In 1925, while chasing a dream of fame and fortune by turning a Kentucky cave into a tourist attraction, Floyd Collins himself became the attraction when he got trapped 200 feet underground. Alone but for sporadic contact with the outside world, Floyd fought for his sanity and ultimately his life as the rescue effort above exploded into the first genuine media circus. Reporters and gawkers from across the country descended on the property, fueling the hysteria and manipulating the nation into holding its collective breath. This haunting musical - one of the most acclaimed in recent years - tells the transcendent tale of a true American dreamer.
Writers Notes
TalkinBroadway.com
Written By: Adam Guettel
American Music Theatre Festival commissioned me to write a piece in 1991 and by 1992 Tina [Landau, co-author of Floyd] and I had teamed up on this idea, which was an idea that we found in a book. It was just one paragraph; it was sort of one of those broad survey compendium books about life in America, and the heading of this little paragraph was "Deathwatch Carnival." The paragraph underneath said "a man trapped in a cave and media circus ensues" or something like that. And that's really all we had to go on. Then we found some other research sources, some primary, some secondary, and found the whole thing sort of fascinating, we couldn't stop.
Dana Williams, who was at that time working at Playwrights Horizons, came down to Philly and saw the show, and she is largely responsible, in a way, for Floyd's success in the world. If she hadn't seen it and recommended it to Playwrights, they wouldn't have done it, and it wouldn't have been recorded, and the recording is really the calling card to the show.