earnest to a fault, prone to melodrama

Last October, Hammack decided it was time to start writing. He approached playwright Beverley Byers Pevitts, director of theater at Kentucky Wesleyan College in Owensboro, whom he knew from Kentucky Theatre Association gatherings. The two began collaborating on a script. “With the pressures of running the theater, I felt like it would be good to have someone with experience,” Hammack said. “She’s from Kentucky — Beaver Dam — and knows the lingo of the state,” he said. Hammack is a native of Sturgis, Ky. Ms. Pevitts’ “Final Cadence,” originally entitled “Family Haven,” won a national competition sponsored by the American Theatre Association last year and is to be included in “The Best Short Plays for 1982.” Hammack and Ms. Pevitts have done quite a bit of research on their play, reading old newspaper accounts of the tragedy and talking with people in the Horse Cave area who remember it.

The Floyd Collins entrapment was a big media event — one of the biggest of the 1920s. Radio was in its infancy, but the medium competed fiercely with newspapers. One resident of the cave region told Hammack he remembered his parents sitting by their homemade crystal set, listening to accounts of the rescue attempts. “I know the newsreel people came here and filmed it,” Hammack said. “Screenings were in Louisville, I guess. People here went up on the train and watched them while it was still going on down here.” The playwrights haven’t ignored the publicity surrounding the event, but that is not the focus of their work.

“One of the things we’re dealing with in the play is what kind of person he [Collins] was,” Hammack said. In their research, they found Collins described in various ways, from “feeble-minded” to “a shrewd, smart guy.” “So we have to find the Floyd Collins who speaks to us — it’s a dream situation for somebody writing a historical play,” said David Shookhoff, director of the upcoming production. Shookhoff has directed many plays and operas in New York and elsewhere, including the New York première of “Transformations,” by Anne Sexton and Conrad Susa, at the Manhattan Theatre Club. “You use your intuition and imagination to help express what you’re trying to express,” Shookhoff said. Hammack said, “We’re finding in the research he was not feeble-minded. He was different for that time. Not a highly educated man but he did know about the geology of the caves.” Shookhoff added, “He was a passionate man. He lived for the caves and had no intimate relationships outside his family.” Collins had some cave buddies, but tended to be a private person even around them. At the time of his death, he was 37, unmarried and was still living at home with his father, stepmother and other family members.

In 1917, Collins discovered what he called the Great Crystal Cave, which is part of Mammoth Cave, Hammack said. “He found it on his own place, his daddy’s place.” After his death, it was named the the Floyd Collins Crystal Cave. At the time of his entrapment, Collins was seeking “a more accessible entrance to Crystal Cave or a new cave,” Hammack said. Crystal Cave was open to tourists in 1925, but it was off the beaten path. “When he was showing Crystal Cave he would turn on [for the tourists]. He came to life. Otherwise, he was reticent,” Hammack said. “The thing that defines him is his passion for caves,” Shookhoff said. “I like to think of him as an artist, searching out the caves for the beauty that was in them,” Ms. Pevitts said. Ms. Pevitts learned in her research that Collins “didn’t want things disturbed, yet when he was showing Crystal Cave he would give them [tourists] onyx and gypsum.”

Other people who figure in “Of Time and the Rock” include William Burke “Skeets” Miller, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Courier-Journal reporter who went down to the spot in Sand Cave where Collins was trapped. “He was one of the very few people who got right down to him. He was very small. He helped try to get him out,” Hammack said. Collins’ brother Homer and friend Johnnie Gerald, who visited the trapped man, are also portrayed. The play tries to show the changes experienced by Collins and those men during his underground imprisonment, the authors said. “The play is about a man who is uniquely afforded the privilege of watching himself die,” said Shookhoff. From that perspective, “there’s kind of an enlightenment about death.”

Although it will be presented before the public this summer, Hammack looks on the play as in the formative stages. “This is only the beginning process of writing a play. It’s certainly not a finished play,” he said. Shookhoff, who directed the Horse Cave Theatre’s pre-season production of “Village Wooing,” which was selected to be part of the Nashville Institute for the Arts summer program, thinks of the play about Collins as “kind of a workshop production.” Hammack expects to get “a lot of feedback locally” and from the spelunkers attending the congress. “We will re-write it after this season,” he said. Hammack foresees “Time and the Rock” in its final form as a three-act play. Now it’s in two parts. The first deals with Collins’ discovery of Crystal Cave, the events during the week before his entrapment in Sand Cave and the actual mishap. The rest of the play “deals with the entrapment, the people who went down to him” and the events surrounding the attempted rescue. Although there are “thousands of [other] stories” that might have made good material for a play, Hammack thinks he and Ms. Pevitts made a good choice. “I think we’ve all discovered for ourselves why this [the Floyd Collins tragedy] is still interesting.” In addition to the opening and closing dates, performances will be next Sunday and July 28 and 31, Aug. 2, 4, 7, 9, 11, 14, 16, 18, 21, 23, 27 and 29, and Sept. 3, 5, 10 and 12. Curtain time is 8 p.m. (CDT). Ticket information is available by calling (502) 786-2177.