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Out to Sea and Back With Swept Away
The story of a whaling expedition that turned horrifying, musicalized by the Avett Brothers.
Logan, with the support of Scott and Seth Avett and their bandmate Bob Crawford, has chosen “salvation and redemption” as the play’s big idea, but its deployment is telly not showy — we hear a lot about it, but our pulses never really rise with the stakes. He’s known only as “Mate”—Logan takes a Cormac McCarthy approach to names—and he’s played by John Gallagher Jr. with a glinting leer, a six-months-at-sea beard, and a backwoods dialect cranked up so high that it makes the score’s banjo part feel downright sinister. “[I] kept the coloreds in line down the Carolinas,” he hisses at two of the men who end up on the lifeboat with him after the wreck, laying out his ugly past by way of threat, “killed so many damn Indians out in the Oklahoma Territory I couldn’t keep track, so many scalps I had on my belt.
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