‘Swept Away’ Runs Aground at SpeakEasy Stage
Directorial misjudgment sinks this ship
One thing more Boston companies would be wise to accept: if you don’t have the means to do a show, you probably shouldn’t do it. If you can’t bring down a chandelier, don’t do The Phantom of the Opera. If you don’t have the dancers, don’t touch West Side Story. And if you can’t convincingly put a ship on stage—or destroy one, or cast the men who sail it—don’t do Swept Away.
Drawn from the music of The Avett Brothers and loosely inspired by the notorious Mignonette shipwreck, Swept Away is not a modest show. It asks for a ship you can believe in, a storm that can take it down, and a world that presses in on the men left behind. It trades in hunger, exposure, and brutality. It is also, as critics have noted since its premiere at Berkeley Rep four years ago, not a very good musical—a conclusion only reinforced by its brief and troubled Broadway run.
The story focuses on four men: a devout Big Brother (a very good Bishop Levesque), his restless Little Brother (Max Connor), a hardened and morally unmoored Mate (Peter DiMaggio), and a Captain (Christopher Chew) nearing the end of his career. After a violent storm destroys the vessel, the four are left adrift in a lifeboat with no food, water, and little hope of rescue. The show moves between the ordeal and a later accounting, where the surviving Mate is forced to tell the story he’s spent a lifetime avoiding.
But here, in Jeremy Johnson’s dreadful production for SpeakEasy Stage, we don’t have a great cast or a dazzling set to distract from the mediocre material. It isn’t that the cast isn’t good, but that most are miscast. These are supposed to be 19th-century whalers, men who’ve spent years doing hard, physical work at sea—the very picture of brawn and masculinity. Instead, most look absurdly young and fresh-faced, reading less like seasoned sailors than boys performing a conservatory showcase.
The casting is only the first of several baffling decisions. For Swept Away to work, the world has to feel physically and morally hostile—exposed and uneasy, with a constant sense of threat. Instead, this production offers no such pressure, no real atmosphere holding it together. For starters, it’s never believable that they’re on a ship. The ever-present, brightly lit scrim is just plain ugly, flattening the stage into a washed-out backdrop that gives the show an unmistakably amateur look. Seth Bodie’s costumes gesture toward period, but everything looks arranged rather than worn, like modern clothes dirtied up. The footwear allowed onstage is a particular affront—modern rubber grips and dance shoes that have no business being here. Karen Perlow’s lighting thankfully provides some atmosphere, but Janie E. Howland’s set barely amounts to more than a suggestion, with two small masts and a scatter of ropes. And where is the world around it? The sounds of the sea? The mist, the fog, the moon? Why is no one ever wet? Nothing adds up. And—again—for a professional theater charging healthy admission prices, this is hard to excuse. How is an audience supposed to get lost in a show so inattentive to its own details?
And so what is one to do when you need to stage a shipwreck but can’t? Jeremy Johnson’s solution is to thread an aerialist (Ezra Quinlan) through the evening, hanging, climbing, dropping in and out of scenes, and, at times, standing on deck with the others, looking out of place. It’s inelegant, and it undercuts the realism the piece depends on. The execution is clunky and anticlimactic, which only makes the problem worse. This has to feel like a real boat on a real ocean. Turn it into a circus act, and you lose the plot.
The show’s central image, at least in the second half, should be brutally simple: four men confined to a lifeboat, with nowhere to go and no way out. But Johnson never gives that confinement any real physical shape. There’s no lifeboat, no defined space, nothing that actually holds these men in place. They just stand—not even with a wobble—and move about the front of the stage as if being trapped at sea were beside the point. If the play’s moral pressure depends on men being trapped together in a tiny vessel on an endless ocean, then the production has to make us feel that.
There are some plusses. It’s good to see Peter DiMaggio stretch into a different kind of role here—and he’s a formidable leading man—though he veers into overacting in the second half, and the Southern accent remains puzzling given that the Mate is described as a Yankee from Vermont—both problems point back to the direction. Christopher Chew is, as ever, excellent and well-cast. The score is well-sung, and the band, led by Paul S. Katz, is the evening’s most consistently professional element. Ilyse Robbins’s choreography is also a bright spot—though when isn’t it?
If SpeakEasy were committed to doing this piece, it might have been wiser to present it as a stripped-down concert in the Roberts. Instead, we’re left with something that has become all too common at SpeakEasy: inattention to detail and a disregard for the material’s basic demands. It’s too bad.
Swept Away. Through May 23 at SpeakEasy Stage, Boston. speakeasystage.com. Running time: 90 minutes.