Theatre in Review: Swept Away (Longacre Theatre)Swept Away is a jukebox musical of a different sort; rather than recycling a clutch of overexposed pop hits and tying them to an airheaded plot, it takes its songs from Mignonette, a concept album by the folk-rock band The Avett Brothers, which recalls the 1895 wreck of a real-life British yacht. John Logan's book uses these songs as the basis for a fictional story of oceangoing misadventure; we're about as far from The Heart of Rock and Roll or Once Upon a One More Time as anyone can get. However, the show's creators may have gone too far around the Horn in pursuit of tragedy. To be sure, Swept Away has all sorts of things going for it, including a stunning design, imaginative staging, and highly committed performances. But packed in the ship's hold is a weighty cargo of angst, resulting in an unapologetically grim tale; it's the only musical that asks the audience to watch its four principals waste away, possibly unto death. Swept Away also suffers from a split personality, with its ninety-minute running time broken into distinct halves. The first details the setting sail of an unnamed whaling ship from New Bedford; it is 1888 and, we are told -- exhaustively -- an era is ending, whale oil being supplanted by paraffin and kerosene. The captain (Wayne Duvall) sadly notes this is the final trip for the vessel, which is to be sold for scrap on its return. (As it happens, it is the final voyage for entirely different reasons.) Also onboard is a character known as Mate (John Gallagher, Jr.), a hairy, cynical, profane sort; Little Brother (Adrian Blake Enscoe), who, sick of farm life, runs off to sea; and Big Brother (Stark Sands), determined to retrieve his sibling. (Advertising its seriousness, Logan's book dispenses with proper names, an early clue that something is awry.) The ship shoves off with Big Brother still onboard, an unwelcome guest put to work on deck, leaving open the question of who is planting the crops back home. For forty-five minutes or so, Swept Away lays out the many tensions onboard as Enscoe and Sands squabble about the future, Enscoe misses the girl he left behind, and Enscoe's religiosity, especially his attempts at ginning up a prayer service on the Sabbath, gets on everyone's nerves. "We're pagans and idolators here," Gallagher says, "waiting to whore ourselves from one pox-ridden port to another. We're sailors and workers, we got no time and no inclination for your pious bullshit, so do not embarrass yourself in front of the crew, and do not inflict your unforgiving sonofabitch God on the rest of us. Hear me, friend?!" Aye, aye, sir. Still, this is promising stuff, aided by songs that fit the hard-driving, masculine milieu and choreography, by David Neumann, emphasizing the explosive pressure of rowdy men confined to close quarters. The opening scene weaves two songs -- "Hard Worker" and "Nothing Short of Thankful" -- in and out of the action, as the characters assemble, and the crew gets ready to depart. The elements of conflict are immediately in place, waiting only for a catalyst. Instead, Logan overturns things, literally: A catastrophic storm blows through and Rachel Hauck's sturdy, beautifully wrought set is upended, left to loom over the action like a tombstone, its mirrored underside reflecting the only survivors -- Gallagher, Enscoe, Sands, and Duvall -- floating in a lifeboat with nothing to eat or drink as days lapse into weeks. The four-men-in-a-boat second half is astonishingly bleak, especially when Gallagher insists that, if everyone else is to live someone must die, thus providing the others with a critical food source. He has specific ideas about that, setting off a chain of furious confrontations followed by a killing and a pair of brutally ironic reversals. This is where Swept Away lands in rough seas: This sequence, while never exactly dull, is exceedingly forbidding; it's the longest, most drawn-out death scene in musical theatre. But what is the point of this story, aside from delivering a gratuitous emotional workout for the audience? Why is it being told now? Even taken on its own terms, Swept Away doesn't fully satisfy: The Avetts' plaintive ballads can't match the savagery of the action; the book's framing device, featuring the aging Gallagher slowly expiring from tuberculosis, preaches a gospel of self-forgiveness that hardly seems adequate to the horror it contains. Nor has Logan's book done nearly enough to create characters who are anything more than figures etched in scrimshaw; we know almost nothing about the brothers and their lives back home; despite a lengthy speech about a career as a grifter and union-buster, Gallagher's character remains a one-note rogue. (A fine actor, he doesn't fully convince as the rum-swilling, whore-chasing type; under all that facial hair, a choirboy still lurks.) Swept Away earned favorable attention during tryout engagements in Berkeley and Washington, DC, so maybe there will be an audience for this Melville-esque fight for survival. Admittedly, it has been gorgeously produced. In addition to Hauck's wonder of a set, Kevin Adams' moody, muscular, highly colorful lighting produces a series of memorable looks. Adams collaborates seamlessly with sound designer John Shivers in the shipwreck sequence, creating an atmosphere of unbridled terror. Shivers' audio reinforcement also provides excellent intelligibility. (The haunting orchestrations by Chris Miller and Brian Usifer, as well as ravishing vocal arrangements, are a big help in this regard.) Susan Hilferty's costumes have the necessary look of rough cloth worn day after day for months. Michael Mayer's staging is one of his best, orchestrating the big moments -- including the sudden appearance of a chorus of the dead -- with considerable sweep. But Swept Away, a musical exercise in blood and thunder, eventually starts to sink under the weight of its solemnity. At the end of its brief running time, you, too, may feel as if you have been left adrift with inadequate supplies and no rescue in the offing. --David Barbour 
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