Tina Landau Brings The Light To ‘Floyd Collins’ On Broadway

One of the most anticipated shows this Broadway season is Lincoln Center Theater’s production of Floyd Collins. For three decades, devoted fans of the musical have been waiting for the production to have a major run and the time is finally here.

The show centers on a Kentucky cave explorer, (or spelunker), who becomes pinned by a falling 27 pound rock inside a narrow cave and cannot free himself. Based on a true story, the 1925 rescue attempt drew a media circus. Reporters and gawkers from around the nation flocked to the mouth of Sand Cave where Floyd Collins was trapped 200 feet below.

Floyd Collins is the brainchild of Tina Landau and Adam Guettel, who began collaborating when they were students at Yale. They met when Landau was seeking composers for a college revue that she was directing.

Landau still recalls how she felt hearing his submission. “Adam’s music spoke to me instantly and deeply,” says Landau, who was a driving force behind the musical SpongeBob SquarePants, which received 12 Tony Award nominations. Last season she directed Paula Vogel’s Tony-nominated play, Mother Play, and she has directed over 20 Steppenwolf Theater productions.

Guettel’s composition rocked her world. “It was scrawled out on a napkin and he played it for me live. And I thought, ‘I’ve never heard anything like this.’ His music can be utterly simple and direct at times and so complex and sophisticated at others,” says Landau. “Above all, inside of Adam’s music is a longing, a yearning—a desire for “up,” as I call it. And this leads to the most soaring and heart-wrenching melodies and music imaginable. His music expresses what I feel in my deepest soul.”

The duo adapted Floyd Collins for The American Music Theater Festival in Philadelphia, where they were commissioned to produce and write the show. Then in 1996, Floyd Collins had a brief but cherished run off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons.

Landau, who wrote the book, has always been Floyd Collins’ director. While Adam Guettel wrote folk and bluegrass-inspired music and lyrics about life, love, connections, and the joy of recognizing those gifts. During the song “How Glory Goes,” Floyd reflects on the end of life and sings:

“Do we get to look back down at who we love? Are we above? Are we everywhere? Are we anywhere at all? Do we hear a trumpet call us and we’re by your side?”

For Landau, reviving Floyd Collins, especially now, is particularly meaningful. With a cast that features Jeremy Jordan as Floyd Collins, Jason Gotay, Sean Allan Krill, Marc Kudisch, Lizzy McAlpine, Wade McCollum, Jessica Molaskey, Taylor Trensch, Cole Vaughan, and Clyde Voce, many members of the 1996 creative team have returned to work on this current production. They include music director Ted Sperling, orchestrator Bruce Coughlin, sound designer Dan Moses Schreier and lighting designer Scott Zielinski,

“It’s very special to have a show that you made 30 plus years ago become one that you can visit in the present,” says Landau who also directed and co-wrote Redwood, which is currently on Broadway, starring Idina Menzel.

“Floyd Collins has become a gauge, a marker, against which I can measure my own change as a person and an artist,” says Landau, who wrote additional lyrics for Floyd Collins. “It was one of the first shows I did that brought my work to the attention of so many people in the industry when I was young. And here it is today, bringing the work to the attention of so many new audiences.

Nominated for six Tony Awards this season, including Best Revival of a Musical, Landau discovered Floyd Collins’ story when she saw a paragraph written about him in Reader’s Digest or a similar publication. She was drawn to the dichotomy of a person stuck in their own grave while people are benefitting from above, making a spectacle of it all. In fact, the paradox feels more prescient than ever to Landau.

“That juxtaposition speaks perfectly to the unfortunate reality of the ways in which our society often uses personal tragedy for entertainment or profit,” says Landau. “And even now more so than when we first wrote the piece in the early nineties. But in addition to that, the juxtaposition really serves as a larger metaphor for the individual’s relationship to others – how we long to be recognized and understood and included. But we are ultimately on our own journey, which must be taken alone.”

Jeryl Brunner: Why is Lincoln Center Theater the ultimate place to do Floyd Collins?

