Inside A Theater, But Taking It Slow
The Bengsons tiptoe back into live performance, bringing Zoom participants along
“We are going to take this slow,” said Abigail Bengson, and she meant it.
The Bengsons’ work-in-progress, Broken Ear Setlist: Songs From Ohio, which played two nights at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn for a distanced audience on April 15-16 (it also streamed on Zoom), felt like a gentle easing-in.
There were no rousing numbers here, no showstoppers like “Hundred Days,” the blazing centerpiece of the duo’s best-known show of the same name. The evening was so somber that my audience seemed a bit deflated by the end. (Or maybe six-feet-apart crowds will be low-energy no matter what, we’ll see.)
Ultimately, the restraint struck me as appropriate. The Bengsons had no interest in throwing us (or themselves) right back into the fire. At the same time, they did intend to bring a spirit of mourning into the room, to acknowledge our collective loss—a subject many other artists are avoiding right now.
Back in 2017, I struggled with the heavy theatrics of Hundred Days at New York Theatre Workshop. The music was gorgeous, but the staging (from Anne Kauffman, who here co-directs with Caitlin Sullivan) cast Abigail and Shaun Bengson’s love story as a grand, epic tale, in ways that felt totally out of proportion with the degree of adversity they’d actually faced.
So I’m relieved to see The Bengsons humbled. That sounds backhanded, but it’s honestly not meant that way. Many of us have gained some much-needed perspective this past year. For artists, that perspective surely ought to emerge in their creative practice.
So Broken Ear Setlist sticks to small, intimate tales, told with modesty. Among them are Shaun’s experience with tinnitus; the couple’s differing relationships with spirituality; and Shaun’s memories of “Mrs. Wean,” a teacher who nurtured his love of music.
These are pre-pandemic stories, but the resonances are there. Shaun’s “broken ear” speaks to the human body’s fragility; spiritual reflections get at our struggle to find meaning in a painful time; and Mrs. Wean’s illness and death brings all those we lost into the room. None of this is underlined, fortunately, but much of it is wonderfully moving.
The Bengsons also de-center themselves by handing off to featured performers Vuyo Satashe and Barrie Lobo McLain, who each got poignant numbers; and by Zoom-ing in a “guest expert,” a doctor to whom they pose impossible questions, such as “Is God alive?” and “How do we keep existing in a world where there is so much we will never truly know or perceive?”
The duo can be overly precious. Talk of creating a new, better world is vaguely defined, except for a laudable commitment to captioning all their future shows.
Yet it works because of a feeling the songs and atmosphere of Broken Ear Setlist gracefully capture: a liminality, the moment of healing that comes before recovery. That’s helped by the inclusion of Zoom audience members, beamed in on a screen behind the performers. They are a further acknowledgment of the midpoint where we’re living right now.
(The Bengsons hope to make this permanent, which I’m less sure about—seeing Zoom folks talking, on their phones or walking around was a bit distracting. Directly beaming in home viewers may ignore how different those viewing experiences are.)
In keeping with that liminality, there’s no final song of uplift and release. The Bengsons are more than capable of writing them, as they’ve shown on previous shows, but rightly identify that now isn’t the time. We haven’t triumphed yet, so there’s no release to be had. Let’s take it slow.
This week, you can also read me in:
The Brooklyn Rail, with a look at the joy and mania of Theater In Quarantine’s artistic process on Scott R. Sheppard’s Blood Meal;
Culturebot, with an appreciation of The Brick Theater’s series “A New Year,” four wonderfully strange pieces livestreamed from their stage.