The On-and-Off Sparks of The Keep Going Songs

Photo: Jeremy Daniel

There’s a long section in the final third of The Keep Going Songs that comes together to feel really transcendent. The show is by the Bengsons — the real-life couple Abigail and Shaun Bengson, who perform together as a band and create works of music-driven theater — and in this patiently ascending movement, a song in praise of the humble earthworm moves into an extended, gorgeous looping suite. Alejandro Fajardo’s lights glisten and eddy in oceanic hues; the Bengsons’ playing becomes more and more abstract and ambient, and in what is unquestionably the most breathtaking moment in director Caitlin Sullivan’s production, Abigail takes sips from a bottle of water and, holding a microphone to her throat, blows triumphant sprays of mist into the air. The effect — that of a whale surfacing, serene and massive — is, in the literal sense, wonderful.

If The Keep Going Songs kept going on such a consistent high — or had maintained one all the way up to this point — the result would be a marvel. But while the show clearly comes from a place of deep earnestness, good will and good work are two different things, and the Bengsons aren’t always able to convert the one into the other. It’s not about the music: There, the duo are as solid as they come. Abigail’s voice can roar and warble and whine with folksy grit or can climb into the rafters with songbird delicacy. Shaun is a fearsome finger-picker and, along with juggling a series of guitars, can more than hold his own on various keyboards, an accordion, and a trumpet. Then there’s that mesmerizing looping. When the Bengsons embrace the primacy of sound, then things really start to sizzle: That they’ve finally let go of spoken text by the time the whale sequence rolls around is part of what helps the moment climb to its zenith. But for much of the show, Abigail serves as the primary narrator, and her delivery chafes.

Shaun speaks and sings, too, though never as much. The Bengsons present versions of themselves that position Abigail squarely in the emotional and theatrical foreground with Shaun a few steps behind — quieter, more deadpan, holding down the rhythm. Six years ago, their show Hundred Days told the story of the couples’ meeting but mostly of Abigail’s existential panic in its wake. The Keep Going Songs is, as Abigail describes it early on, “a concert / That’s also a wake,” and its mourning is at once expansive and specific: Her older brother Peter died in August, and the show — via a wide, spiraling path that travels through the evolution of trees and jellyfish, whales and crabs — circles around him. I appreciate the intention: There’s much that’s beautiful and generous about the way in which contemporary theater has been opening up spaces for shared grieving. Yet I found myself consistently distanced by the Bengsons’ — well, Abigail’s — tone. “It’s not about me …” she sings as The Keep Going Songs begins, “And it’s not about you / It’s about all of us.” I want to believe her; I do, partly. But …

Abigail Bengson winks and mugs. She starts giggling halfway through jokes in that specific way that both undermines and underlines — that way that signals that the joke-teller is willing to come down on the side of self-deprecation or smugness depending on which way the wind blows. She fills her sung delivery with fervent, illustrative gestures, pointing to her head on the word “know” or upward on “God.” She’s got huge stores of energy, and they often spill out in much the same way a precocious, theater-curious kid’s would — they say, Look at me. And there would be nothing wrong with that — news flash, performers want, need, and have to be looked at! — if there weren’t a kind of false egolessness also being performed. All this self-consciousness makes for an uncomfortable patina over what is at its core, I’m certain, real sincerity. It creates cringy wrinkles in otherwise amusing or poignant sequences. In a song called “Kick Ass, Kiddo” (Peter’s repeated encouragement to his sister), the Bengsons sing, “If we can’t afford to live in New York anymore / What do I tell my kids? / If I’m worried they will be / The serfs of feudal robot overlords / What do I tell my kids?” It’s funny; it’s — oof — real. Then Abigail sings, “If I’m worried that having children ruined our lives and careers because all our childless artist friends seem to be better reviewed and have much better skin …” People laugh, but the laugh feels cheap — not strictly because of content but, again, because of a certain cloying hamminess of tone. And here I am fulfilling the prophecy, I suppose, but it’s not about kids. It’s about a dissonance in the work, an aspiration to the epic and outward-facing, undercut by a stuckness in the self.

Because, when the Bengsons are at their best, they are epic, and they do find both wonder and joy in the world’s wild mysteries. In a lovely song called “Awe,” they share “four awesome things” with us — because awe, “it turns out … neurologically speaking,” is “the best antidote” to grief. We get to learn about a jellyfish that grows into its mature state, then, instead of dying, devolves back into an egg, is reborn, and can repeat this aging and unaging cycle endlessly “until it’s eaten by something.” We get whale song, crazy facts about queen bees, and about how lignin — “the protein that makes wood woody” in trees — evolved before anything came into being that was able to break it down. And so, billions of years ago, because these earliest trees “could die, but they couldn’t dissolve and redistribute,” a mass-extinction event occurred. “But nobody’s talking about how trees were dicks once too,” sings Abigail, “So there’s hope for me and you.”

It’s one of the show’s best jokes, and in moments like these I felt the charm of The Keep Going Songs most fully — just as I felt its potency when the Bengsons’ music, in its more sonically daring forms, came to the fore and swept us along. But the production lacks rigor, both tonally and structurally. We don’t need to be so ingratiatingly played to, and, at almost two intermissionless hours, the show needs a tighter first half, along with at least one less climax. Musically, it loses oomph with each one, which is a shame, because when all the aural and emotional layers of The Keep Going Songs slide into harmony, the Bengsons manage to touch something soaring and resonant — something that truly is not about them, and not about us, but about something vaster than us all.

The Keep Going Songs is at the Claire Tow Theater at Lincoln Center Theater through May 26.