Impossible not to laugh

“Men On Boats” stages in Carmel with no men

By STU CLAMPITT
news@readthereporter.com

Carmel Community Players (CCP) is thumbing its collective nose at written history in a comedic retelling of John Wesley Powell’s expedition down the Colorado River. The play, Men On Boats, will stage at The Cat, 254 Veterans Way, Carmel, from April 17 to 26.

CCP’s own summary of this play reads, “In 1869, the American government sent a crew of explorers down the Colorado River to claim land that doesn’t belong to them. In this true(ish) retelling of the 1869 expedition, the one-armed John Wesley Powell enlists a crew of insane but loyal volunteers to trek through the Grand Canyon; they’ll brave dangerous waters, get on each other’s nerves, and threaten to quit at nearly every turn. Played by a cast of people the first journey left out, Men On Boats is a raucous adventure dramedy explores the bravery, determination, and true grit of the historical explorers, in addition to the general foolishness of humanity.”

The Reporter spoke with CCP Director Samantha Kelly to find out what a “true(ish) retelling” is and why there will be no actual men in the aforementioned boats.

“[Playwright] Jacqueline Backhouse took the actual journals from John Wesley Powell because he did document the entire trip,” Kelly said. “You can actually read the journals. She decided that because history, as we know it, is stereotypically written with cis white men – because that’s who went on these expeditions – she decided that she was going to kind of turn everything on its head and give history a new spin.”

That new spin involves characters who all use the names of people on the expedition, but with the caveat that none of the actors are supposed to portray the characters as factual representations of historical figures they stand in for.

“Everybody is playing the people that were on the expedition,” Kelley said. “However, there are no cis white men anywhere in the show. It is female identifying and non-binary performers. We are basically taking an expedition that was documented with fairly good documentation – mostly Powell’s account of everything – and kind of doing a sarcastic play on it. The play itself definitely plays into the fact that the natives were here first, and here we go, naming everything after ourselves, even though it’s been named already. It’s kind of just a new retelling of actual history.”

According to Kelly, the playwright has very specific requirements for casting.

“She doesn’t want any cis white men within the show, but she also doesn’t want the actors or the director to turn themselves into these people,” Kelly said. “So basically, everybody has the names of these characters, but nobody is trying to actually be them. We did enough research on our own at the beginning, where we figured out one of the explorers was actually a Scottish man. And the actress I have playing that person cannot do the Scottish accent. So basically we are recounting the events of history in a new way.”

Along the way down the Colorado River, in and out of boats, there will be a lot of comedy and at least a few fourth-wall breaks.

“We have somebody who, at the very end of the show, recounts what happens to everybody, but then is like, ‘I’m going to tell everybody that I’m the one that rescued you,’ even though they rescued themselves,” Kelly said.

This play is sort of meta-revisionist history as a tongue-in-cheek comedy because there’s a character who’s revising history as it’s being revised to all be done by non-men anyway.

“Yes, pretty much,” Kelly said. “We are revising history while revising history.”

Kelly was in a production of Men On Boats in college in 2017, when the play was so new that they had to work from a draft of the script, rather than a finished dramatist’s copy.

“My first interaction with it, just from the read through when I was in it, we were crying, we were laughing so hard because so many of the jokes just, they landed immediately and we were like, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s hilarious,’” Kelly said. “Then we got to the point where we all started putting our spin on it. And it’s the same with my actors. They started putting their own spin on everything and now the jokes are landing like 10 times funnier. It’s impossible not to laugh for a lot of these situations.”

Kelly called this play a PG-13 piece that she expects to appeal to people in their 20s and 30s because of the specifics of the humor involved, but audiences of all ages should, in her estimation, enjoy the laugh-out-loud humor.

“I say come with an open mind because the title is very misleading, but I think audiences will really, really enjoy it once they get situated within the show,” Kelly said. “It’ll keep them on the edge of their seats the whole time.”

Get Your Tickets

• When: April 17-26. Thursday, Friday, and first Saturday shows at 7:30 p.m. Sunday and second Saturday shows at 2:30 p.m.
• Where: The Cat, 254 Veterans Way, Carmel
• Cost: $20 Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. $15 Thursday.
• Where to buy: Go to carmelplayers.org or call (317) 815-9387 for tickets.