ideology. Men On Boats allows us to wonder who we are actually prioritizing, and what America first really means? What and who are we seeing as America and American? In this climate, a play that questions heroic frontier narratives becomes especially resonant and significant, inviting audiences to reconsider how expansion and the building of a nation have been mythologized; it feels urgent, reminding us that the stories told about a nation can shape its present actions and ideals.

Dunn: “Well, the Natives have lived in these lands for centuries.”

Powell: “Well, they’ve also probably named all this land already. And here we are naming it after ourselves.”