One bright pleasure amid the grimness of the pandemic has been the serendipity of hearing from people you’ve lost touch with and had forgotten how much you liked. You get to learn where they’ve been sheltering in place, and how they might have been changed by this age of upheaval and displacement.
I was pleased, for instance, to receive an email about Abigail and Shaun Bengson, who have come up with a show of exultant ambivalence for the Actors Theater of Louisville. It’s called “The Keep Going Song,” and it streams through Oct. 8 on a pay-what-you-can basis.
I had taken a shine to this eccentrically wholesome couple when I met them at the Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival a few years ago. Not that I actually spoke to them or shook their hands (which was a socially sanctioned activity then). But performing their musical memoir “Hundred Days,” about the dramatic genesis of their relationship, the Bengsons emanated the confiding coziness of late-night gab sessions over beers at a kitchen table.
That mostly all-sung show, delivered in a gutsy pop-folk style spliced with gospel laments and hallelujahs, was about how — or if — love can survive in the shadow of our awareness of death. So I was curious about the states of their hearts and minds in a year when the imminence of mortal disease is as pervasive as fog.
It turns out that the Bengsons have been spending their quarantine in Dayton, Ohio, with their 3-year-old son, in Shaun’s parents’ house. That’s the setting for “The Keep Going Song,” and you can glimpse the accouterments of their improvised life there — a futon, an afghan for an indoor picnic, a tot-size trampoline in the backyard.
As Abigail sings, in that wide-open balladeer’s voice of hers, “We have to make it up as we go.” That’s the general credo of this 50-minute piece, which is about nothing more nor less than continuing to exist when everything feels both static and in endless flux.
The subjects covered as they address this concern, while playing keyboards and guitars (acoustic and electric), are both homey and cosmic, from financial shortages to the testing nature of God. For the Bengsons, it seems, everyday life is both a religious celebration and a passion play.
They begin the show, which was “mixed and mastered” by Ian Kagey, with a ritualistic sharing of challah bread and grape juice, proffered to us through the camera lens. They then shift into what feels like one sustained, shape-shifting song, of varied component parts, which seems to have no beginning or end.
Abigail offers a benediction. She hopes we have lots of good television, adequate food and “enough good memories to last you a long time.” The numbers that follow embrace an account about Shaun’s distrust of churchgoing, an anatomy of lacerating grief and Abigail’s description of the sacred hallucinations that come with labor pains. All of them deal with coming to terms with “the dark and the light of the world as it is.”
“Keep Going” deals more directly with questions of faith than any made-for-streaming show I’ve encountered during the past five months. The whole work is steeped in a kind of everyperson pantheism, with elements of Judeo-Christian and Eastern religions.
The usual prayers, Abigail sings, “just ain’t cuttin’ it,” before she and Shaun segue into a funky, propulsive chant: “I want money comin’ in and good things to happen.” Responses to such requests are not immediately forthcoming, of course.
Early on, Abigail sings that she hopes if “your heart is breaking, it’s breaking open.” In other words, be receptive to everything, the pain and the joy, because it’s all part of the same indivisible package. That’s what music is, the Bengsons say, a blending of those opposed feelings into an ineffable, all-transcending whole.
On the basis of “Keep Going,” you might almost believe that the Bengsons communicate in song all the time. Surely that’s not actually true, or Shaun’s parents might have run away or strangled them by now.
But there is a sense that the melody, heard or unheard, never really stops. The Bengsons use synthesizers and keyboards to layer sounds and rhythms that keep repeating, which extend to an epilogue that’s as infectious as a kindergarten ditty, a list song about things that grow.
That includes trees, leaves, people and thoughts, not to mention the music to which this roster is set. I guarantee it will keep expanding in your mind later in ways that should drive you mad. But for me, it felt like some much needed reassurance.
The Keep Going Song
Available through Oct. 8; actorstheatre.org.
Source: Theater - nytimes.com
