The Avett Brothers’ Songs Get Theatrical Treatment in ‘Swept Away’

John Gallagher Jr. lays prostrate on stage. He’s wearing a dirtied face mask over a scraggly beard he’s been growing out since August and is on a makeshift hospital bed beneath the cover of tattered blankets. Gallagher has been hiding in plain sight for half an hour before eager crowds fill Washington, DC’s Arena Stage at the Mead Center for American Theater and Swept Away begins.

The new musical, based on the songs of North Carolina folk-rock band The Avett Brothers, opened to previews on Nov. 25 and recently extended its run until Jan. 14. A riff on the popular and accessible format of the “jukebox musical” (in which recognizable songs from other performers are the main soundtrack), Swept Away uses the band’s existing songs to create an original story inspired by a 19th-century shipwreck and its four survivors.

(UPDATE: The band announced onstage at a May 17 concert in New York that the show is coming to Broadway this fall, according to The New York Times.)

“Swept Away” poster with artwork by Ken Taylor (click to enlarge)

Gallagher, a Tony award-winning actor for his role in Spring Awakening (which featured music by singer-songwriter Duncan Sheik), says that his time undercover, under the covers, helps him get into the headspace of the protagonist, the nameless narrator, Mate.

“I’m really lucky because I get 30 whole minutes to just lie there with my eyes closed,” Gallagher says. “I listen to the audience come in and I think about the show and I think about the character and I think about the history of the piece and the stakes of the story. It actually is a great way to get focused and grounded.”

That preparation time is especially necessary for a show like Swept Away. Despite the hype surrounding the production, as well as the hopeful adventuring depicted in Ken Taylor’s promo visuals, the story itself is menacing and thought-provoking. Gallagher’s character, as well as the other three leads — Wayne Duvall (O Brother Where Art Thou?) as the Captain, Adrian Blake Enscoe (Apple TV+’s Dickinson) as the Little Brother, and Stark Sands (Inside Llewyn Davis) as the Big Brother — traverse the darkest crevices of the human psyche as they portray the last survivors of a shipwreck grappling with morality and mortality.

Making a Musical

In 2004, The Avett Brothers released their second studio album, Mignonette. The concept record followed the true story of a yacht that sank off the coast of the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa in 1884. The surviving crew, floating in a dinghy for 19 days, resorted to cannibalism in order to live. When a German ship and crew eventually rescued the sailors and returned to England, the survivors were then tried and charged with murder. Their sentences were eventually commuted to jail time, but the story of the Mignonette and its crew helped outlaw the killing of one so that many could live, a practice known as “the custom of the sea.”

Gallagher knew the story closer to the album’s original release, having first discovered The Avett Brothers at the Philadelphia Folk Festival in 2005. He became an instant fan, mesmerized by the then-trio’s authentic performances influenced as much by Southern folk traditions as rock and roll. By the time he starred in American Idiot, the rock opera inspired by Green Day’s 2004 record, on Broadway in 2010, Gallagher even had a poster of The Avett Brothers hanging in his dressing room.

Still, it took another seven years before the idea of turning Avett Brothers songs into a musical even started to become a reality. Matthew Masten, a producer who serves as a commercial partner for this production, first reached out to the band’s manager via Facebook Messenger in 2014 about the possibility of collaborating. In 2017, he connected with playwright and dramatist John Logan, who agreed to write the book. Known on screen for his work on Gladiator and the two Sam Mendes-directed James Bond films, Logan won a whopping six Tony awards in 2010 for Red, his play about visual artist Mark Rothko. Such esteemed connections and collaborators are a vital part of what gives the burgeoning Swept Away such credibility and heft.

Logan remembers those early days of listening to every Avett Brothers song and writing a notecard about each one in order to gain a deeper understanding of the working repertoire and potential narrative connections. Of course, the band’s Mignonette album served as inspiration, but, Logan says, “I didn’t want to just recreate a concept album on stage. I wanted to be inspired by their work as American artists.”

