Swept Away an Emotional Journey on the High Seas with PRG

	Adrian Blake Enscoe as "Little Brother." Photo: Emilio Madrid

Swept Away, the much-talked-about musical that opened at the Longacre Theatre in November, is based on the album Mignonette by American folk-rock band The Avett Brothers. The story, which was inspired by the true story of the shipwreck of a British yacht in 1884, follows four sailors stranded at sea for nearly three weeks and the moral dilemma they ultimately face. The 90-minute production premiered at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre in 2022 and moved to Arena Stage in Washington, DC, before reaching Broadway.

PRG provided lighting, scenic, and automation to this emotionally charged production which left audiences blown away by its lighting design by Tony Award Winner (Spring Awakening) Kevin Adams and scenic design by Tony Award Winner (Hadestown) Rachel Hauck. The New York Times recognized the shipwreck as one of the "9 Best Theater Moments of 2024," with critics saying, " Winds blow, timbers shiver, and the ship tilts at a thrilling, impossible angle. Disaster never looked so good."

"Swept Away's director Michael Mayer and I went to see Billy Budd at the Met in 2012, and when we started work on this show, I kept telling Michael that Swept Away should look like that production of Billy Budd. That way, it would be lit like an old-fashioned incandescent-era opera with gel and a narrow palette and that it would have a black void surround. Those design elements would separate Swept Away from the conventional look of Broadway musicals while supporting the show's extremely dark tone," says Adams.

For the show's first half, which takes place on a big whaling ship, the lighting plot was wildly asymmetrical, laid out around a complicated off-center rig of ropes and rigging for the ship. There was a strong axis of sunlight running stage right of the centerline of the ship and a second axis of moonlight from farther stage left. For these, Adams used "old-school" conventional fixtures, PAR 64s, ETC Source Four PARs, and Source Four Lekos, with individual gels and no scrollers. To light the actors, he used Martin Mac Ultras and Mac Ones.

The show's second half takes place after the shipwreck and finds the four remaining actors adrift at sea in a small lifeboat. Here, the music and scenes got more expressionistic, and the colors became more saturated. The sunny day became a harsh golden yellow and the nights turned to monochromatic blues and greens.

"We used LightStrike software to allow the lighting fixtures to follow the actors in the small lifeboat using positioning information provided by the scenic automation system," explains Adams. "We had four fixtures high left and right that were dedicated to each performer, and at times, we added a flatter box-boom mover to fill in a face for a specific character."

The small boat was surrounded by a sea of unseen LED pixel tape that pointed at the deck and created different atmospheres of moving water around the boat. PRG's Mbox media server was used to individually control over 10,000 pixels in the LED pixel tape. It was a field to make saturated moving color and gave the second half of the show a different tonal look from the big ship of the of the first half. I like how the LED ocean isolated the boat when seen through the mirrors hanging above it," says Adams.

"PRG was key in making my lighting and special effects work. I've worked with them for 25 years, and it was no surprise that they could provide a rig of quiet movers and make it affordable. They did a terrific job," says Adams.

While researching the show, Adams, Hauck and costume designer Susan Hilferty visited a maritime museum in Mystic, Connecticut, whose artifacts include a collection of 19th-century ship photographs and paintings and the last American whaling ship, built in 1840. Says Hauck, "The research we did truly paid off, we understood how those boats feel. The incredible scenic work by Scenic Art Studios resulted in what looked like a real, rugged, truly weathered ship out for its last sail. We combined aging techniques to achieve this, which added real depth and character to the whaling ship. With Kevin's lights, it really did look like an oil painting."

One of the challenges in building the big ship was how practical and robust it had to be. "I didn't realize how aggressively David Neumann, the show's choreographer, would use every inch of the ship and put all kinds of lateral force on the structure. In the first production, the cast kept breaking bits of the ship with the muscular choreography," says Hauck. "So, we continued to strengthen the boat and structure to support the choreography, and then we built the Broadway boat to be much stronger."

The ropes, tensioned up to 400lb to support the performers' weight, were attached to a grid secured to the building 35' over the stage (above the lighting). They were on a kabuki release mechanism to quickly drop to facilitate the scene shift from the sizable whaling ship to the small lifeboat.

At the moment of the shipwreck, through choreography and technology, the actors used the release of these lines to weave a compelling and frightening narrative in slow motion. After the ship sank, it had no connection to the grid except for four lines lifting it. The downstage edge rose up and the bottom became a backdrop that hovered in the air over the lifeboat which floated in the middle of the stage deck, completely adrift.

"The shipwreck is a huge tonal transition between the big whaler full of life to a tiny, isolated lifeboat lost in the middle of a giant ocean. The audience can see that those guys are in huge trouble. There's just nothing else around but water," Hauck observes. "The structure of the big boat looming over them becomes the memory that haunts them."

The canoe-like lifeboat, an actual wooden boat the production purchased for the show, was held above an "ocean of steel" by just a cradle on a lift, reinforcing the feeling of being hopelessly isolated. Throughout these scenes, it could remain stationary or, through the use of a "turtle," rotate 360 degrees at variable speeds. The slow spin left the boat feeling like it was adrift while offering the audience a changing view into the small space.

Hauck described the execution of the production, saying, "Needless to say, this design posed a series of incredibly complex engineering problems. I can't say enough about the dedication and skill of the engineers at PRG and the team who built the show. They executed the mechanics of this beautiful heartbreaking show flawlessly. They did a brilliant job."

Swept Away played its last performance at the Longacre Theater on December 29, 2024.

Learn more about PRG's work on Broadway here.