An Avett Brothers musical is testing the waters. Next stop: Broadway?

The brothers' folk-rock songbook is featured in "Swept Away," an Arena Stage production telling the story of a 19thcentury shipwreck.

From left, Wayne Duvall, Stark Sands, Adrian Blake Enscoe and John Gallagher Jr., who play the four men lost at sea in the musical "Swept Away" at Arena Stage. (Craig Hudson for The Washington Post)

For his latest project, John Logan went to sea. And to get there, he put on his headphones. "I spent the next few months listening to every single Avett Brothers song, and taking notes on every single song - and they have recorded a lot of albums," recalled Logan, a Tony winner for his 2010 play, "Red."

It was the start of a process of sorting the music, composing a script and combing historical records for a dark tale that, six years later, would unspool in Arena Stage's Kreeger Theater. "Swept Away," the story of four men, adrift after their boat sinks in the Atlantic and compelled by extreme privation to conspire in a horrific act, starts a crucial engagement Saturday in a run that may determine whether it survives to run another day, on Broadway.

Despite a director with a major résumé (Michael Mayer of "Spring Awakening" and "Funny Girl"); a cast including Broadway veterans John Gallagher Jr. and Stark Sands, and a skilled book writer in Logan, a Times Square mooring is nowhere near settled. Based on real events and inspired by a 2004 album, "Mignonette" by the Avett Brothers, a band led by Seth and Scott Avett, the 90-minute musical is compact and intense, certainly not the kind of fare that calls for jazz hands or tap shoes.