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Floyd Collins Is Beautiful But Can’t Break Free
A few crucial staging choices kneecap this production from the start, undermining its epic tragedy.
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 empty 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 together on a slab of rock near a cave entrance, lines of bodies arranged with balloons and other carnival paraphernalia, jaunty black cutouts against a pink sky. Granted, it’s tough material — the story, based on real events, follows the plight of an ambitious 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.
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