I fell hard for The Bengsons. But over the years, this married singer-songwriter duo, now back off-Broadway with My Joy Is Heavy (at New York Theatre Workshop through April 5), have grown more and more difficult to love.
Abigail and Shaun Bengson burst onto the scene with Hundred Days, a moving account of their bumpy courtship set to rousing indie-folk-punk tunes. (I still have the album on constant repeat.) Days premiered at NYTW in fall of 2017. It was quickly followed by The Lucky Ones at Ars Nova in 2018, a challenging book-driven musical with a breadth of narrative ambition that made me hopeful. Both pieces were auto-fiction, but their stylistic differences suggested artists interested in experimentation with theatrical form.
There were also warning signs. The Bengsons’ natural open-heartedness and vulnerability has always hovered just on the edge of self-indulgence. In Hundred Days, Abigail’s struggle to commit to Shaun is centered around an intense fear of his death—not wholly irrational (to love is to lose, etc.)—but hardly a unique concern, yet one presented in grandiose terms.
In translating these potentially navel-gazing questions into more theatrically transcendent terms, the Bengsons got a huge assist from early collaborators. For Hundred Days, director Anne Kauffman’s sparing production gently conjured the creeping threat of mortality, using columns of falling sand that drifted down from above the stage. The show’s book, co-authored by the Bengsons and playwright Sarah Gancher, zeroed in on specific emotional peaks and valleys while consistently propelling the narrative forward.
The rigor applied to Hundred Days has been less in evidence in the Bengsons’ subsequent works. Sometimes, a looser style has been forgivable in context. Shutdown-era piece Broken Ear Setlist: Songs From Ohio was a gentle easing-in, played for two nights before a socially distanced audience at St. Ann’s Warehouse in spring 2021. (Credit where due: The pair committed, at Broken Ear, to offering captioning and accessibility options for every show amid Shaun’s experience with hearing loss, and have stuck by that promise.) A concert at the Claire Tow Theater in 2023 was unstructured and cutesy, mostly in an annoying way—but it was just a concert.
Then came The Keep Going Songs at LCT3 in 2024, an amorphous, half-interactive affair about… um, getting by in a frightening world? Keep Going was an underdeveloped piece, given little shape or structure by director Caitlin Sullivan. It seemed to confirm a shift away from auto-fiction and into wholly autobiographical territory, as though zooming out to a larger frame had been something forced upon the Bengsons in the past.
The couple’s recent life struggles were now being relayed to us, mostly by Abigail, with little formal notions attached other than “here’s what happened.” Certainly there were gestures at the idea that, in remembering Abigail’s deceased brother, we were sharing a group act of mourning. But that concept hardly felt fleshed out.
My Joy Is Heavy suffers from the same insularity. In this piece, which brings the couple back to the Workshop, the “what happened” is their efforts at having a second child. We chiefly learn about it through direct address interspersed with songs. Joy Is Heavy also takes the autobiography even further by making use of real Bengson family home videos, projected across and behind Lee Jellinek’s purposely half-built house set. (Video design is by David Bengali.)
The director on this round, Tony Award-winner Rachel Chavkin, is rightly esteemed (though her typical precision has been less in evidence of late, based on the evidence of Lempicka and Gatsby: An American Myth). Chavkin attempts to abstractly conjure the Bengsons’ Ohio Covid getaway home as a transient space, reflecting the couple’s uncertainty around their future. But the home videos undercut that effort, pulling us out of the theatrical and back into the literal.
More fatally, the Bengsons try to act out significant moments from their journey as straightforward dialogue scenes, presented by Chavkin in a naturalistic style. The two are not actors, and these scenes feel awkward.
As always, music is where the Bengsons excel, and Joy Is Heavy features a number of rich melodies. “Easy/River” reflects stirringly on Abigail’s easy first pregnancy and the shocking experience of her second, which ended in miscarriage. “I’d Like to Be Happy” strikes at the contradictions of finding personal joy in a political moment of immense pain.
It is a strange continuing pattern: That wide-lens viewpoint, incorporating the world alongside just themselves, still resonates in the Bengsons’ music. But once the song is over, it falls away, and we’re back to weirdly glib, passing references to “the streets running red with the blood of protesters.” Yes, they are—do you have anything more to say about it?
In 2022 the Bengsons streamed a new in-process work called Sovereignty Hymns, a docu-piece about several women’s experiences with abortion and miscarriage. What might My Joy Is Heavy have looked like if they had considered similarly pushing the focus from themselves onto other subjects? Or, at the very least, finding a more imaginative form that kept the whole picture within their lens?
And yet…and yet, and yet. Late in My Joy Is Heavy, following a devastating turn in the couple’s story, Abigail and Shaun share a quiet moment with their son, Louie. The three curl up in bed together, following a long day of sledding. They play Louie a video on their phone. And amidst all this pain, Louie says, unprompted, with the joy that comes easily to a child: “This is the best day of my life.”
It’s such a powerful moment, so intimate yet at the same time so immense—exactly what the Bengsons do best.
Something wild happened at the midway-point of Baby Butcher Choke For Free, a “noise theater” concoction from the gently anarchic performance duo laialeah. That window on the house left wall of the Brick space? The one that’s literally always covered up? Performer Leah Plante-Wiener just…opened it.
It’s not the wildest thing to happen in this chaotic show, but it certainly blew my mind. I’ve been to the Brick a lot. I didn’t even know that was allowed.
Based on Butcher one imagines that Weiner and co-performer Eulàlia Comas, the other half of laialeah, probably zero in something they are not allowed to open/touch upon entering any given space. At another point in this vibe-y piece, loosely structured as a memorial for/excavation of a dead cow named Valentina, the two exited the theater and ran over to Brick Aux, going live on Instagram to chronicle their journey. (In the theater, we watched the live projected onto the back wall—imagine the Sunset walk, but punctuated by cries of, “Shout out to Bagelsmith!”) The two also cook a whole steak on stage, then eat it in front of us mournfully.
I’m not sure what this show was about. Or if it was about anything. But I did, by the end, feel surprisingly sad at the loss of Valentina. And somehow, I also felt like I had killed her. I’m sorry, Valentina. We never met, but I miss you.
I started a podcast with my good friend, theater producer Connor Scully. It is called House Closed: Theater We Saw. I hope you’ll give it a listen!