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Theater review by Adam Feldman
Rating: ★★★★ (Four stars)
There are plants in the audience at the Bengsons’ latest theatrical song cycle—not spectators who are secretly part of the show, but actual potted greens. Abigail Bengson, the distaff side of the couple, entrusts two of them to people seated in the front row at the very beginning of the performance. My Joy Is Heavy looks back at the Covid pandemic of 2020, when she “was one of the lucky ones who spent lockdown in their terrifying, untouched childhood bedroom.” One of the small plants, she says, represents the people who died during that time; the other represents those who were born. If this gesture is slightly precious, it is nonetheless apt in a production that asks its audience to hold and consider life and death in tandem.
“It’s an old house,” Abigail says of her mother’s modest place in Vermont. “This house was built at a time when people gave birth and died at home.” Lee Jellinek’s set provides a deconstructed version of it: wooden platforms, a futon, a keyboard, a kitchen table crowded with pills and honey, a section in back for the six-piece band, a staircase going nowhere just for show. Colorful drawings on the fridge attest to the presence of the Bengsons’ three-year-old son, Louie; Abigail and her husband, Shaun, get an oasis of alone time for two hours every day when Grandma Kathy is watching him. Although Louie can be a handful—in one hilariously gross story, his snowsuit runneth over as he sits on Santa’s sleigh—they decide to try for a second child, which proves to be a challenge. “I grew up Christian with all that abstinence education stuff,” Shaun sings. “And I really thought that if I just blew on a girl she’d catch a case of the babies.” But then he adds: “It wasn’t like that for us. At all.”
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If you’ve seen the Bengsons’ previous work, such as Hundred Days or The Lucky Ones, you may anticipate this turn into darker territory; their genre is crisis Liederkreis, and the threat of disaster shadows even their happiest moments. Abigail has previously suffered a miscarriage, and now she worries whether, even if she did get pregnant, she could carry a child to term. The suspense of that question—the potential it raises for enormous grief—suffuses the story, and pours out through the vessel of Abigail’s remarkable voice. The songs in My Joy Is Heavy cover a lot of stylistic ground: There are soupçons of hip hop and ska, and an amusing Alpine excursion includes ululations and some yodelish vocal doodling. But their default mode is a dramatic folk that is ideally suited to Abigail’s powerfully focused and emotive soprano. She’s intense, with a shock of grey in her wild curly hair; Shaun’s affect is mild and supportive, the easel to her impasto oil painting.
Nick Kourtides’s sound is crisp and well-balanced, and Rachel Chavkin’s direction adds considerable visual dynamism to a story that is necessarily about confinement, with particular help from Alan Edwards’s lighting and David Bengali’s video design. Aside from one droop at the two-thirds mark, the energy stays high, and episodes of goofy humor periodically cut the navel-gazing tension. But there’s no question that, as promised by the title, a lot of this show is pretty heavy going. There’s a sense of danger in Abigail’s performance: She has the demanding task of not only revisiting her trauma but enacting it—often rawly, without the deflection of humor or the decorum of sang-froid. At times, she verges on too much, and I suspect that some people will find that discomfiting. But the feeling and insight offered in this show reward you for braving the discomfort zone. “There is light down here,” as the Bengsons sing, “once your eyes adjust.”
My Joy Is Heavy. New York Theatre Workshop (Off Broadway). By the Bengsons. Directed by Rachel Chavkin. With Abigail Bengson, Shaun Bengson. Running time: 1hr 15mins. No intermissions.
Buy tickets to My Joy Is Heavy: New York Theatre Workshop
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