By Kilian Melloy

The John Logan-written jukebox musical Swept Away sweeps into Boston after last year’s Broadway run. The show draws on the work of The Avett Brothers, principally on their third album, Mignonette, titled after an English vessel that sank in the 1880s and the survival story the survivors endured.

Logan, an Oscar-and Tony-winning screenwriter, wrote the book after Broadway producer Mike Masten approached him with the idea of basing a show on the album. “There were songs that Logan felt like he could use,” Jeremy Johnson, who is directing the SpeakEasy Stage Company production of Swept Away, told QulturVultur in a recent interview, “but he listened to some more of the Avetts and said, ‘If you can, give me access to the full Avett catalog.’ And they said, ‘Sure,’ and once he had access to that, he was able to pull from a bunch of different elements. Even though he’s pulling from several different albums, from several different stages in their career, it all still works, which is kind of amazing.”

Logan’s book tells the story of a quartet of shipwreck survivors, the captain and crew of a whaling ship sunk in a storm. Told in flashback as the first mate (called only Mate) reflects on events ears later — with a chorus of ghosts urging him on — the story sees the arrival of a young farm boy, Little Brother, on the ship. Little Brother is anxious to escape a fate trailing “the ass-end of a plough mule,” but his older sibling, Big Brother, has chased after him with the thought of bringing him back home. Having stepped aboard the ship just before it set sail, Big Brother is now part of the crew, his reluctance sharpened by the way Mate and Little Brother have struck up a friendship. The Captain, meantime, frets that his sailing days have nearly come to a close.

How right he is: After the ship is sunk, the four face almost certain death. Reflections on the lives they have lived lead to moments of remorse, but also joy; their choices have brought them to where they are and will determine what happens next. Not all of those choices are obvious, but they all feel necessary.

Swept Away plays April 24-May 23 at the Boston Center for the Arts’ Stanford Calderwood Pavilion. Read on to see what Johnson had to say about the show’s themes of deep male bonding and life choices, and how a visit to an antique whaling ship informed his approach to helming the production.

Kilian Melloy: This musical is a powerful story about people wanting different things: Adventure, safety, redemption, and, most essentially, to survive. How does the music by The Avett Brothers capture that and communicate that?

Jeremy Johnson: When the Avetts were in their mid-20s, their father gave them a copy of this book, The Custom of the Sea, which was the story of the shipwreck of the Mignonette. At the time, they were traveling around the country, and they were playing gigs, and a lot of their friends were getting jobs and starting families. They were in this little bus traveling around the country trying to survive as a band. They read this book and kind of identified with this idea of these four survivors just trying to scrape through. So, a lot of the Mignonette album, which is used in in the show, speaks to what they were feeling at the time.

Kilian Melloy: Fraternal love certainly does come into the play. It’s a story about a younger brother running away from the family farm, and his older brother, who sees his duty in life and to their family is to come chasing after the younger brother, grab hold of him, drag him back home and make him, live his predestined life.

Jeremy Johnson: He’s looking for adventure, and it’s complicated by the fact that when they arrive, he meets Mate, who is a charming, engaging, funny, slightly dangerous and rough-around-the-edges kind of character who has a different life philosophy from Big Brother. For the first half of the play there is this tug of war between Mate and Big Brother for the heart of Little Brother. What kind of person is he going to grow into? Is he going to go back and do what his duty is? Or is he going to answer this call to adventure?

Kilian Melloy: It’s interesting how the characters are referred to by their roles: The Mate, the Captain, the Little Brother, and the Big Brother. Nobody’s got a name. Does that contribute to the universality of the play?

Jeremy Johnson: I think so. Our roles are sort of symbolic: “I’m the big brother, which also means I’m representing family and duty and responsibility,” and, “I’m the Captain, I’m representing authority and the past and fatherhood.” I think all of that stuff is there, and it makes the play feel epic. In the rehearsal room, what we want to make sure we’re doing is still creating really vivid, clear, specific, nuanced human beings. We’re not playing symbols. We have to be playing people. I think the audience will read the symbols, but my hope is that they still connect with human characters that are going through something that feels real.

Kilian Melloy: The playwright, John Logan, who’s also a screenwriter, is openly gay, and I wonder if that perspective has lent something to the story.

Jeremy Johnson: I’m kind of curious to explore this in rehearsal. I’ve wondered to myself why Big Brother, who is so focused on family and duty and responsibility, does not have a wife and children, and says things like, “I don’t let myself want that.” For me as a gay director, I see a little queer subtext in some of these lines. I haven’t talked to the actors about it yet, but it is something that’s interesting to examine. Is this a character that’s hiding something, or repressing something? Are they going deep into this religious fervor to escape from something? But on top of that you’ve got this bromance Little Brother and Mate are developing, which is not necessarily something that’s romantic or sexual, but there’s room for jealousy and envy and competition to show up in the relationships between these men, which I think is really interesting.

Kilian Melloy: To research the material you visited some different museums in the area, including the only remaining wooden whaling ship.

Jeremy Johnson: The last wooden whaling ship in the United States is in Mystic, Connecticut — the Charles W. Morgan.

Kilian Melloy: How did that inform your direction of the play?

Jeremy Johnson: Incredibly. There’s something about going and physically being in that space on that ship, to hear the creaking of the wood in the water, to go down into the fo’c’sle [forecastle] and see how small your bed was. I mean, you get one cot, and you get one little piece of fabric that you draw over for privacy, and you have this much space between you and the ceiling. That’s where you sleep. And you do that with 20 other people in the room with you, and it smells, and it’s greasy, and it’s hot, and you can hear the water sloshing outside. I mean, it was such a visceral thing to be there, and then to walk around the deck and see the trypots, where they melt down [whale blubber to extract oil]. The fact that it was all done on the ship is nuts. It was great to get a sense of, like, “What’s the scale of the ship? How big is it? What is it like to walk around on it? What are the quarters like?” That’s really rich stuff that I can bring back to the actors and say, “This is what your day-to-day was like” so that we can fill in that feeling, so it feels lived in.

Kilian Melloy: Why are the days of sailing ships still such a romantic thing for so many people?

Jeremy Johnson: I mean, you’re dealing with the ocean, which is so massive and mysterious even now. There’s still tons about the ocean that we don’t know. And I think especially for those of us in New England who live by the sea and have so much of our culture informed by the sea, there’s that romanticism to it. Both of my grandfathers are sailors. My father’s a sailor. Again, this goes back to surrender and back to some of the other stuff we’ve talked about; you’re riding the wind, you’re trying to figure out how to steer this boat and set up these sails so that you can catch the wind and let the wind move you forward. The wind is unpredictable, and it’s going to change, and you’ve got to change with it. There’s so many life parallels that you can draw to sailing. There is something romantic about that, as you’re trying to harness nature in this really pure way to move yourself forward.

Kilian Melloy: The show premiered just last year, and the way it’s stormed onto the scene is remarkable. Is the response to Swept Away related to the current moment? Are we finding comfort in this story of peril?

Jeremy Johnson: I think the challenge of that first production was the question of, do people want this right now? Are people ready for something that’s this intense and heavy? There were people that were, and there were people that weren’t. I’m excited to see what its life beyond Broadway is like. It’s got a rabid fan base already, even from the short amount of time that it was in New York. SpeakEasy’s told me that they’ve already heard from the “Swept Away-lers,” I guess they’re called, who are interested in coming from New York, and from all over, to see this thing on stage again. There’s a hunger for this story and an interest to see it done again, so I’m excited to watch people watch it.

Swept Away plays April 24 – May 23. For tickets and more information, visit the SpeakEasy Stage website at this link.