DEEP DOWN

“Floyd Collins,” “Rheology,” and “I'm Assuming You Know David Greenspan.”

- HELEN SHAW

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 premiére 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.