Gorgeous Stage Brings Light to MTP’s “Floyd Collins”

Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer

The tragedy of Floyd Collins has always been a story about distances large and small.

The small and impossible distance between a trapped man and the people trying to reach him. The gulf between a local emergency and a national spectacle. And the distance between a voice heard underground and a crowd that believes it understands what that voice means.

Mill Town Players’ production of “Floyd Collins “understands that the story’s power lies not merely in the historical facts — the 1925 Kentucky cave rescue that ended in death — but in the uneasy relationship between the man below and the people above.

Under Mary Nickles’ direction and the remarkable (as usual) set design of MTP Founder Will Ragland, the production uses the renovated Historic Pelzer Auditorium to create a relationship that is physical. The wildly creative cave is more than a setting, it creates a constricted, claustrophobic feeling in both storytelling and tone.

The musical, with a book by Tina Landau and music and lyrics by Adam Guettel, is a challenging choice for a community theater. Its score is not built around easy applause lines or familiar, catchy radio-ready melodies. Guettel’s music moves through folk, bluegrass, chamber music, 1920s harmonies and dissonance; it asks singers to navigate intervals that can be beautiful precisely because they resist comfort. The Mill Town Players band and singers more than meet the challenge with seriousness and an impressive live ensemble under musical director Todd Monsell.

Zac Bolton’s guitar, Kip Brock’s percussion, Mary Beth Carpenter’s viola, Greg Day’s bass, Julie A. Florin’s piano, Olivia Massey’s violin, Kimberly Souther’s cello and Monsell’s melodica give the score its Appalachian contours without flattening it into rustic decoration. The music has twang, ache, echoes and sudden shifts of atmosphere. It remains, fittingly, difficult to predict.

Phillip Rast, as Floyd Collins, carries a load as heavy as an underground cave in, a performance which requires him to stay physically confined for much of the evening while making the character’s interior world feel vast.

Rast’s Floyd is more than a victim awaiting rescue. He is a dreamer, a restless explorer and a man whose hope for discovery has become an ordeal no one can control. The role requires vocal stamina and emotional restraint, including staying on key during protracted scenes of yodeling. Floyd’s situation is already so extreme that a performance can easily become too demonstrative. Rast instead allows the character’s fear, imagination and stubbornness to emerge gradually.

The final movement of Floyd’s story, especially in the mountain-gospel tinged “How Glory Goes,” holds the show’s emotional center. The song does not erase the tragedy, but it shifts the terms of it. The cave becomes, for a moment, a place where Floyd can imagine freedom even as the physical world closes around him.

Parker Fowler gives Homer Collins a wonderful and lively sense of urgency and loyalty, while Tom Holahan, as the world-weary Lee Collins, grounds the family conflict in something rougher and more complicated than simple rural sentiment. Ryvers Martin’s Nellie Collins offers a bright, clear vulnerability in the role, and Ruth McDaniel, as Miss Jane, gives the surrounding community a needed human presence.

Martin and Fowler give a rare authenticity to the roles as Floyd’s siblings, with both showing a heartwarming connection to their brother. Martin’s spiritual connection to Floyd carries elements both important to the show and genuinely touching.

The supporting cast handles the musical’s larger social world with confidence. Jesse Winner’s Bee Doyle, D’Andre Hicks’ Ed Bishop and Brandon Ledford’s Jewell Estes help establish the world above ground before it becomes overwhelmed by reporters (mostly bad), rescuers (mostly lazy) and spectators (who are there for the carnival atmosphere).

What makes “Floyd Collins” more than a based on a true story cave-rescue musical is the frenzy that grows around the man in the tight and beautifully staged underground.

A story became one of the country’s first modern media spectacles, where reporters descended on Sand Cave, Kentucky, attracting tens of thousands of yard birds who wanted to be a part of the event with little thought to the man trapped and dying underground. Vendors sold food and souvenirs. A human emergency became public entertainment; it revealed the strange and ugly appetite of a nation that weeps crocodile tears in faux sympathy while consuming suffering at the same time.

David Dare’s, who’s awkward Skeets Miller is essential to this tension, is near perfect as the undersized reporter who can physically reach Floyd when others cannot. Skeets becomes both witness and participant, a person trying to record the truth while helping transform it into a story for the outside world. And unlike the other reporters, he becomes emotionally attached to Floyd and committed to helping comfort and attempts with all his might to bring rescue.

Frank Fowler’s H.T. Carmichael embodies a different form of opportunism where institutional ambition arrives at a disaster site with the confidence of someone who believes authority belongs to whoever claims it most forcefully.

