All Aboard the Kitty Clyde’s Sister

Named after… well… Kitty Clyde’s Sister

Old Shady

Walter Henry Powell (A.K.A Old Shady) is a thrill-seeker who enjoys exotic cuisine, soul music, and pockets. Regarding the expedition, Shady says (to himself) “Come for the adventure; stay because you’re dead.”

Old Shady is played by  Briana Sprecher-Kinneer. Briana graduated from the University of Iowa and the University of Northern Colorado with Bachelor’s degrees in Theatre and English. Past projects with OpenStage include Assistant to the Choreographer for The Full Monty, Luciana in The Comedy of Errors, the ensemble in Monty Python’s Spamalot and Rent, Dale Pittman in The North Plan, Desdemona in Othello, Columbia in the 2011 production of The Rocky Horror Show and serving as the stage manager for King Lear. Briana also writes and directs and is a co-founder of Actors’ Gym Collaborative Theatre, for which she has written several pieces including The After Party: A Cabaret-Meets-Psychotherapy Musical Extravaganza, (in which she also performed), In the Bouncy Castle of Your Heart, and A Life Between: The Story of Joseph Antoine Janis and First Elk Woman, (a piece for chamber music and narration).

George Young Bradley

If the phrase “ignorance is bliss” took human form it would be George Bradley, and if you told him that, he’d still probably be stoked.

George Bradley is played by Rebakah Goldberg, a Denver resident making her OpenStage Theatre and Fort Collins debut with Men On Boats. She has recently worked with The Boulder Ensemble Theatre Company in The Wolves and Benchmark Theatre in The Arsonists. Alongside acting, she also works with playwrights and artistic directors who are producing new work in workshop and staged reading settings. She trained at The Denver Center for The Performing Arts and obtained a Bachelor of Arts in Theatre at Florida Gulf Coast University, where she worked under professional artists from all over the country.

Men on Boats

By Jaclyn Backhaus

Directed by Denise Burson Freestone

January 18 – February 15, 2020


“A thrilling, gender-flipped slice of manifest destiny.” -Time Out New York

Ten explorers. Four boats. One Grand Canyon. Men on Boats is the true(ish) history of an 1869 expedition when a one-armed captain and an insane yet loyal crew set out to chart the course of the Colorado River. Inspired by John Wesley Powell’s actual travel logs, Backhaus’s nimble and ingenious script is provocative, laugh-out-loud theatre, performed by a diverse cast of non-male actors who infuse America’s historic myths of male conquest with a sly blast of satire. With the speed and force of whitewater rapids, this off-Broadway sensation creates perilous canyons and death-defying cliffs out of sheer imagination, shaping an innovative and innately theatrical experience.

Playing at Lincoln Center Magnolia Theatre – 417 West Magnolia Street

Grant Support
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Grant Support
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