With Musical Swept Away, The Avett Brothers Chart New Waters

In the early 2000s—long before they got the attention of producer Rick Rubin and topped the Billboard charts with “Ain’t No Man”—the Avett Brothers were a scrappy young band forging their own path. The musical trio—brothers Scott (vocals, banjo) and Seth Avett (vocals, guitar) and Bob Crawford (vocals, upright bass)—were keeping up a hectic touring schedule and spending a lot of time on the road. During the endless hours in the touring van, Scott regaled his bandmates with passages from The Custom of the Sea, a book that tells the grisly true story of the 1884 shipwreck that left four increasingly desperate survivors adrift in a leaky, 13-foot dinghy without provisions. Cannibalism aside, the story had a strange resonance. The Avett Brothers, too, felt like voyagers in uncharted waters, detached from reality.

“It was easy to see that van as our vessel,” Seth told Broadway.com Editor in Chief Paul Wontorek on The Broadway Show. “We were in our little lifeboat. We were seeing our peers succeed and sort of extricating ourselves from the common template. It was scary. And we felt very driven to survive.”

In 2004, the Avett Brothers released Mignonette, a concept album based on the story of the shipwreck of that name. Fast forward nearly 20 years, and the Avett Brothers’ hard-edged Americana sound has a loyal and passionate fanbase. And, most recently, their album Mignonette has given life to a new musical, Swept Away, which opened in December at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C.

The show has been a labor of love for director Michael Mayer, who was drawn to the project by its very unlikeliness—a quality it shares, he said, with past directorial successes Spring Awakening and American Idiot. “One of the things that attracted me to it as a piece to work on is, ‘How do we do this?’”

For book writer John Logan, the soulful, characterful songs of the Avetts were the major drawcard. “What keeps the American musical theater vibrant is new voices,” he said.

As a a writer who has tackled everything from abstract expressionism (Red) to Ancient Rome (Gladiator), British spies (Sam Mendes’ James Bond films) to Parisian bohemia (Moulin Rouge! The Musical), Logan was excited to take on the sea. “Great writers have been grappling with the metaphor of the sea since The Odyssey,” he said. “The sea’s a vast, great metaphor, waiting to be uncovered. It can be beautiful and it can be terrifying from one moment to the other. And what we want to do with theater, I believe, is be beautiful and be terrifying.”

Logan decided early on not to constrain himself to the true historic events of the Mignonette. Instead, he explained, “I wanted to be inspired by the music.” Logan took copious notes on every song in the Avett Brothers’ discography, requesting that the band make their entire catalog available for the project. Slowly, characters emerged from the songs. “And those characters fell into a story.” Logan also started reading a lot of Joseph Conrad and Herman Melville. He was particularly inspired by a quote from Conrad’s Lord Jim, citing the passage in program notes for the musical's 2022 world premiere at Berkeley Repertory Theatre: “There are as many shipwrecks as there are men.”   

Logan took his ideas to Scott and Seth early in the writing process. “The love and the generosity and the genuine inspiration was clear,” said Seth. “It felt like a new thing right out of the gate, which was super exciting.”

With the Avett Brothers' blessing, the story of Swept Away expanded to include a disastrous whaling voyage. Still, at its center, remains the element that struck them all those years ago: a group of men, miles away from anywhere, fighting for their lives.

“It’s not like anything you’ve seen before,” Logan said of the finished product. “You may be provoked or challenged by it. It’s a serious piece of drama.”

Tony Award winner John Gallagher, Jr. plays one of the four bedraggled survivors (along with two-time Tony nominee and fellow American Idiot alum Stark Sands, as well as regular screen actors Adrian Blake Enscoe and Wayne Duvall). It’s a dream role for the actor, a fan of the band’s “really potent, high-stakes music.” While performing in American Idiot on Broadway, he had an Avett Brothers poster on the wall of his dressing room and introduced their music to Sands, his co-star in the show. ("I was like, oh, this is cool," said Sands.)

“I just have so much respect and admiration for them as artists,” said Gallagher, Jr. “It’s a privilege to get to live in their songs, to sing these songs and expand on the themes they’ve put into their lyrics.”

When it comes to enjoying the music of the Avett Brothers, the whole cast is, well, in the same boat. "Transcendent" is how Duvall describes their music—they're currently his favorite band—while Enscoe paraphrases the old maxim about country music: "What makes a good folk song is four chords and the truth."

As for the show more broadly, Gallagher said that audiences can look forward to an intensely emotional time in the theater. “You can feel there are moments when the air gets sucked out of the room." Duvall concurred: “If you tell me you didn’t cry, I’m going to say you’re a liar.”

For the Avetts, seeing their songs reinterpreted in a musical-theater context—and giving their fans the opportunity to experience familiar songs anew—has been inspiring. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime—once-in-many-lifetimes, possibly—opportunity to see this music that you wrote turned into an expression that you never thought possible," said Seth.

“It’s extremely exciting,” agreed Scott. “It feels like, as we move through our lives and eventually pass on ourselves, the song perhaps can keep living in different forms in different places.”