Jay Bearden, David Larson, Omarion Kirksey and Will Esterhai provided depth to the story and the visuals on stage as the reporters, officials and ensemble voices that turn the rescue into a chaotic public drama. In “Is That Remarkable?” with additional choreography by Katie Stewart, the production gives the audience a glimpse of the show’s sharpest satirical edge: news becoming over-the-top performance, performance becoming commerce, and tragedy becoming something people can package and sell.

The cast succeeds when it resists turning these figures into cartoon villains. The reporters are exploitative, but they are also people caught in the machinery of attention. Some of the rescuers can be heroic, but they are also confused, frightened and divided about what to do. The musical’s discomfort from the fact that nearly everyone around Floyd has some mixture of good intentions and self-interest is a hallmark of the story.

Will Ragland’s scenic design may be the production’s most striking accomplishment.

The set transforms the Pelzer stage into a layered, unstable landscape of platforms, reclaimed lumber and light. The construction team — Ragland, Cameron Woodson, Will Nickles, Hannah Morton, Eliza Burdette, Mary Nickles and Omarion Kirksey — has created a world that feels simultaneously tight, precarious and treacherous.

The use of reclaimed deck boards gives the stage a weathered, uneven texture. These boards do not merely suggest a cave; they suggest a place that has been assembled from the remains of other lives, other homes and other stories. The visible grain, splintered edges and layered surfaces make the setting feel dangerous without requiring a literal geological recreation.

Most effective is the three-dimensional scrim that divides the world above from the world below. Under Tony Penna’s lighting design, the black, sculpted material can appear solid, then become transparent enough to reveal the cave beyond. The effect is theatrical rather than cinematic, which is exactly why it works. The audience is continually aware that it is looking through a constructed wall, just as the characters above ground are trying to imagine the world they cannot see.

Josef Wehunt’s sound design and audio engineering extend the cave beyond the stage. Echoes and ambient effects move through the newly renovated auditorium, giving Floyd’s yodels and calls an unsettling spaciousness. The sound makes the audience feel the scale of the darkness around him, even inside a restored theater with comfortable seats and bright exit signs.

Hannah Morton’s costumes and the prop work by Ragland, Woodson and Kate Shipley provide enough period detail to place the action in 1925 without overloading the stage with nostalgia. The production understands that historical accuracy is useful only when it helps clarify character and conflict.

“Floyd Collins” is not a conventional crowd-pleaser. Its score does not always offer immediate melodic comfort. Its central figure is immobilized. Its final outcome is known before the first note is sung. And its larger social commentary can make the audience uneasy because the media circus around Floyd feels less antique than it should.

But Mill Town Players deserves credit for choosing a musical that asks more of both its artists and its audience.

The company could have opened its 13th main-stage season with a title already familiar to most theatergoers. Instead, it selected a work that is rarely produced, musically difficult and structurally unusual. That choice reflects confidence in the company’s audience and in its own ability to make an unfamiliar story compelling.

The production is especially well suited to the newly renovated Historic Pelzer Auditorium. Morgan Parrish’s stage management and the stage crew of Kelsey Wong and Katelyn Wong keep a complex technical environment moving. The improved sound system, more accessible seating and updated interior give the company the tools to stage a work in which sound, space and separation are central themes.

At its best, this “Floyd Collins” makes the audience feel the essential cruelty of the historical event. Floyd is never very far away, yet he remains beyond reach of rescuers. The people above ground can hear him, write about him, argue over him and build an entire carnival around him. But they cannot save him.

That is the cave at the center of the show. It is made of rock, but it is also made of fear, ambition, noise, grief and the things people do when they believe they are helping.

Production credits

Director: Mary Nickles

Musical director: Todd Monsell

Stage manager: Morgan Parrish

Scenic designer: Will Ragland

Lighting designer: Tony Penna

Costume designer: Hannah Morton

Audio engineer and sound effects: Josef Wehunt

Additional choreography for “Is That Remarkable?”: Katie Stewart

Cast: Phillip Rast as Floyd Collins; Parker Fowler as Homer Collins; David Dare as Skeets Miller; Ryvers Martin as Nellie Collins; Tom Holahan as Lee Collins; Ruth McDaniel as Miss Jane; Jesse Winner as Bee Doyle; D’Andre Hicks as Ed Bishop; Brandon Ledford as Jewell Estes; Frank Fowler as H.T. Carmichael; Jay Bearden as Cliff Roney, reporter and ensemble; David Larson as Dr. Hazlett and ensemble; Omarion Kirksey as Frederick Jordan, reporter; and Will Esterhai as reporter and ensemble.

“Floyd Collins” runs today through Oct. 11. Tickets here.