Scott Klavan: Swept Away

SWEPT AWAY
Book by John Logan
Music & Lyrics by The Avett Brothers
Directed by Michael Mayer
The Longacre Theater
Broadway Review by Scott Klavan (12/21/24)

By the time you read this review, Swept Away will be closed. It didn’t last long. The 90-minute musical featuring an all-male cast in the story of a shipwreck on a whaling ship in the 1880s originated at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, CA , in 2022, moved to Washington D.C.’s Arena Stage, and just transferred to Broadway in November. It had songs by the Avett Brothers, well-known and liked in some quarters, and talented players, including admired Broadway veterans John David Gallagher and Stark Sands. There’s spirit and sincerity, likeability, some bold, moving moments, and effective staging by the lauded director Michael Mayer. There are also flaws in the storytelling and writing. But all of that is moot because Swept Away didn’t have a chance to catch on; after a brief attempt to keep it open by fans, it lasted until December 29—after previews, 32 performances.

The fast failure of the show may be seen as surprising, although maybe not. It could be a fairly predictable result given the state of modern Broadway theater. Either way, it’s worth taking a look at the show, a watery debacle on stage, and a financial one, off, to see what went wrong.

The plot is clear and easy to follow. In 1910, older sailor Mate (Gallagher), near death in a hospital, is visited by the spirits of three colleagues from a whaling ship they worked years before; the ghosts urge the old man to tell the tale of their final journey off Massachusetts, a traumatic one, as evidenced by Mate’s reluctance to revisit it. But he decides to recount the story (or we’d all have to go home) and the men travel back in time, to 1888, where the New England ship plans to shove off in search of whale blubber, valuable then as a use for light, heat, and other necessities. On board, the devoted but world-weary Captain (Wayne Duvall) relies on Mate, even then a cynical, hard-living, experienced man of the sea. Soon, a wholesome, rambunctious teenager barrages on board. This is Little Brother (Adrian Blake Enscoe), desperate to escape his mundane life on a farm and see the world before his marriage to beloved fiancée Melody Anne. He is followed by his protective, sober, and religious Older Brother (Sands), trying to rescue him from this danger and return him to the safety of home. But Little Brother refuses to leave; determined to look after his kin, Older Brother joins him on the precarious voyage out to sea.

As they travel, the righteous Older Brother conflicts with the nihilistic Mate, while the Captain bemoans the coming end of whaling days, as blubber is being replaced by kerosene as fuel. Suddenly, all arguments and lamentations end as a huge storm sinks the ship and the two Brothers, the Captain and Mate, become the only survivors in a life boat; a tragic ordeal and moral dilemma follow.

The piece features over a dozen songs by the Avetts, taken off of their 2004 album Mignonette, the name of the doomed real-life 19th-century ship that inspired the record. I have to admit I’d never heard of the songwriting and singing brothers Scott and Seth Avett, originally from North Carolina, though their heartfelt folk music has a following. The unabashed earnestness of the score, in soulful tunes such as the title song, and Nothing Short of Thankful, is often winning. But there is also a straightforward quality that flirts with blandness and even in a short show, repetition creeps in, dulling us out.

More damaging is the book by film and Broadway writer John Logan (the screen’s Gladiator, the stage’s Red), which presents the kind of prototypes—the naïve lovelorn farm boy, crusty Captain, cynical veteran mate—that might be found in an old seafaring movie with Lionel Barrymore and Alan Ladd, rather than the specific and complex characters considered more stageworthy today. Dialogue and interaction, while energetic, is just too often simplistic. (There’s a hint to the problem in the generic names of the characters.)

The plot itself starts out dynamically, but the middle section goes in circles, losing a vital chance to create involving arcs for the players; none of the men on stage really move or change, and the script fails to fully build a central moral dilemma that will explode in the last harrowing section. (The fact that the songs come from an earlier album—only one was apparently written for the show—seems to be a liability. The score doesn’t truly serve the story, elucidate it, move it forward, etc.) Life on a whaler is basically ignored; there are few references to the men doing their actual jobs, which might have brought variety, and growth, to the people and story. It must be said the staging and acting in the culminating scenes of survival are wrenching, but the play as a whole has the scope of the little lifeboat, rather than the bigger whaling ship.

Director Mayer, acclaimed for many musicals including American Idiot, also with Gallagher and Sands, and the current Off-Broadway revival of Little Shop of Horrors, does really well with the shipwreck and the last brutal sequences. The set by Rachel Hauck is blunt yet inventive, and the actors all shine, with Sands bringing maturity, subtlety, and feeling to what might have been a clichéd do-gooder role. Special praise goes to the all-male chorus of sailors; though, even with its short length, the play seemed to have enough time to add detail to another character or two, filling out a show that stays slim.