Tina Landau: We have wanted to do Floyd Collins at Lincoln Center almost from the moment we last worked on it. It has always been our dream. For a whole variety of reasons: my schedule, Adam’s, Lincoln Center’s—the stars never aligned. And then suddenly, they did!

We have waited patiently and that’s paid off. And it’s such an honor that we have been able to schedule it as the last show of the theater’s out-going artistic director, the iconic and cherished André Bishop.

Brunner: And what was appealing about the Vivian Beaumont Theater?
Landau: We have always held out for the Vivian Beaumont as a space to stage it in because of the ways in which the theater itself is cavernous. We knew how the show worked in a small, cramped space but I always felt there was a flip side to that which was part of our show as well: the openness of the world above Floyd—the ground and the sky. The dark, tight, narrow passageways of Floyd’s entrapment is defined and increased by its extreme contrast with the vast space above and beyond too.

Brunner: What is one of the first pieces of theater that you created?

Landau: I grew up in a kind of show biz family – my parents, [Edie and Ely Landau], were film producers who took me to see theater from when I was a toddler. I always knew I wanted to make these things as opposed to be in them. I did the typical shows in the basement.

The earliest real play I wrote and directed was in fifth or sixth grade. It was called Love, Tyler, and was inspired by a painting in our house of three old men sitting on a bench. I wrote a play about these old men, one of whom announces he’d be returning to his Irish homeland in order to die. The play ends with a goodbye letter he writes to his friends, signed of course, “Love, Tyler.” And it’s a mediation on living a good life and facing death bravely. In an Irish dialect. Written by an 11-year-old Jewish girl. How and why the heck and why did I end up writing THAT?! Now that I think of it, maybe it’s an early precursor to Floyd Collins. Ha!

Brunner: It seems both Redwood and Floyd Collins center on individuals who go inside nature in search of salvation. Do you find that to be the case?

Landau: Yes, in both Redwood and Floyd Collins an individual goes into nature on a kind of quest—one to find escape, in the case of Jesse in Redwood, and one to find glory, in the case of Floyd. And in both cases, nature answers in an unexpected way which leads them both to something very different than what they had hoped for or anticipated. But as the writer Joseph Campbell said, “Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.” That is true for both Jesse and Floyd.

Brunner: What role has nature had in your life?
Landau: Personally, nature has become my great solace and existential guide. It’s an ever-present example of how we might live, face obstacles, and find resilience and renewed life. During the writing of Redwood I had recently lost a beloved immediate family member. And it was my time in and amongst the trees that allowed me to feel and process and move through my grief.

Brunner: How did you update Floyd Collins for the Lincoln Center production?

Landau: Adam and I wanted both to honor the original and also allow ourselves to reexamine it with the fresh eyes and ears of our older, more experienced selves. We’ve known there was something mysterious and wild about how we first made it and we certainly didn’t want to mess with that beyond recognition. So we’ve tried to listen to it and let it lead the way.

At the same time, we never felt fully finished with Floyd Collins, and we’ve had an on-going list of minor improvements we’ve wanted to make for years now. So we’ve done those—mostly streamlining the over-abundance of idioms in the script and adding musical extensions or fleshing out of some musical moments that were more fragmentary before.

Brunner: What do you hope people come away with after seeing Floyd Collins?

Landau: I hope people leave Floyd Collins more aware of and sensitive to how we sometimes sabotage each other. At heart, people are usually just trying their best to do the right thing. [The show is] an invitation to see our neighbors, co-workers or family members and give grace to them. To see value in those with whom we may disagree and remind ourselves how we must hold tight together if we want to get anything done.

But more than anything, I hope people can see and feel the exquisite, aching beauty of life through what Floyd goes through. I hope they experience those final moments of his ascent as relatable and piercing and transcendent and heartbreaking and joyous and true. That aspiration, that desire for light, and the ultimate recognition of our mortality. I believe those are universal. And they are worth reckoning with, together, in the dark of a theater.