“The aboriginal of penning is the beingness within,” the composer and lyricist Adam Guettel told an interviewer, successful 2001. It had been 5 years since the Off Broadway première of “Floyd Collins,” his folk-inflected musical, which recounts the existent communicative of the eponymous Kentucky cave explorer, and Guettel was acceptable to crook further inward for inspiration. But successful “Floyd Collins” helium and the show’s director, Tina Landau (who came up with the thought and wrote the publication for the musical), had already taken that conception of inwardness to an extreme. In 1925, the existent Collins got trapped underground, and the full country, kept connected tenterhooks by an avid press, waited for much than a week to spot if helium would marque it out. Nearly the full musical, which is present being revived astatine Lincoln Center, truthful unfolds with our leader stuck accelerated wrong 1 of the earth’s constrictive pockets, his dwindling consciousness reaching retired toward the glittering, subterranean volumes each astir him.
The boyish Broadway darling Jeremy Jordan plays Floyd, a devil-may-care young adventurer who slithers into an astir inaccessible crack, astatine which constituent assorted people—including his member Homer (Jason Gotay), a courageous writer (Taylor Trensch), and a pompous engineering enforcement named Carmichael (Sean Allan Krill)—start trying to get him out. Aboveground, nary 1 tin settee connected a rescue strategy, though everyone does hold to currency successful connected the ensuing media circus; adjacent Floyd fantasizes astir the tickets helium could merchantability to a cave helium whitethorn ne'er escape. (Usefully, Jordan conscionable played the pb successful “Gatsby,” different American striver pushing into spaces that don’t needfully invited him.) Floyd’s strange, dreamy sister Nellie (Lizzy McAlpine) imagines escorting him majestically done upland halls “as we travel ’long the diamonds / to the outside,” arsenic if the mediocre of Appalachia were the heirs of deep-buried palaces.
This allusion to cavernous splendor works some for and against the production, which is being directed, erstwhile again, by Landau. Despite the efforts of the plan corporate called dots, the Vivian Beaumont, a vast, curved, audience-on-three-sides arena, constrains the show’s quality to beryllium either intimate oregon spectacular. The orchestra sounds fantastic successful the immense openness, but show lines present are notoriously difficult: immoderate onstage operation mightiness chopped disconnected somebody’s quality to see. Landau does not ever gully beardown performances from actors, and a fewer large players, McAlpine among them, look mislaid connected the wide, mostly bare stage. When Floyd, aft taking a twisting way done a benignant of obstacle people of hydraulic platforms that correspond stone passages, gets pinned successful spot by a boulder, the histrion really lands connected a black, blocky, Cybertruckesque chaise longue. Jordan indispensable past recline determination for hours, similar a sunbather successful a platform chair, trying to task the feeling that a full hillside is crushing him.
“Floyd Collins” is the 2nd of Landau’s shows this play to absorption connected an epic brushwood with nature. She besides wrote and directed the Broadway philharmonic “Redwood,” with the composer Kate Diaz, successful which Idina Menzel climbs a large histrion and refuses to travel down until her quality has had an epiphany. “Floyd Collins,” however, stands caput and shoulders (and torso and pickaxe) supra the dippy “Redwood.” Landau treats the Kentucky caves with much dignity than she does California’s conveniently therapeutic forests, and though the older philharmonic does rotation into digressions and rise crippled ideas lone to wantonness them, its occasional consciousness of awed fearfulness and spiritual ambivalence are acold preferable to the nature-equals-healing pabulum of “Redwood.”
It helps that, successful “Collins,” Guettel has fixed america 1 of philharmonic theatre’s astir frankly gorgeous scores. There are those who mightiness similar his Tony Award-winning enactment successful “The Light successful the Piazza,” from 2005, for its shimmering loveliness, and “Light” surely forms a much integrated whole. But I emotion Guettel’s innovation here: stomp-and-holler Appalachian plaintiveness joined to elegant chromatic orchestral harmonies. Jordan—physically static, but vocally free—flourishes erstwhile performing this benignant of soaring music, and, successful Nellie’s numbers, McAlpine’s haunting, Joni Mitchell timbre drifts beautifully down astir him, the lone warmth successful a scenery increasing progressively bedewed and cold. The creators’ storytelling power is slack to the constituent that I genuinely could not archer you however galore radical die. Yet, sonically, the acquisition is affluent with jewels, conscionable arsenic a bully cave ought to be.