Logan shifts the setting for Swept Away off the coast of New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1888, taking creative liberties with almost every other aspect of the narrative, too. “I wanted to be totally fictional. I wanted four men on a lifeboat. I wanted them tried by circumstance,” he says. “But I decided to write about a whaling voyage because I know a lot about whaling mostly from [Herman] Melville and it was an interesting jumping-off point. So while I was listening to the Avetts and making up some of the four characters, I was reading James Fenimore Cooper, a lot of Joseph Conrad, a lot of Melville, and Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana. I was doing a very deep dive into nautical literature and artists who had looked at the sea as a great metaphor to explore the human condition.”

From left, Adrian Blake Enscoe, Stark Sands, John Gallagher, Jr. and Wayne Duvall. (Photo by Julieta Cervantes)

Between the conceptualization, casting, and staging, as well as delays due to the pandemic, it took until January 2022 for Swept Away to premiere at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre in California. As it plays out today, Swept Away focuses on four main characters. Gallagher’s Mate, a rambunctious, weathered man who has seen and done much harm along his wayward travels, serves as the narrator and most fully developed character. The Younger Brother runs away from home, seeking adventure and excitement on the water instead of in the dirt on his family’s farm. The Older Brother, a deeply religious man, chases after his sibling out of a sense of familial loyalty, but ends up stuck on the ship as it leaves from port. And finally, the aging Captain sets off on his last sail only to question his life, purpose, and future.

While the cast and team have dreams of Broadway, the seas ahead are not necessarily smooth. Swept Away shines in its dramatic story, star actors, and set design (especially the full ship mast that rises up into the rafters mid-show). However, the second half moves considerably slower than the start. After the truly remarkable storm scene — during which choreographer David Neumann and set designer Rachel Hauck viscerally recreate the shipwreck through sound, strobe, and bodily coordination — the four main characters remain in the same rotating lifeboat for nearly the duration of the rest of the show. The lack of changing scenery emphasizes the tedium and terror of being lost at sea for three weeks, but can also become visually monotonous for the audience.

Still, the connection between story and song is one of Swept Away’s greatest successes. The Avett Brothers’ songs transition remarkably well to the theater in order to soundtrack these individual and collective journeys — as Logan notes, “they write real character songs.” In particular, the stomp-clap nature of the band’s early canon works impeccably, as the dynamic lends itself easily to full company staging and dancing — one of the hallmarks of theater that’s rarely replicated elsewhere.

Following the Music

Scott and Seth Avett arrive on Zoom together, calling from their North Carolina studio as Sunny the cat crawls between their laps. Longtime bassist Bob Crawford sits in a different virtual window, although not geographically distant, backdropped by a double bass in a corner as well as a Fender Jazz bass and an octave mandolin hanging on the walls behind him.

Having their music as the soundtrack to a stage production never crossed their minds before Swept Away became a reality. Scott emphasizes that it’s more of a production that “happened to us over the course of 15-20 years” than a show that everyone intentionally worked to conceptualize. “It was just brought to life,” he muses. “It was revealed. And it was followed. We, in a sense, we’re obedient to it.”

In total, Swept Away borrows from five Avett Brothers records and includes one new song, “Lord Lay Your Hand on My Shoulder.” The band had very little to do with the arrangements and musical updates; Logan, music supervisors Brian Usifer and Chris Miller, music director Will Van Dyke, and the entire production team did the work to make the songs fit so seamlessly with the narrative.

The cast members, too, reinterpret the songs with heart and authenticity. Even though none of the four leads has significant formal vocal training, they’re all excellent singers in the pop and rock vein. In particular, Gallagher and Enscoe’s brilliant interplay on songs like “Ain’t No Man/Lord Lay Your Hand on My Shoulder” and “Hard Worker,” and harmonies on “Swept Away,” highlight the musical and narrative synergy. (Those not lucky enough to catch them together in Swept Away may be able to see them on the road, as Enscoe’s band Bandits on the Run and Gallagher will be touring together throughout the winter and spring, even making a stop at Folk Alliance International’s annual conference in February.)

