After American Idiot, Stark Sands, Michael Mayer, and John Gallagher Jr. Reunite for Swept Away

John Gallagher, Jr. was ready to quit theatre. In the late 2010s, the actor—a Tony Award winner who had led two hugely popular musicals—was experiencing a crisis: “I was dealing with quite a bit of stage fright…It had kind of crept up in my life in my mid 30s for the first time—where being on stage was suddenly not comfortable in a way that it had been in my youth.” But then, in 2017, he got an email from producers Matthew Masten and Sean Hudock. They were creating a musical based on the music of the Avett Brothers, and Michael Mayer was directing it. There was no script yet, but was he interested?

Gallagher was a longtime fan of the Avett Brothers’ music. He loved Mayer, because they had done Spring Awakening and American Idiot together. John Logan was writing the book. “These are collaborators that I desperately want to work with,” says Gallagher, who spoke with Playbill prior to Broadway previews. “I was dying to do something else with Michael. The best times of my life on stage are all thanks to him.” So, he said yes, and it’s a decision that, in his words, “has paid dividends.”

That musical with no script is now Swept Away. It follows four men who are trapped on a boat together after a shipwreck. The show opened at the Longacre Theatre November 19.

John Gallagher, Jr. Heather Gershonowitz

Mayer was first approached to work on Swept Away way back during American Idiot. Gallagher had loved the Avett Brothers so much that he had turned the entire Idiot team onto their music. So when Swept Away came around, Mayer said yes with a condition: “We have to make a part for Johnny in it,” he recalls, pointing to Gallagher, who smiles mischievously while chewing on a coffee stirrer. “I thought that this was the logical next thing for us to do together, after Moritz in Spring Awakening, and then Johnny [in American Idiot]. Moritz as a teenager. And then Johnny as a fucked-up 20-something. What is the fucked up 30- to 40-something character?” He then looks at Gallagher, “We’ll see what you do in your 50s.”

Responds Gallagher, with affection: “I don’t know how I’m going to top this. What are we going to do next?”

But it wasn’t just Gallagher. For Swept Away, Mayer has assembled a number of his longtime friends—many of them from American Idiot (whom Mayer affectionately refers to as “idiots”). Similar to Idiot, Swept Away is also based on a concept album. The music is drawn from the Avett Brothers’ catalog of folk and Americana-tinged songs, most specifically from their concept album Mignonette, which told the story of a shipwreck. In Swept Away, a crew of whalers set out from Massachusetts in 1888. Soon, they are besieged by a storm which sinks the ship—leaving four survivors, played by Gallagher, Stark Sands (also from American Idiot), Wayne Duvall, and Broadway newcomer Adrian Blake Enscoe. Trapped on a small boat, the four men have to ask themselves how far they would go to survive.

"The characters are archetypes. It does have a kind of spiritual feeling to it—in the way like when you read those parables from the Bible," says Mayer. In the show, no one is named. For instance: Gallagher is First Mate, while Sands is Big Brother. And for Broadway, Mayer wanted to really increase the contrast between the full ship of men in the first half of the musical, and the desolation in the second half when there are only four survivors. So, the show begins with a cast of 16 on a full ship, which is then (in a stunning coup de théâtre) whittled down to four on a small lifeboat.

Explains Mayer: "The thing that has impressed me the most about what John Logan did is, he took all of these amazing songs, this kind of unbelievable story, and these four indelible character types—and it all happens in 90 minutes. But you feel like you've been on this gigantic, epic adventure that just goes terribly, terribly wrong. And then it does ask, what is there? Is there forgiveness?" Especially, is there forgiveness after you've done the unthinkable?

For Sands in particular, Swept Away is a much more serious show than & Juliet or Kinky Boots (the other musicals he's known for). But for the actor, working in the room with his friends has been “easy,” adding, “I heard that John was attached, and then I got the call to be involved, which was, like, very exciting for so many reasons, not just because I became a fan of the band, but I'm also a fan and a friend of these guys," he says, gesturing to Mayer and Gallagher. "To know that I was going back into a room with these people where it’s a very safe space to create…It’s just easy, and it has been since the beginning.”

Being friends has allowed Gallagher and Sands to go to new emotional places together. While in American Idiot, they played childhood friends; in Swept Away, they are enemies. Gallagher plays the ship’s First Mate, who is jaded and bitter and believes life is a zero sum game. But he is thrown off when he meets Sands’ character, a newcomer to sailing who is religious and believes there is a higher power and purpose to life. The two spend the musical at each other’s throats, sometimes literally.

For Gallagher, he admits he “blacks out” those intense moments, saying with a smile, “I don’t recall attempting to physically bite Stark Sands.” He then adds, more seriously, “If I got this role and I went into a room full of strangers, I don’t think the result would have been the same...It is only through playing on a team with people that I love and admire, and I’m so comfortable being myself around, that you’re able to go to such extremes.”

Sands agrees, saying that his role in Swept Away is “the most emotionally vulnerable I’ve ever had to be. It is the toughest inner work that I’ve had to do…And as a dad now, I’ve got two kids who are nine and six—I wouldn’t be able to do this in the same way 10 years ago.”

That parental energy is very useful, agrees Gallagher: “Stark really would be the person that we would all turn to if we were lost at sea.”

Exclaims Mayer: “100 percent!,” before adding, “To just drive this boat metaphor into the ground, these guys are the anchor for me.”