In 1915, the histrion William Gillette described the “illusion of the archetypal time”—the mode that performers tin fool an assemblage into believing it’s seeing a spontaneous event, adjacent if determination person been hundreds of identical performances earlier it. Jordan, for instance, would similar america to judge that helium got stuck successful that crevice today, close successful beforehand of us. Sometimes, though, a amusement really wants america to beryllium alert of its repetitions.
In “Rheology,” astatine the Bushwick Starr, successful Brooklyn, the playwright Shayok Misha Chowdhury collaborates with his non-actor mother, Bulbul Chakraborty, connected a enactment (co-produced by Ma-Yi Theatre Company and HERE Arts Center) that reveals its iterative process, to devastating affectional effect. Chakraborty is simply a physicist, and she begins “Rheology” lasting astatine a chalkboard. She’s delivering an introductory lecture connected the fluid properties of sand, describing the forces that enactment connected idiosyncratic grains wrong a dune, erstwhile she chokes connected a portion of water. She’s interrupted by her son, who gives her absorption from a spot successful the audience. (He’s hoping for a small much melodrama.) Chowdhury explains that helium has decided to hole for his mother’s eventual decease by gathering a amusement astir it. There are shades of Nathan Fielder’s “The Rehearsal” present arsenic helium jumps up onstage to speech her done a deathbed scene. She improvises, and they laughter astatine the results; past they sing unneurotic successful Bangla arsenic she drifts off.
So far, truthful postmodern and playful. But Chowdhury wrote “Public Obscenities,” the complex, multilingual household play that was a finalist for a Pulitzer successful 2024, and we cognize helium has much to accidental astir the interplay of generations than “I volition miss my parent someday.” Later, Chakraborty enumerates the galore forces that enactment connected her, similar her grief astatine being incapable to get to India successful clip for her ain mother’s cremation. She shows america a movie of her mother, bedridden successful her nineties, who, by that time, could not admit her but could retrieve a Rabindranath Tagore poem she’d learned by bosom decades earlier. As Chakraborty and her lad talk oregon sing their lines, we recognize that we are watching them connection each different the solace of repetition. Perhaps someday, erstwhile the remainder of reasoning is gone, these memorized speeches volition remain, talismans against each abrading constituent but the end.
A akin gift, if offered successful a lighter spirit, sits astatine the halfway of Mona Pirnot’s meta-theatrical puzzle container “I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan,” astatine the Atlantic Stage Two. Pirnot has written a play that’s fundamentally a drawing-room confessional for strapped playwrights, a enactment truthful insistently insider-y that I recovered myself laughing astatine the thought that determination are capable of america to get its jokes. It features a playwright named Mona who scolds a person who wants to discontinue the theatre, portion a 3rd person admonishes Mona for not disclosing the fiscal arrangements that marque her creator beingness possible.
The gimmick is that Pirnot, who is obsessed with the downtown theatre icon David Greenspan, has written the play for him to execute arsenic a solo piece, successful the aforesaid mode that helium has played each the parts successful different shows, including his ain hit, “The Patsy.” Thus the existent Greenspan glides to and fro betwixt characters, often becoming Mona, telling her friends however perfectly fantastic David Greenspan is. We get a batch of fiscal item here, astir Greenspan’s fund arsenic good arsenic Pirnot’s, and it’s wide that a beingness successful the experimental theatre promises astir zero monetary reward. In 8 shows a week, though, Greenspan has to accidental again and again however overmuch helium is loved. By the extremity of the run, I think, he’ll judge it. ♦
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