ADRIFT, AND
MORALLY AT SEA

A haunting, musically rich survival tale that
probes faith, labor, and the cost of living on

Directed by Jeremy Johnson and driven by the highly listenable roots-inflected songs from The Avett Brothers (music director Paul S. Katz), this engrossing SpeakEasy Stage production of Swept Away, a New England premiere, tells a complex story of ship-wrecked men determining just how far they are willing to go to survive.

Peter DiMaggio stands out as Mate, the force that drives the tale from beginning to end. Near the end of his life, the voices of the three men with whom he shared a lifeboat following the 1888 shipwreck of a whaler off the coast of New Bedford tell him he must relate what happened on that boat if he is to die in peace.

Thus the tale begins.

Peter DiMaggio and Ensemble

Swept Away could be considered something of a sequel to Moby Dick. Unlike that narrative, which is set at the height of the American whaling industry in the 1840s and which portrays a captain willing to sacrifice the lives of his crew to exact revenge on a whale who has taken his leg, Swept Away tells the story of what Captain (Christopher Chew) terms “useless men hunting vanishing prey in a dying trade.” The other two speaking roles, Little Brother (Max Connor) and Big Brother (Bishop Levesque) portray two additional archetypes: a young man seeking relief from the tedium of farm life through an adventure at sea and his older brother, determined to save him from the corrupting influences of the wider world and bring him home again.

Max Connor, Peter DiMaggio, Bishop Levesque, Christopher Chew

Endurance tales of people facing desperate times often culminate in an act universally seen as a violation of basic morality. So as I watched the story of Mate and his stranded comrades unfold, I dreaded this outcome. Nonetheless, Swept Away manages to twist that expectation into a moment of shock and then plays on the Christian ritual of Communion, in which the body and the blood of Christ are sacramentally consumed for spiritual sustenance. It leaves the audience grappling with the morality of the survivors’ choice, the role of Mate in precipitating it, and the choices of the Captain and the two brothers in their complicity. On the surface, it may seem to be a story of a handful of men who descend into cannibalism to survive; on another level, it is the story of how capitalism chews up the lives of workers to further its own goals of profit-making, regardless of the needs of those who power it with their labor.

Max Connor and Peter DiMaggio with Ensemble

DiMaggio’s compelling delivery of bookwriter John Logan’s poetic lines is almost reason enough to see this production. He employs a beautiful cadence, swaying slightly from side to side as he speaks to convey a ship’s motion, yet never do these techniques overpower the emotional content of the unfolding story. Connor’s haunting tenor is an added pleasure, as are choreographer Ilyse Robbins‘ dance numbers (which include notable talent such as Nicholas Papayoanou and Anthony Pires, Jr.) and which successfully convey the hard lives of sailors with grace and rhythm. The stellar design team includes Janie E. Howland (set); Seth Bodie (costumes); and Karen Perlow (lights).

Peter DiMaggio

In a lovely coda to this past Saturday night’s performance, Chew acknowledged after curtain call that Papayoanou was missing his Emerson College graduation ceremony to appear that night. Papayoanou was handed a bouquet of flowers, cap and gown, and diploma cover, as the orchestra struck up “Pomp and Circumstance.”

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photos by Nile Scott Studios

Swept Away
SpeakEasy Stage Company
Boston Center for the Arts, 527 Tremont Street
90 minutes, no intermission
ends on May 23, 2026
for tickets, visit SpeakEasyStage

for more shows, visit Theatre in Boston

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