How Broadway's Floyd Collins Compares to the Real-Life Story

The story of Broadway's Floyd Collins, a current Tony nominee for Best Revival of a Musical, is a harrowing one. The musical, featuring a book by Tina Landau and a score by Adam Guettel, tracks its titular character as he explores Kentucky's Sand Cave, part of an effort to find a tourist attraction that could change the fortunes of his entire family. On his way out, he gets stuck in a tiny shaft. As an effort to rescue the lost explorer gets underway above ground, one of the country's first-ever media circuses develops around it to breathlessly report the story across the country. Also, spoiler alert, they're not successful in getting Collins out.

That might sound like an unusual plot for a musical, but what might be even more surprising is that the story is a real one, happening near Louisville, Kentucky in 1925. To find out how the musical compares to real life, �뵺�� talked to Roger W. Brucker, co-author of Trapped! The Story of Floyd Collins (written with Robert K. Murray), the most authoritative source on the story ever published. First published in 1982, the musical's Broadway bow has inspired an from The University Press of Kentucky, newly featuring a foreword by the show's book writer and director Landau.

Brucker was drawn to the story because, along with being a writer, he's a cave explorer himself. Though Billy Wilder made a film inspired by the story, Ace in the Hole, by the '80s, Collins had mostly faded from the public consciousness. Brucker's drive to research and write the book came from a desire to figure out why the rescue mission had been unsuccessful.

"He was in a very tiny cave," Brucker explains, "just a few feet wide and a few feet high in the biggest places—and most places, it's smaller than that. People didn't have any room to work." Brucker describes the spot Collins was stuck in for two weeks as "a body-sized limestone tube." The cave was (and still is today) apparently very unstable, which is what led to Collins becoming trapped. While returning to the surface through a tiny shaft head-first, rubble fell on his legs, pinning specifically his left leg in the v-shaped groove of a heavy rock. Rescuing him would have involved clearing that rubble and somehow dislodging the rock, but there was almost no space around his body to make that happen.

A diagram of where Floyd Collins was trapped, and the rescue shaft excavated to get him out. Roger W. Brucker

"Very few people could get to him to feed him and keep him hydrated," Brucker says. "And so, hypothermia probably began to set in several times, in addition to his being trapped. He died, according to the people on the scene, of exposure and hypothermia."

Though the musical makes excellent, and ironic use, of its expansive stage at the Vivian Beaumont, it conveys this aspect of the story using the actors' bodies. Characters like Taylor Trensch's Skeets Miller (a reporter) and Jason Gotay's Homer Collins (Floyd's brother) climb on top of Floyd as they try to free his legs—as the title character, Jeremy Jordan is confined to a sitting position for a majority of the show.

The biggest part of Brucker's work was actually getting in the cave himself, which he calls the scariest cave he's ever explored. He surveyed where Collins was actually trapped. Brucker says a proper assessment was not part of the 1925 rescue operation—and could have changed everything. Because they waited too long, and ultimately only did an inaccurate survey of the cave, the vertical shaft that was excavated to reach Floyd was misplaced, landing about 15 feet from where he actually was. That meant the effort took longer than it needed to, longer than Floyd could stay alive.

Brucker says that Floyd's story is unlikely to happen to anyone today, because rescue plans are much more formalized. "Today, we have cave rescue teams that have been rehearsed and trained, and equipment caches in practically all cave regions in the country," Brucker explains. "If somebody were trapped today as Floyd Collins was, he would probably be attended by rescuers in a matter of a couple of hours."

Roger Brucker exploring Sand Cave Roger W. Brucker

Brucker has seen "25 or 30" productions of the musical since it premiered Off-Broadway in 1996. He says it's surprisingly accurate in terms of the timeline of events��"I don't have any complaints about it," he says. To him, what it conveys best is the essence of the people involved. A major theme of the musical is Collins' exploitation at the hands of reporters looking for a good story, which makes that aspect of the musical a poignant one for Brucker—the show is a way of giving the man his dignity back.

"Floyd Collins was a taciturn man," Brucker says. "He was kind of reticent to talk—unless he was talking about caves. When he discovered a cave, you couldn't shut him up. He was loquacious, full of talk and sales talk on how you ought to buy a ticket to his cave."

Brucker hasn't seen the current Broadway production yet, but from a rehearsal he attended, he rates Jeremy Jordan (currently Tony-nominated for the performance as Floyd) as "probably the best I heard." Beyond Jordan's trademark vocal abilities, Brucker says Jordan captured the spirit and energy of Collins when he is talking or singing about caves.

Roger W. Brucker visits *Floyd Collins* in rehearsal, with Tina Landau and Adam Guettel Tricia Baron

Maybe the only thing Floyd Collins blurs a bit is that the real man had already been something of a success when he became trapped. "He found a cave about 2,000 feet long in 1910, and he found a cave about five miles long, Crystal Cave, in 1917," Brucker says. "He was not a beginner or an amateur. He pretty much made his living exhibiting the caves he found, and exploring caves."

In the musical, Floyd is on a quest for success after feeling like the black sheep of the family, with the show ultimately exploring if there can be something noble in failure. In real life, the main reason Sand Cave was so attractive to Collins was that it was better located than his previous finds, close enough to the highway to attract more tourists.

READ: Floyd Collins' Broadway Debut Isn't About Why Now—It's Why Always

The other character Brucker says the musical really nails is Skeets Miller, the young reporter who becomes one of the few people small enough to navigate the tiny cave passages to Floyd. The two struck up a friendship, and Miller's empathic writing was perhaps the sole authentic and non-exploitive contemporary source of reporting from the event. "Miller was one of the most empathic people I ever met in my life," Brucker remembers. He was able to interview him for Trapped! before Miller died in 1983. “His reporting was so vivid that people began to see him as a real person. He was able to take an anonymous farmer, cave explorer, and breathe life into him by reporting his feelings and emotions at the time he was trapped—and at the same time reporting some of his own emotions." Miller's work earned him a Pulitzer Prize in 1926, and is likely the only reason any fascination with the story persists to today.

Taylor Trensch in *Floyd Collins* Joan Marcus

But make no mistake. Though Brucker has many thoughts about why the rescue mission failed, he also has some notes for Collins himself. Though the musical doesn't really depict this, in real life, Collins had been exploring the Sand Cave for about two weeks before he got stuck. And that means, according to Brucker, he should have known the conditions he was in and made some choices that would have put him in a considerably better position. "He shouldn't have gone caving alone," he says. "He should have told people where he was going that day. He should have worn a hard hat. He didn't do any of that, so he could be scolded for doing that."

In other words, don't try this at home, kids.

Not that you even could—one of the biggest reasons Floyd's story wouldn't happen today is that the entrance to Sand Cave has been sealed off to most people for decades, and isn't something you can just go exploring on your own. Lucky for us, we do get Guettel and Landau's transcendent Floyd Collins to theatrically take us there.