University of Miami's ambitious "Floyd Collins" probes endlessly challenging conundrums

... just saw Adam Guettel and Tina Landau’s Floyd Collins musical at the University of Miami’s Ring Theater with Larry, Gary, and Roger, and I wanted to jot down my impressions of it…

Resurrecting a critically-acclaimed Off-Broadway production that ran for only 25 performances in New York in 1996 (it had been eclipsed to some extent by the tragic circumstances of Jonathan Larsen’s RENT), the ambitious collaboration by my colleagues and students at UM’s Theatre Arts department thoroughly impressed me. Crisply directed by JV Mercanti, with masterful musical direction of the hybrid bluegrass/Bartok-esque score by NDavid Williams, and stunningly energetic and percussive choreography by Christine Kellogg, the unconventional experimental musical was without doubt one of the more challenging pieces I’ve witnessed in a college setting. The ensemble cast of student actors and orchestra fully embraced performing the difficult score with precision and abandon. With costume design by K. April Soroko, lighting by Bryan Kaschube, and a striking set by student designer Lauren Coghlan, the creative team vividly transported the audience into the world of rural 1920s Kentucky. Although the opening night of the production was hindered by a few technical problems that are inevitable in an endeavor of this scope and likely to be fixed in subsequent performances, the talented ensemble cast and orchestra succeeded in not only telling a moving and entertaining story, but more importantly, in challenging the audience to ponder our current situation vis-à-vis Nature, Technology, and the American system.

On the surface a true story about an entrapped Kentucky cave explorer who dies of hunger and exposure after 16 days underground, for me, Floyd Collins resonated as an extended metaphor about human life on the planet earth in the postmodern era. As in the present, in which we are grappling with the effects of climate change after two centuries of industrial exploitation of the earth’s resources, in the play (based on actual events from 1925), a man’s desire to harness nature for his own material gain backfires. In the wake of Floyd’s broken dreams, a callous and selfish society watches as the earth swallows him whole.

Could Denton Welch's "In Youth Is Pleasure" inspire queer youth of today?

In Youth is Pleasure by Denton Welch

Set mainly in the environs of an upscale hotel in the British countryside at which Orvil is staying with his mildly effete wealthy father and two condescending older brothers, Denton Welch’s mid-20th-Century novel  In Youth Is Pleasure chronicles the vibrant inner life of Orvil Pym, a sensitive and imaginative teenage boy who is just coming of age. The narrative offers a seemingly unrelated sequence of events, built around the various illicit pleasures Orvil experiences over the course of his summer vacation after a debilitating first year at boarding school. Left to the endlessly entertaining devices of his own amusement by his distant father and annoying elder siblings (whose reaction to Orvil’s presence ranges from teasing to embarrassment to total disregard to fraternal protection – the one closer in age is relatively kind if a bit gruff, while the eldest is the most overbearing, fear-inducing, and cold), Orvil explores the hotel, its grounds, and surrounding countryside without supervision.

Over the course of the novel’s 152 pages, Orvil engages in various activities that could be described as transgressions against the ‘normative’ expectations of male teenage behavior. For example, he steals a tube of lipstick from a department store, then hides it in the back of a drawer in his hotel room, only to coat his young lips with the cheap sticky waxy-tasting paint several chapters later while admiring his mirror, before applying it freely over his bare body as if it were tribal war paint, encircling his nipples with the bright red pigment, creating gash marks alongside his ribs and forehead, etc., then dancing about wildly in his hotel room before scurrying frantically to wipe it off, jolted into action by his elder brother’s door knocks.

Other examples of Orvil’s ‘queer’ behavior include his breaking into a Catholic Church and becoming drunk on stolen altar wine while exploring the various nooks and crannies of the church including the inside pockets of the neatly-hung choir robes, and his fascination with a book in the hotel lobby dedicated to physical exercise that features photographs of semi-naked male athletes demonstrating the movements. Most beguiling for this reader was Orvil’s rainy day interlude with a ruggedly sunburnt parson in a cottage in the woods that begins with an invitation to warm himself by the wood stove, climaxes in his exploration of the feeling of the inside of the parson’s leather shoes that he’d been instructed to polish, and ends in Orvil’s binding the priest’s hands and feet with white rope before a rapid no-turning-back exit in spite of the cleric’s pleas for him to return on the following day. More innocuous passages narrate Orvil’s delight in finding the perfect broken China saucer to buy at an antique store, or in taking afternoon tea in the hotel lobby after an afternoon spent canoeing alone, in which a dive into the river precipitated the joy of weightlessness amidst the flowing water, followed by thrilling heat of the sun as he lay on the riverbank to dry.

What makes the novel most engaging is the way that Welch’s seductive, evocative prose captures the delights of youth objectively yet with palpable balminess: the writing – in third person omniscient voice – allows the reader to indulge in the unjaded feeling of interacting with an endlessly alluring world that is seemingly full of possibility, but is nevertheless clouded by the constricting feeling of social expectation that becomes ever more omnipresent with the encroachment of adulthood.

2014 marks the 50th Anniversary of the birth of gay theater.

In 1964, Lanford Wilson's "The Madness of Lady Bright" and Robert Patrick's "The Haunted Host" opened at the Caffe Cino in Greenwich Village. These two groundbreaking plays paved the way for subsequent GLBTQ theater. Published by the Gay and Lesbian Review, Worldwide, my essay explains how these plays did more than just open the door for gays on stage: by making visible and public a new liberated consciousness, they helped open the closet door in general, as well.

Robert Patrick and William Hoffman in
“The Haunted Host,” December 1964 production.

Tom Bigornia, Neil Flanagan, and Lucy Silvay in
“The Madness of Lady Bright.”
Photo by Conrad Ward from the 1964 revival.

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