Afraid of the Depths

Staging choices kneecap Floyd Collins's epic caving tragedy.

- SARA HOLDREN

THERE ARE MOMENTS of stillness in Floyd Collins that are unquestionably beautiful. Tina Landau—co-author of the musical with composer Adam Guettel and director of its first New York revival since its Off Broadway premiere in 1996—knows how to space bodies across a stage. She literally co-wrote (with Anne Bogart) the book on Viewpoints, a movement-based improvisation-and-rehearsal technique developed from the work that the experimental choreographer Mary Overlie was doing in the '70s. On the wide stage of the Vivian Beaumont, two of the Viewpoints, spatial relationship and shape, find particularly striking expression: As Floyd Collins begins, Landau arranges her ensemble in silhouette across an expanse of dirt floor, a soaring blank canvas of firmament behind them. Throughout the play, she loops back around to these shadow tableaux—groups of men huddled on a slab of rock near a cave entrance, lines of bodies with balloons and other carnival paraphernalia, jaunty black cut-outs against a pink sky.

As frozen snatches of theatrical time, these snapshots create quiet bursts of aesthetic pleasure in the brain. The problem is that most of Floyd Collins occurs in the action between tableaux, and there the show quickly loses its grip, both visually and dramaturgically, on our attention. Granted, it's tough material. The story, based on real events, follows the plight of a farmer turned caver in 1920s rural Kentucky who spends the majority of the play's two and a half hours trapped deep underground in a tunnel no bigger than a coffin. (Spoiler alert: His fate is not bright.) But risky content is far from enough to derail a strong musical; sometimes, from murderous barbers to postapocalyptic body horror, it even makes one. It's not what Floyd Collins is about that undermines it—it's a feeling of diffusion and monotony in both its book and its score and, here, a few crucial staging choices by Landau.