Why Didn’t I Love the Bengsons’ My Joy Is Heavy?

There is not, as far as I’m aware, a phrase for that particular feeling of disquiet when something that should, by all obvious descriptors, be right up your alley instead leaves you by the side of the road. When Mumford & Sons made their first splash back in the late aughts, I felt squirmy without knowing exactly why. But Sara, don’t you love that whole banjo-playing, suspender-wearing indie folk-rock shebang? Well, yesish. For some reason — I think, now, having to do with a marketable sheen masking a certain inauthenticity — the Mumford boys never did it for me, despite my fondness for their broader genre. Over the last few years, I’ve been experiencing Mumford Syndrome again — this time with the Bengsons.

The Bengsons are a couple, Abigail and Shaun, and, with a rotating cast of excellent fellow musicians, a band. They write lush, folk-influenced songs and make ecstatic concert plays, and for almost a decade now, my response to their work has been undergoing a gradual but definite cooling process. In 2017, I was moved by Hundred Days (if you click, keep scrolling down; I promise it’s there), the story of their meeting and marriage, but I also remember feeling prickles of doubt. I couldn’t quite work out how or even whether to pursue those prickles, so I stuck with what seemed admirable about the show. Shocking for a critic to admit? Be that as it may — parsing the complexity of how work strikes us is a tricky endeavor whether or not we attempt it professionally, and no one nails it every time, even by their own standards.

In 2024, I felt more able to name those same quibbling internal voices, the thing in me that ultimately remained at a distance from The Keep Going Songs. (The Bengsons also showed up on Broadway that year, singing selections from Stephin Merritt’s oeuvre in All In — great, sharp-edged songs set in relief against a salable, simplistic show.) Now the couple returns to New York Theatre Workshop, where they are Usual Suspects, with My Joy Is Heavy, and I can finally identify my sense of alienation. It’s the same feeling I’ve always had around churches. Not that I spurn an evocation of the sacred: All theater flows from it, and some of the most stirring things I’ve seen onstage have felt like acts of secular worship or communion, rituals of sharing in the inarticulable mystery. This, I believe, is what the Bengsons aspire to, and there are moments, usually musical, when they touch it. But what holds me up outside the church is the feeling not of sacrament but sanctimony. There’s a note of self-congratulation running through this work too — tricky to pinpoint because it comes swathed in both twee humility and real suffering.

My Joy Is Heavy continues the Bengsons’ trajectory as musical memoirists. Its ostensible focus is the noun of the title, but it spends most of its 70 minutes making its way through the adjective. It’s a COVID story and, like The Keep Going Songs, a grief story. One of the Bengsons’ essential expressive modes is the wake, whether in the Celtic or Creole tradition — the raucous celebration while death is in the room as an honored guest. This time — along with their top-notch six-piece band, who also take on a few characters during the show — they lean toward New Orleans. The play’s climactic title song is unquestionably a banger, with all the energy of a Bourbon Street funeral and an especially wonderful performance by Reginald Chapman wailing on the trombone. Getting there, however, is a more dubious matter.

Rachel Chavkin directs Abigail and Shaun on a set by Lee Jellinek that deconstructs the house the couple lived in during the pandemic. Abigail’s childhood home in Vermont (where she and Shaun sheltered with their toddler, Louie, and her mother, “Grandma Kathy”) becomes an airy, wall-less series of white platforms and exposed framing, its earthy texture evoked by props — crocheted blankets, messy fridge decorations — and by the photographs and footage with which Chavkin and video designer David Bengali fill a series of background screens. The couple was working on a commission: “We’ve decided we want to make something about joy,” Abigail tells us. “However, I am not doing well.” She describes living with PTSD and undiagnosed chronic pain (“No one can tell me what’s going on”) while also attempting to do the thing she and Shaun most want: “To have a baby.”

I said “that she and Shaun most want,” but that, technically, is inference. Even if it’s true, what Abigail actually says to us from the stage is: “What I want most — and I recognize this doesn’t make any sense — what I want most … is to have a baby.” That’s three first-person pronouns in one sentence. She also doesn’t say “another” baby, though we get intermittent reminders that Louie is running around the house watching YouTube and “refusing to potty train.” This stuff goes by quickly, but what it adds up to — and what I’ve experienced in all the Bengsons’ work that I’ve seen — is the feeling that these stories, which are purportedly by and of a family and of and for a community, are really by, of, and for Abigail. Like many a trauma-focused memoirist, she seems to be conducting a kind of long-form joint self-exorcism and therapy session that we’re being invited to witness. I don’t question the reality of her suffering but rather its constant starring role. Here, in a play all about the pain and potential loss of attempting to have a kid, it’s especially discombobulating how tertiary the Bengsons’ existing child feels to the action. The crux of the story they’re telling is, in essence, a moment in which they remember Louie exists. That may be putting it harshly, but it still seems strange to glorify a single jolt of presence without a more rigorous interrogation of what’s actually been obscuring one’s vision.

Because to interrogate and to narrate are two different things. We do get the latter, and in fairness to the Bengsons as collaborators, Shaun puts his body on the line in My Joy Is Heavy more than he’s done in previous productions. Abigail is the one who clearly thrills to performance; Shaun consistently orbits her sun, giving the impression of the bearded and bespectacled multi-instrumentalist who’d be happy jamming on the sidelines. In Hundred Days, Abigail eclipsed him because, though the pair had just met and fallen instantly in love, she was overcome with fears that he was going to die. In The Keep Going Songs, she was mourning the loss of her brother. Here, there’s both sorrow and fear thickening the air: Abigail is still in deep grief over a miscarriage she experienced before having Louie, and as she and Shaun try for another baby, the effort is blighted with terror. What if it happens again? “Don’t let any happiness in / Don’t let hope in,” Shaun chants in the ensuing song. “I have to build a solid wall,” sings Abigail, “between my heart and my belly.”

It can feel heartless to accept the offer of this kind of confessional art-making with anything less than reverential sympathy. But that’s the issue right there: For all the Bengsons’ outward focus on freedom (“Every performance of My Joy Is Heavy has a relaxed house,” Abigail tells us before the show, “which means you can do whatever is good for your body and nervous system”), there is a role we’re expected to play here, a narrow — if supposedly transcendent — emotional exchange toward which we’re being steered. When the Bengsons tell us to open our metaphorical hymnbooks to whatever page, we’re meant to kneel or stand or bow our heads accordingly. There may be moments when the formula succeeds, just as there are moments during a church service where something true and bright can come of the prescribed practice. But what there isn’t is room for questions, and I left My Joy Is Heavy with plenty.

My Joy Is Heavy is at New York Theater Workshop through April 5.

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