So why did Swept Away go dark so fast? It was strong enough to deserve a solid run. After seeing it, this reviewer thinks there are apparent reasons in the show itself: again, it has truncated reach and expression, and predictability in characterizations and dialogue. Okay, but it also is superior at times, forthright throughout, with genuine emotion and force. It doesn’t have any stars. True, but neither did Come From Away, whose modesty and popularity Swept Away seemingly wants to emulate. Some other current musical hits, such as I, Juliet, Hadestown, Six, don’t have famous names to sell their product. It’s not based on a familiar property, usually a film, like Death Becomes Her, Harry Potter…, or The Outsiders. Can’t argue with that. Although, proximity to big-name movies doesn’t guarantee profitability; see: The Notebook, Back to the Future, among many others. Certainly, the complete lack of women in the cast hurts, commercially speaking: men don’t go to plays much these days, and Broadway has basically given up the idea of trying to attract them. There’s none of the kind of “You Go Girl” feminist boosterism that is featured in many recent smashes. And the story, while wholesome and inspiringly spiritual/Christian in nature, does have painful, downbeat elements, particularly near the end, the part most audiences take home with them. Put all of this together and you might have the answer to Swept Away’s failure.

But there’s one other thing. Even as someone who works in the theater and arts-related activities all week, I had barely heard of Swept Away until it opened; it took positive word-of-mouth from show friends to get me to go. I didn’t know it was based on an album or true story until I read the profile in Playbill and background articles and Wikipedia researching this review. As mentioned, I hadn’t heard, and didn’t hear, anything about the Avetts. One of my favorite names of a company is YourMarketingSucks.com. I don’t know if this NY-based publicity group is worthwhile, but its title and concept are great. Probably because of a limited budget, the marketing for Swept Away not only sucked, it barely existed. (I accidentally came across an interview with actor Enscoe on a Sunday morning radio show I’d never heard of and whose name I don’t remember. I guess that’s about the best media exposure they could get.) This is weird, because, in looking at the number of producers credited on the show, I stopped counting after 30. But it isn’t an isolated incident. Many shows throw their beloved production up on Broadway, naively crossing their fingers and fervently wishing that, like Come From Away, it will catch on and reach an audience on its own. (This overreach also happens because the number of worthwhile Off-Broadway houses, where Swept Away would have been more comfortable—and presumably gotten more time to build an audience—is rapidly dwindling.) The Broadway of today is a fiercely competitive, overpriced, spectacle-laden, star-run, multi-million dollar machine, where, as in all areas of modern American life, ruthless money-driven corporations rule. Without committed, innovative schemes of sales persuasion to get you afloat, and the necessary finances to serve as ballast, you’re going to founder, and drown.

Scott Klavan, theatre writer at Escape Into Life, is an actor, director, and playwright in New York. Scott performed on Broadway in Irena’s Vow, with Tovah Feldshuh, in regional theater, and in numerous shows Off Broadway, including two productions of The Joy Luck Club for Pan Asian Rep. His stage adaption of Raymond Carver’s short story “Cathedral” was produced off-Broadway by Theater Breaking Through Barriers (TBTB), and his play Double Murder was published in Best American Short Plays of 2006-2007. For twenty years, Scott was Script and Story Analyst for the legendary actors Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward and for companies including HBO, CAA, and Viacom. In 2015, he was featured in A Soldier’s Notes, an episode of the Web Series Small Miracles, alongside Judd Hirsch, and earned a nomination for Outstanding Actor in the LA Web Series Festival. Scott directed the one-woman show My Stubborn Tongue, written and performed by Anna Fishbeyn, off-Broadway at The New Ohio Theater and at the United Solo Festival; and directed and appeared in the solo play Canada Geese, by George Klas, in the 2016 New York International Fringe Festival. In 2019, he directed a 60-minute version of the Sondheim/Lapine classic Into the Woods, cast solely with senior actors, for Music Theatre International (MTI) and Lenox Hill Neighborhood House; the show was written up in The New York Times. He helped to develop and directed Eleanor and Alice, by Ellen Abrams, about Eleanor Roosevelt and her cousin Alice Longworth, for the Roosevelt Library and Museum in Hyde Park and the Roosevelt House in NYC. He directed Night Shadows, by Lynda Crawford, about the poet Anna Akhmatova, for the On Women Festival at Irondale Center. He is a Lifetime Acting Member of The Actors Studio and a member of the Studio’s Playwright/Directors Workshop (PDW), where his own play The Common Area, was chosen as part of the PDW’s Festival of New Works in 2019. During the pandemic, Scott figured out how to direct on Zoom! Scott teaches at the 92nd St. Y and other arts organizations.