... 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.
