Jeremy Jordan Mines “Floyd Collins” for Its Sonic Gems

“The future of writing is the universe within,” the composer and lyricist Adam Guettel told an interviewer, in 2001. It had been five years since the Off Broadway première of “Floyd Collins,” his folk-inflected musical, which recounts the true story of the eponymous Kentucky cave explorer, and Guettel was ready to turn further inward for inspiration. But in “Floyd Collins” he and the show’s director, Tina Landau (who came up with the idea and wrote the book for the musical), had already taken that notion of inwardness to an extreme. In 1925, the real Collins got trapped underground, and the whole country, kept on tenterhooks by an avid press, waited for more than a week to see if he would make it out. Nearly the entire musical, which is now being revived at Lincoln Center, therefore unfolds with our hero stuck fast inside one of the earth’s narrow pockets, his dwindling awareness reaching out toward the glittering, subterranean volumes all around him.

The boyish Broadway darling Jeremy Jordan plays Floyd, a devil-may-care young adventurer who slithers into an almost inaccessible crack, at which point various people—including his brother Homer (Jason Gotay), a courageous journalist (Taylor Trensch), and a pompous engineering executive named Carmichael (Sean Allan Krill)—start trying to get him out. Aboveground, no one can settle on a rescue strategy, though everyone does agree to cash in on the ensuing media circus; even Floyd fantasizes about the tickets he could sell to a cave he may never escape. (Usefully, Jordan just played the lead in “Gatsby,” another American striver pushing into spaces that don’t necessarily welcome him.) Floyd’s strange, dreamy sister Nellie (Lizzy McAlpine) imagines escorting him majestically through mountain halls “as we follow ’long the diamonds / to the outside,” as if the poor of Appalachia were the heirs of deep-buried palaces.

This allusion to cavernous splendor works both for and against the production, which is being directed, once again, by Landau. Despite the efforts of the design collective called dots, the Vivian Beaumont, a vast, curved, audience-on-three-sides arena, constrains the show’s ability to be either intimate or spectacular. The orchestra sounds wonderful in the huge openness, but sight lines here are notoriously difficult: any onstage structure might cut off somebody’s ability to see. Landau does not always draw strong performances from actors, and a few major players, McAlpine among them, seem lost on the wide, mostly empty stage. When Floyd, after taking a twisting path through a kind of obstacle course of hydraulic platforms that represent rock passages, gets pinned in place by a boulder, the actor actually lands on a black, blocky, Cybertruckesque chaise longue. Jordan must then recline there for hours, like a sunbather in a deck chair, trying to project the feeling that a whole hillside is crushing him.

“Floyd Collins” is the second of Landau’s shows this season to focus on an epic encounter with nature. She also wrote and directed the Broadway musical “Redwood,” with the composer Kate Diaz, in which Idina Menzel climbs a big tree and refuses to come down until her character has had an epiphany. “Floyd Collins,” however, stands head and shoulders (and torso and pickaxe) above the dippy “Redwood.” Landau treats the Kentucky caves with more dignity than she does California’s conveniently therapeutic forests, and although the older musical does wander into digressions and raise plot ideas only to abandon them, its occasional sense of awed horror and spiritual ambivalence are far preferable to the nature-equals-healing pabulum of “Redwood.”

It helps that, in “Collins,” Guettel has given us one of musical theatre’s most frankly gorgeous scores. There are those who might prefer his Tony Award-winning work in “The Light in the Piazza,” from 2005, for its shimmering loveliness, and “Light” certainly forms a more integrated whole. But I love Guettel’s innovation here: stomp-and-holler Appalachian plaintiveness married to elegant chromatic orchestral harmonies. Jordan—physically static, but vocally free—flourishes when performing this kind of soaring music, and, in Nellie’s numbers, McAlpine’s haunting, Joni Mitchell timbre drifts beautifully down around him, the only warmth in a landscape growing increasingly wet and cold. The creators’ storytelling control is slack to the point that I genuinely could not tell you how many people die. Yet, sonically, the experience is rich with jewels, just as a good cave ought to be.

In 1915, the actor William Gillette described the “illusion of the first time”—the way that performers can fool an audience into believing it’s seeing a spontaneous event, even if there have been hundreds of identical performances before it. Jordan, for instance, would like us to believe that he got stuck in that crevice today, right in front of us. Sometimes, though, a show actually wants us to be aware of its repetitions.

In “Rheology,” at the Bushwick Starr, in Brooklyn, the playwright Shayok Misha Chowdhury collaborates with his non-actor mother, Bulbul Chakraborty, on a work (co-produced by Ma-Yi Theatre Company and HERE Arts Center) that reveals its iterative process, to devastating emotional effect. Chakraborty is a physicist, and she begins “Rheology” standing at a chalkboard. She’s delivering an introductory lecture on the fluid properties of sand, describing the forces that act on individual grains inside a dune, when she chokes on a drink of water. She’s interrupted by her son, who gives her direction from a seat in the audience. (He’s hoping for a little more melodrama.) Chowdhury explains that he has decided to prepare for his mother’s eventual death by building a show around it. There are shades of Nathan Fielder’s “The Rehearsal” here as he jumps up onstage to talk her through a deathbed scene. She improvises, and they laugh at the results; then they sing together in Bangla as she drifts off.

So far, so postmodern and playful. But Chowdhury wrote “Public Obscenities,” the complex, multilingual family drama that was a finalist for a Pulitzer in 2024, and we know he has more to say about the interplay of generations than “I will miss my mother someday.” Later, Chakraborty enumerates the many forces that act on her, like her grief at being unable to get to India in time for her own mother’s cremation. She shows us a film of her mother, bedridden in her nineties, who, by that time, could not recognize her but could remember a Rabindranath Tagore poem she’d learned by heart decades earlier. As Chakraborty and her son speak or sing their lines, we realize that we are watching them offer each other the solace of repetition. Perhaps someday, when the rest of thinking is gone, these memorized speeches will remain, talismans against every abrading element but the end.

A similar gift, if offered in a lighter spirit, sits at the center of Mona Pirnot’s meta-theatrical puzzle box “I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan,” at the Atlantic Stage Two. Pirnot has written a play that’s basically a drawing-room confessional for strapped playwrights, a work so insistently insider-y that I found myself laughing at the idea that there are enough of us to get its jokes. It features a playwright named Mona who scolds a friend who wants to quit the theatre, while a third friend admonishes Mona for not disclosing the financial arrangements that make her artistic life possible.

The gimmick is that Pirnot, who is obsessed with the downtown theatre icon David Greenspan, has written the play for him to perform as a solo piece, in the same way that he has played all the parts in other shows, including his own hit, “The Patsy.” Thus the actual Greenspan glides to and fro between characters, often becoming Mona, telling her friends how absolutely wonderful David Greenspan is. We get a lot of financial detail here, about Greenspan’s budget as well as Pirnot’s, and it’s clear that a life in the experimental theatre promises nearly zero monetary reward. In eight shows a week, though, Greenspan has to say again and again how much he is loved. By the end of the run, I think, he’ll believe it. ♦