Theater Review: ‘Swept Away’ on Broadway

By swept away, at the Langacre.
Photo: Emilio Madrid

“Consider the subtlety of the sea,” wrote Herman Melville Moby Dick“the diabolical brilliance and beauty… the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures hunt each other and wage eternal war since the beginning of the world. Consider all this; and then turn to the green, gentle, and most docile earth… Don’t you find a strange analogy to something within yourself? For as this hideous ocean surrounds the green land, so within the soul of man lies one island of Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but surrounded by all the terrors of half-known life. God save you! Don’t leave that island, you can never return!’

Damn it, Herman. Perhaps it’s unfair to jump straight to the leviathan of seafaring when thinking about the new musical Wiped out. At the same time, the writers are clearly going for the swirling depths and dizzying existential heights of Melville. They are interested in what happens when the soul of man leaves the safety of its own inner island. John Logan’s book weaves its way through songs Resedathe 2004 album from North Carolinian folk rockers the Avett Brothers, delving heavily into the rest of their catalog along the way. That album musicalizes a naval tragedy from the 1880s, in which an English ship of the same name sank off the coast of the Cape of Good Hope. Four crew members were stranded in a lifeboat for 19 days and were only rescued after three of them killed and ate the fourth. Welcome to the horrors of the half-known life.

In adapting the Avett Brothers’ take on this horrific true story into a musical, Logan and director Michael Mayer faced a strangely paradoxical task. On the one hand, the events are there, the songs are there, and the central characters and situations are waiting to be brought to three-dimensional life. Conversely, this straightforwardness is a potential pitfall. A piece of theater composed of pre-existing songs, or that charts a well-known historical event, can end up feeling like the things we expect to happen do happen, and along the way people sing about it (or, more likely, they sing about somewhat general conditions bordering on the specific conditions on stage). Despite the creative team’s best efforts to incorporate a capital-T theme throughout the work, Wiped out often falls prey to this rottenness. Logan, met the support of Scott and Seth Avett and their bandmate Bob Crawford have chosen “salvation and redemption” as the play’s big idea, but its execution isn’t flashy on television – we hear a lot about it, but our heart rates never really rise with the stakes.

Both story and character problems are to blame. Logan and Mayer strive to blend the economic (the show is only 90 minutes) with the epic, but their story of shipwreck, suffering and cannibalism remains limited by its own plot points – it aims for Melvillian metaphysical grandeur but never quite hits it . . At the same time, the character in need of redemption is a tough nut, with such a thick shell that it’s questionable if there’s anything inside. He’s known only as ‘Mate’ (Logan takes a Cormac McCarthy approach to names) and he’s played by John Gallagher Jr. makes the score’s banjo part feel downright sinister. Gallagher, even though he sings well and moves well, is more Mephistophelean than human. It’s fine that Mate isn’t nice, but if we’re going to commit to bringing his soul back to the light, there has to be a soul in the first place. “(I) kept the colored people in line down the Carolinas,” he hissed to two of the men who ended up with him on the lifeboat after the wreck, detailing his ugly past as a threat, “so many damn Indians have killed in the Oklahoma Territory, I couldn’t keep up, I had so many scalps on my belt. Every despicable trade there was was easy for me… So don’t ask who I am. You know.” (Logan moves Reseda‘s basic plan in the United States, set in the post-war whaling years.)

These types of speeches could be an opportunity for an actor to play both persona and shadow at the same time. There is a version of Mate who tries to convince himself as much as his fellow sailors. If they are to survive, they will have to do the unspeakable, and perhaps there is a part of Mate that knows – like Lady Macbeth, as she prays to be filled with cruelty – that he will have to become monstrous, and so he will do his best to play the monster. But that subcutaneous layer, the part that fears and regrets and longs for a different past but also for a different future, is not visible in Gallagher. His Mate feels bad and cunning, if not happy, then still committed, until the end.

Or rather the beginning: like many new musicals these days, Wiped out exists within a frame. We first meet Mate in a rickety hospital bed, wrapped in bloody rags and coughing up what’s left of his life. It is 22 years after the wreck and subsequent horrors; now he lies dying in a charity ward. But before he can slip away, three old friends arrive. Here are the men who endured the nightmare with him, the Captain (Wayne Duvall) and two farm boys, Big Brother (Stark Sands) and Little Brother (Adrian Blake Enscoe), who have chosen the worst possible ship to save the country. to leave. an adventure at sea. None of them are still among the living (no spoilers as to which man was consumed), and both Susan Hilferty’s costumes and Kevin Adams’ lights do a beautiful job of suspending them in another realm, dim and watery in the shadows around Mate’s bed. “Confess it, confess it, tell the truth, my man,” they sing to him, “unless your plan is to take it to hell.” Mate’s redemption apparently depends on their release from purgatory. “Tell our story,” they urge him. ‘Let us go… Free yourself.’

As Big Brother and Little Brother, Sands and Enscoe bring out conscience and vulnerability Wiped out that Mate lacks, along with, in Enscoe’s case, a sparking vitality that boosts the play’s engines. Enscoe, who has their own indie band called Bandits on the Run, is a radiant presence, delivering the Avett Brothers’ songs, including the surprisingly mellow title track, with equal parts passion and tenderness, longing and lilt. They’re the ingénue, the adventurous young spirit who does it aboard a whaling ship because “there must be more to this life,” while Sands’ Big Brother is the hard-working, pious, stay-at-home type. Poor Big Brother – he’s not on board until the ship leaves because he’s trying to drag Little Brother off. He wasn’t even supposed to be here today!

Ultimately, Wiped out‘s most compelling elements are around the center rather than within it. Along with Sands and Enscoe, the show’s muscular, rugged, dirty Henley-wearing ensemble does a great job with David Neumann’s masculine maritime choreography. They enthusiastically climb into the rigging and swing from the ropes of Rachel Hauck’s cleverly designed set, which in itself is perhaps the production’s greatest triumph. It has a trick up its sleeve for the eventual shipwreck, and when it comes, Mayer and his entire team deliver a staging that indeed evokes the terrible and the sublime. The “devilish brilliance and beauty” of the sea flows through the space. It is temporary, but at least for a moment we are carried away by it.

Wiped out is at the Longacre Theater.