In the new musical Swept Away, four very different men forge a bond under the most dire of circumstances: stranded together for more than 20 days without food or water, as the sole survivors of a shipwreck.
For the highly accomplished actors playing these characters in the production, which begins previews October 29 and opens November 19 at the Longacre Theatre, the journey has had its own considerable, albeit less extreme, challenges. And the camaraderie forged between the performers — Tony Award winner John Gallagher Jr., two-time nominee Stark Sands, stage and screen veteran Wayne Duvall, and rising star Adrian Blake Enscoe, noted for his role on Apple TV+’s Dickinson — has been similarly intense, if less fraught with conflict.
Joining their director, Michael Mayer — another Tony winner, whose previous musical triumphs include Spring Awakening, American Idiot, Thoroughly Modern Millie, and 2022’s revival of Funny Girl, to name just a few — for dinner during a rehearsal break, the stars of Swept Away convey a sense of easy, affectionate camaraderie. “We’ve become like four brothers,” Duvall says.
From the start, fraternity has loomed large in every aspect of this production. The musical features a score by the acclaimed folk-rock band the Avett Brothers, showcasing — but not limited to — songs from their 2004 album, Mignonette, named after and inspired by the story of an English yacht that sank off the coast of a peninsula in South Africa back in the 1880s. Four crew members managed to survive in a dinghy, but as their prospects dimmed, with no food or water, a tough decision was made.
For the show, John Logan, the Tony Award–winning playwright and screenwriter — whose previous Broadway credits include Red, Moulin Rouge! The Musical, and, fittingly, The Last Ship — crafted what Mayer stresses is “a completely new story” set on a whaling ship off the coast of New England. “John created original characters, taking emotional content from the Avett Brothers’ songs. The only thing it has in common with the story of the Mignonette is that there are four survivors in a lifeboat, and the inevitable happens.”
In Logan’s book, director Mayer notes, “it’s about what you do to stay alive, and how you live with yourself after that. What he imagined was almost a morality play, with four archetypes.” Two are siblings, Big Brother and Little Brother, respectively played by Sands and Enscoe. Duvall plays the Captain, and Gallagher — the first actor Mayer cast, having worked with him on both Awakening and Idiot — is a “wayward character,” in the actor’s words, called The Mate.
“He’s the second mate of the ship, and sort of the narrator,” Gallagher explains. “The show begins as a memory play, with him going back in time to describe this intense experience. He’s still a big mystery to me; it’s one of the most amazing roles I’ve ever been gifted. He’s a bit of an aimless drifter and grifter, seemingly with no moral compass. He’s been on the run for much of his life and this job on a whaling expedition is sort of the last stand for him.”
The Captain is set on his own final journey, according to Duvall. “He’s at the end of his career, on what he thinks will be and what probably is his last sojourn,” he says. “In my mind, he hasn’t been the most successful guy, but he loves what he does, and like an actor who reaches his mid-to-late sixties, he’s thinking, what else is he going to do with his life?”
Though much younger, Little Brother is taking “kind of a last stand too, one last frolic. He’s looking at marrying a girl and starting a family, and he thinks, ‘I have to have a story,’ so he goes off looking for adventure,” Enscoe remarks. Big Brother, who comes looking for him and gets caught on the voyage, “is extremely principled and stubborn, and deeply pious,” Sands says. “My main mission is to bring him home — I repeat that many times — so I’m an outsider, I don’t belong there, and I’m not wanted there, by the crew or anyone.”
The actors got to develop these characters, along with their offstage friendship, in the wake of a real-life crisis: the COVID-19 pandemic. The omicron variant hit hard just as they were preparing to premiere the show at Berkeley Repertory Theatre in January 2022, causing it to close after just a couple of performances. “We were living in this brand-new hotel that nobody else was living in,” Sands recalls (they also shared a dressing room), “and we couldn’t socialize with anyone but each other. We couldn’t even drive home or take a plane home on our days off.”
By the time Swept Away got to Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage late last year — where it would receive rave reviews, as it had in Berkeley — the performers “felt connected,” Duvall says, “to the point that we wanted a dressing room together again.” When that wasn’t plausible for the Broadway staging, Duvall muses, “we said, ‘Well, put us on the same floor.’”
They’ll share the theatre with more actors than Logan had initially imagined. “There was no ensemble originally,” Mayer notes, smiling a bit craftily. “Then, when we first got the production on, I thought, ‘We’re going to need understudies for these guys anyway; why not put them onstage and have a little bit of a crew?’” The company now includes an ensemble of 10, with four additional swings.
The musical’s visual structure has also expanded beyond its characters. When Logan “described just a platform and ropes,” Mayer remembers, “I thought, ‘Don’t you think we need a boat?’” The current staging features “an extraordinary set, designed by Rachel Hauck, that transforms itself in ways that are thrilling, and that brings a danger to the physical life of the play. When you see it, you’ll understand. We’re never really on solid ground.”
The director is quick to add that “there’s a lot of fun to be had” for audiences of Swept Away. “There’s a great joy in it; it’s exuberant and even ecstatic at points. But at the end of the day, it’s an existential story, and if we’ve ever lived in an existential moment before, we’re in one now.”
For Duvall, “part of the journey of an actor is to explore, and no other role in my life has made me go to a place like I have had to go to with this piece, and made me self-reflect more as a human being.” Enscoe, who got married between the show’s first two runs, says the “love and constant attention” he and his colleagues have brought to their work have been “a model for me of how I want my whole life to be built.” And Sands, who had to leave his wife and two children for longer than usual periods during the process, gained “a depth of appreciation for the people I have in my own life, and the people who join me on this journey in my pretend life.”
Gallagher resolves, “The best work I have ever done as an actor — and wouldn’t you know it, it tends to be in Michael Mayer productions — have been the things I can look back on and say, ‘I’m so different than when I started this.’ I want to be flattened and come out on the other end a changed person, hopefully for the better. I’ll never be the same after this, and that’s just what you want as a performer.”