Swept Away

May 6, 2020: Performances have been canceled due to COVID-19. Swept Away will be moved to the 2020/21 season.

Tony Award-winning director Michael Mayer (Spring Awakening, Hedwig and the Angry Inch) blew the roof off Berkeley Rep in 2009 with Green Day’s American Idiot. Now he returns with a captivating world premiere musical, this time featuring a book by Tony Award-winning stage and screen writer John Logan (Red, Broadway’s Moulin Rouge!, Skyfall, Gladiator), and music and lyrics by “America’s biggest roots band” (Rolling Stone) and multiple Grammy Award nominee The Avett Brothers.

1888, off the coast of New Bedford, MA. When a violent storm sinks their whaling ship, the four surviving souls—a young man in search of adventure, his older brother who has sworn to protect him, a captain at the end of a long career at sea, and a worldly first mate who has fallen from grace—each face a reckoning: How far will I go to stay alive? And can I live with the consequences?