In her sparkling lace mini-dress and made-for-stomping boots, Ms. Bengson has the look of a Lutheran Woody Allen, the sort of guy you’d expect to find at a party alone in the kitchen. The pale, bespectacled, guitar-playing Mr. They do not at first seem to wear the spotlight as a second skin. Kauffman and the playwright Sarah Gancher, places the Bengsons front and center as performers.

“Hundred Days,” a longtime work in progress that has been shaped into its current form in collaboration with Ms. I’m talking about those frightening realms of speculation that spring into being when you’ve fallen hard for a certain, seemingly inevitable someone and start thinking how it could all go so wrong, so fast. Their concert-style memoir, “Hundred Days,” part of this year’s Under the Radar festival at the Public Theater, may suggest a musical variation on an anecdote-laden wedding announcements in a Sunday newspaper.īut this production, directed with a slithery ominousness by the gifted Anne Kauffman, takes you places you don’t expect to go, even though you’ve most likely visited such places yourself. My Joy Is Heavy! can be accessed on the Arena Stage YouTube channel.Say, how would you like to spend 90 minutes with a very married young couple telling you all about how they met and fell in love (at first sight!) and took a crazy road trip together? Among prospects for a thrilling night out, this one would appear to rank with watching slides of your accountant’s vacation in Brussels.īut Shaun and Abigail Bengson, singing songwriters who perform as (yep) the Bengsons, turn out to be surprisingly stimulating company. “This year has really been about connection, and we have connected to people all over the world in a very real and humbling way.” “It’s been incredible that we’ve gotten to work through the year, and how this song has gone viral,” Shaun said. That’s where “The Keep Going Song” evolved from. The Bengsons drove to Dayton, Ohio, to stay with Shaun’s parents, and they put together an hour-long concert for the Louisville theater. So by bringing viewers into their home-warts and all-they will see the dirty dishes in the background as the Bengsons sing and dance together, providing that real intimacy.īefore the pandemic hit, the couple were working on the music for a play at the Actors Theatre of Louisville, and after one performance, the country shut down. “We wanted to make it really intimate and trying not to replicate the experience of being in a theater with us, but figuring out what would be most enjoyable over this medium.” “It’s conversational, sometimes it seems like a music video or a dance party, sometimes it seems like you’re going for a walk with us,” Shaun said. My Joy Is Heavy! includes seven songs, with each functioning in a different way.

The Bengsons display the pleasures, joys and the emotional tolls of the events of the past year and how they managed to cultivate and hold onto happiness even during these dark, difficult times. When I had a miscarriage, that shaped what we were going through, and this became a healing practice for us to make this together.” Then I got pregnant, so we started to feel our way into that being part of the piece. “At first, we were thinking about one thing-living with chronic pain and mental illness, and how that affects the ability to cultivate pleasure and joy. “Our memoir pieces need to reflect what’s going on in our own hearts and bodies as we process the world,” Abigail said. In the 27-minute piece, the Bengsons present an intimate portrait of celebrating joy during difficult times, which for the couple included dealing with chronic pain and suffering a miscarriage during the COVID-19 lockdown. “We made the whole piece on our cell phones, filming each other and things that were going on.” “We filmed it at my mom’s, in the house I grew up in, which is where we have been staying for the past six months,” Abigail said. “That changed a few times as our lives changed, as she ran with us as things kept evolving.”įor their part, the Bengsons composed a new memoir musical titled My Joy Is Heavy!, which is currently streaming on Arena’s website for free. “The incredible Molly Smith reached out to us and said we could create whatever we wanted,” Abigail said. Abigail Bengson performing in ‘My Joy Is Heavy!’ Photo courtesy of Arena Stage. So it was no surprise when Arena Stage reached out to the Bengsons to take part in the theater’s three part-commissioned music series, Arena Riffs. A trio of the indie-folk duo’s songs have also been featured on So You Think You Can Dance, and one of their most recent singles, “The Keep Going Song,” has been viewed more than 4 million times on social media.

Hundred days musical