Out to Sea and Back With Swept Away

From Swept Away, at the Longacre. Photo: Emilio Madrid

“Consider the subtleness of the sea,” wrote Herman Melville in Moby-Dick, “the devilish brilliance and beauty … the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began. Consider all this; and then turn to the green, gentle, and most docile earth … Do not you find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half-known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!”

Damn, Herman. Perhaps it’s unfair to jump straight to the leviathan of seafaring lit when reflecting on the new musical Swept Away. At the same time, its writers are clearly going for Melville’s roiling depths and vertiginous existential heights. They’re interested in what happens when man’s soul leaves the safety of its own inner island. John Logan’s book weaves its way through songs from Mignonette, the 2004 album by the North Carolinian folk rockers the Avett Brothers, while dipping heavily into the rest of their catalog along the way. That album musicalizes an 1880s naval tragedy in which an English ship of the same name sank off the Cape of Good Hope. Four crew members were stranded in a lifeboat for 19 days, rescued only after three of them had killed and eaten the fourth. Welcome to the horrors of the half-known life.

In turning the Avett Brothers’ take on this gruesome true story into a musical, Logan and director Michael Mayer were facing a strangely paradoxical task. On the one hand, the events are there, the songs are there, and the central characters and situations are just waiting to be brought to three-dimensional life. Conversely, that very straightforwardness is a potential trap. A piece of theater assembled from preexisting songs, or charting a known historical event, can wind up feeling by-the-numbers: The things we expect to happen happen, and along the way folks sing about them (or, more likely, they sing about slightly generalized circumstances adjacent to the specific ones onstage). Despite its creative team’s efforts to lace a capital-T Theme through the work, Swept Away often falls prey to this roteness. Logan, with the support of Scott and Seth Avett and their bandmate Bob Crawford, has chosen “salvation and redemption” as the play’s big idea, but its deployment is telly not showy — we hear a lot about it, but our pulses never really rise with the stakes.

Both story and character issues are to blame. Logan and Mayer are striving to mash up the economical (the show is only 90 minutes) with the epic, but their tale of shipwreck, suffering, and cannibalism stays constrained by its own plot points — it aspires to but never quite touches Melvillian metaphysical grandeur. At the same time, the character who needs redeeming is one tough nut, with such a thick shell that it’s questionable whether there’s anything inside. He’s known only as “Mate”—Logan takes a Cormac McCarthy approach to names—and he’s played by John Gallagher Jr. with a glinting leer, a six-months-at-sea beard, and a backwoods dialect cranked up so high that it makes the score’s banjo part feel downright sinister. Gallagher, even as he sings well and moves well, is more Mephistophelean than human. It’s fine that Mate’s not nice, but if we’re going to commit to bringing his soul back to the light, there’s got to be a soul there in the first place. “[I] kept the coloreds in line down the Carolinas,” he hisses at two of the men who end up on the lifeboat with him after the wreck, laying out his ugly past by way of threat, “killed so many damn Indians out in the Oklahoma Territory I couldn’t keep track, so many scalps I had on my belt. Every despicable trade there was came easy to me… So don’t ask who I am. You know.” (Logan moves Mignonette’s basic plot Stateside, setting it postbellum in the waning years of the whaling trade.)

This kind of speech could be an opportunity for an actor to play both persona and shadow at once. There’s a version of Mate that’s trying to convince himself as much as he’s trying to intimidate his fellow sailors. If they want to survive, they’re going to have to do the unspeakable, and perhaps there’s part of Mate that knows—like Lady Macbeth as she prays to be filled with cruelty—that he’s going to have to become monstrous, and so he does his best to play the monster. But that subcutaneous layer, the part that fears and regrets and longs for a different past as much as for a different future, isn’t visible with Gallagher. His Mate feels wicked and sly, if not happily then still committedly so, all the way up to the end.

Or rather the beginning: Like many new musicals these days, Swept Away exists inside a frame. We first meet Mate in a rickety hospital bed, swathed in bloody rags and coughing out what’s left of his life. It’s 22 years after the wreck and its ensuing horrors; now he’s dying in a charity ward. But before he can slip away, three old friends arrive. Here are the men who endured the nightmare with him, the Captain (Wayne Duvall) and two farm boys, Big Brother (Stark Sands) and Little Brother (Adrian Blake Enscoe), who picked the worst possible ship on which to abandon the land for an adventure at sea. None of them is still among the living (no spoilers as to which guy got consumed), and both Susan Hilferty’s costumes and Kevin Adams’s lights do a beautiful job of suspending them in a different realm, dim and watery in the shadows around Mate’s bed. “’Fess up, ’fess up, tell the truth, my man,” they sing to him, “Unless takin’ it to hell is your plan.” Mate’s redemption, it appears, hinges on their deliverance from purgatory. “Tell our story,” they urge him. “Release us … Release yourself.”

As Big Brother and Little Brother, Sands and Enscoe bring the conscience and the vulnerability to Swept Away that Mate lacks, along with, in Enscoe’s case, a sparking vitality that boosts the play’s engines. Enscoe, who’s got their own indie band called Bandits on the Run, is a radiant presence, delivering the Avett Brothers’ tunes, including the surprisingly gentle title track, with both passion and tenderness, longing and lilt. They’re the ingénue, the adventurous young spirit who hightails it on board a whaling ship because “there’s got to be more in this life,” while Sands’s Big Brother is the hard-working, pious, stay-at-home type. Poor Big Brother — he’s only onboard when the ship casts off because he’s trying to drag Little Brother off of it. He wasn’t even supposed to be here today!

Ultimately, Swept Away’s most compelling elements exist around its center rather than within it. Along with Sands and Enscoe, the show’s buff, shaggy, dirty-Henley-wearing ensemble do a great job with David Neumann’s manly maritime choreography. They clamber enthusiastically up rigging and swing on the ropes of Rachel Hauck’s cleverly engineered set, which is, in itself, perhaps the production’s greatest triumph. It’s got a trick up its big wooden sleeve for the eventual shipwreck, and when it comes, Mayer and his whole team pull off a piece of staging that does indeed summon the terrible and sublime. The sea’s “devilish brilliance and beauty” pours through the space. It’s temporary, but at least for a moment we’re swept up with it.

Swept Away is at the Longacre Theatre.