Often, Logan made connections between songs that startled even the songwriters themselves. “Through My Prayers” is one that Scott notes as particularly powerful to the storyline, whereas Seth points out how lyrics in “A Gift for Melody Anne” — “I want my soul to feel brand, brand new / Like a fresh coat of paint / We could make it anything but blue” — is almost eerily relevant.

He recalls, “I remember writing that line and it was about just about being sad. And then how it applies to [Swept Away], like, we can paint it anything but blue because we’re so exhausted at looking at the ocean and the sky. It’s all blue. There are so many moments like that where you’re just like, ‘God, were we accidentally trying to write this? This is just crazy!’”

Most powerful to each of the three band members, though, is how relatable the four main characters are in Swept Away.

“Really throughout the whole process, but especially when I first started seeing it come together and watching it from top to bottom, I was sort of taken aback at how much I connected with all four of the principal characters,” Seth says. “The Captain, purpose and regret. The First Mate, for all of it, the wildness, the evilness, the desire. The Older Brother, care and faith. The Younger Brother, for adventure and excitement.”

Reminiscing on their time together touring around the release of Mignonette and how that serves as a parallel to the story of Swept Away, Crawford adds: “[It was] just three of us in a conversion van, out in the middle of nowhere, before you had GPS directions … That was our journey.”

He continues, “You know, we didn’t listen to a lot of music driving around. We mostly talked. … It was a lot of discussion, a lot of conversations. This book, The Sorry Tale of The Mignonette, had this incredible effect on Scott and he drew those parallels of us and these guys that are in this lifeboat and the idea that you tell the truth even if it jails you, even if it kills you. That identification for us, at that point, I think was really important.”

‘All in This Together’

Despite the emotional turmoil and physical violence depicted in Swept Away, there is — oddly enough — still hope. The characters hope for forgiveness and freedom. And among the show’s creators and creatives, the hope for a better future remains a central theme.

“I think it’s a life-affirming show at the end of the day,” Gallagher says. “But yeah, you have to go through this really dark journey to get to that kind of redemption and salvation.”

The closing number of Swept Away comes from the band’s Grammy-nominated 2012 album, The Carpenter. The title track, a mid-tempo picking tune with similarly off-kilter faith, is one of The Avett Brothers’ most popular songs. And clearly, it still resonates even in this format among the cast, creative team, and audience members, many of whom filed out of the Arena Stage bragging about how they knew every word to every song of the musical.

“To end the show with ‘The Once and Future Carpenter’ and get to sing that is such a high honor,” Gallagher continues, reminiscing on traveling across the Hudson River to see The Avett Brothers in New Jersey around when The Carpenter was released. “There’s this verse ‘My life is but a coin pulled from an empty pocket’ … I get choked up just about every night singing it because it’s just so beautifully written.

“And then I think about 22-year-old me getting to the Belly Up Tavern in Solana Beach, San Diego, like three hours before the concert just so I could be pressed up against the stage to see them! I think about that younger guy and I just try to kind of commune with him for a minute and [acknowledge] how cool is it … to be up on stage singing the songs of one of my favorite bands. It’s just a total gift.”

For Logan, the song takes on a broader significance, one that helps cement this centuries-old story as an allegory for contemporary times.

“When people say, ‘What’s the show about?’ I don’t say it’s about a shipwreck. I don’t say it’s about an ordeal at sea,” he says. “I say it’s about redemption. It’s a show about salvation.

“There’s a moment late in [‘The Once and Future Carpenter’] and the line is ‘We’re all in this together.’ To me, that’s what the show is about. Particularly … doing it in Washington, DC, and looking at an audience and saying, ‘We live in a time of great dissonance, where there’s huge differences. We are really all in this together.’ It’s good to remember that every now and then.”