Abigail and Shaun Bengson welcome the audience to New York Theatre Workshop for “My Joy is Heavy.” They introduce themselves, the band, the crew. They explain this is a relaxed house performance—you can do whatever is good for your body and nervous system, there are access tables in the back, and if you have to get up and pee, they won’t be offended. “I’m in pelvic floor therapy, and I’m peeing right now,” Abigail says. The captions will be up there the whole show. The band members will occasionally pop up as different people from their lives, maybe wearing wigs, maybe wearing glasses. “But I promise, it’s still them.”

Then Abigail explains: “We’re here because we want to tell you about this one moment, this one moment that happened right there on that bed, well it’s a futon but it folds out… This one moment when our lives felt very heavy. Then something changed. But to get there we need to do some remembering together. So do you remember when there was this global pandemic?”

And then come the plants. Do you remember how many, many of us died? “Let’s put them here,” Abigail says, lifting one plant and handing it to an audience member. “And will you take care of them? It’s like 70 minutes, they love the ground.” And do you remember how many of us, miraculously, were born? The pandemic babies? Another plant. “Let’s put them here, along with the not yet born.” And the rest of us, who were not born but did not die—”I will put us here because that is where you are.”

This is how “My Joy is Heavy” begins: not with performance that pretends at objectivity, but with rituals that acknowledge we are all implicated. The Bengsons establish from the first moment that this folk-punk musical memoir about pregnancy loss during pandemic isolation will refuse the boundary between personal confession and communal reckoning. What follows is an extraordinary achievement—raucous, tender, devastating, funny, and theatrically audacious in ways that justify every one of those adjectives.

The premise could easily collapse under its own weight: a married musical theater duo creating a show about their own miscarriages, their PTSD, their failed attempts at wellness culture, their fears about bringing children into a dying world. But the Bengsons—Obie winners and NYTW Usual Suspects whose previous work includes “Hundred Days” and “The Keep Going Songs”—understand that folk-punk energy and genuine grief are compatible. The aesthetic serves the material because the material demands both the cathartic release of music and the unsparing honesty of testimony. Songs like “Underground” (“I’ve been underground in a deep dark cave / Doing my best to stay alive”) pulse with raw energy while articulating the survival instinct required just to endure. The humor is earned because it emerges from people who have lived through terror and found absurdity on the other side—Shaun’s confession that Christian abstinence education left him thinking “if I just blew on a girl” she’d “catch a case of the babies,” Abigail’s realization that she thought “the problem was the patriarchy but actually I just haven’t been drinking enough bone broth.”

Rachel Chavkin directs with the confidence to give the Bengsons and their ensemble exactly what they need and nothing more. This is not a concert with narrative interludes; it is theater that uses music as its primary language. Lee Jellinek’s scenic design creates the Vermont house from memory—”It’s fake, it’s a set, we drew this from memory”—a space intimate enough to contain private grief and large enough to hold communal witness. The bed, or futon that folds out, becomes the play’s central image: where bodies rest, where pain lives, where a four-year-old climbs in to watch boss shows, where life and death exist simultaneously.

The six musicians who join the Bengsons—Aaron Bahr on trumpet/voice, Ashley Baier on drums/voice, Noga Cabo on guitar/bass/voice, Reginald Chapman on trombone/tuba/voice, Matt Deitchman on keyboard/accordion/voice (also serving as music director), and Nicole DeMaio on saxophone/flute/clarinet/voice—function as true theatrical ensemble, not mere accompaniment. They are the Greek chorus that echoes and amplifies the Bengsons’ grief (“Underground / In a deep dark cave / Doing my best to stay alive”), the Swiss wellness podcaster whose dangerous pseudoscience infiltrates the house (“Shape the body / Shape the life”), Gramma Kathy offering her halting greeting, the doctor on the telehealth screen. Every voice matters. Every presence registers. When Chapman as Gramma Kathy simply says “Hello!” in response to Shaun’s enthusiastic introduction, the economy of that moment—the love contained in so little—captures something essential about the piece’s approach to performance. These musicians create characters without abandoning their instrumental roles, inhabiting the Bengsons’ world while maintaining the musical infrastructure that makes emotional catharsis possible.

David Bengali’s video design layers the production with documentary footage—iPhone SE grade, as Shaun notes, because “even though all the theaters are shut down, we have been offered a commission.” The videos of Gramma Kathy, of Abigail in pain with ice packs duct-taped to her head, of Abigail addressing the camera about being “pregnant and I’m not pregnant, there’s life in me and death in me”—these aren’t nostalgic illustrations. They’re evidence of the impulse to document, to preserve, to make meaning out of chaos even when you don’t yet know what the meaning is. Caroline Eng’s sound design and Alan Edwards’s lighting work in tandem to delineate spaces without literal representation, creating the Vermont house, the bed as threshold between life and death, the infinite snow field where the house falls away, all from minimal elements. Isobel Waller-Bridge’s original music—particularly the propulsive “Arise” that underscores a desperate, hallucinatory moment—heightens stakes without overwhelming the intimate scale Chavkin maintains throughout.

The narrative moves in three parts, though the Bengsons only mark two.  Part One establishes the pandemic house, Abigail’s mysterious illness, Shaun’s depression, their desire for another baby despite—or perhaps because of—the chaos. The song “Easy” establishes the mythology Abigail inherited: a mother who “fell pregnant” four times with no complications, gave birth to Abigail in 45 minutes and went home that afternoon, “like a human Pez dispenser.” Against this backdrop, Abigail’s first pregnancy confirmed the family pattern—until it did not. “River” devastates not through melodrama but through specific detail: “You fit into my hand when it was losing time.” The ritual of taking the lost baby to the river. The litany of goodbyes: “Goodbye to the jelly bean / Goodbye to the prophecy / Goodbye to the registry / And to God / And the daycare fee / Goodbye to the part of me / That believed I could be happy.” The resolve that follows: “Never again / I won’t do this again.”

Part Two returns to the present—the second pregnancy test, positive, hidden from Gramma Kathy, revealed to Shaun during “Grandma time” when they can be alone. The joy is immediate but so is the terror. “Don’t Hope” becomes their survival strategy, a desperate attempt to protect themselves through emotional armor: “Don’t let any happiness in / Don’t let hope in / The terror of joy that will hold open cavities / That need protection / From the vivisection / Of all of the dreams that are too precious to breathe the air.” But protection proves impossible and pointless. The turn comes with “I’d Like to Be Happy”—Abigail’s declaration that she will not wait for wellness to start living. “What if health is overrated? / Oh what if wellness is a bullshit industry / Constructed to rob us of joy?” Shaun joins her: “Maybe health and a healthy body and a healthy mind / Are not prerequisites for happiness. / Maybe we don’t have to wait till we’re better / To start living the lives that we want to live.”

Part Three—unmarked but unmistakable—begins with spotting, cramping, pain. The house falls away during the song “Hey-ee,” leaving only the bed in “an infinite snow field.” They take Louie sledding. They order pizza, contact-free. Louie climbs into bed with Abigail, and she lets him. They put on a boss show. And Louie says—”This is truly what he said,” Shaun tells us—”This is the best day of my life.”

The song “It’s Good” holds one of the most extraordinary theatrical moments I have witnessed: Abigail simultaneously holding her living child in her arms and her dying child in her womb, choosing—for two seconds—to stop trying to fix herself and simply be present for both. “Our little family / A house in the snow / Dust in the half light / Nowhere to go / It’s good it’s good / I love you all so much / And right now we’re here / A blanket, a moment / All four of us near.” All four. The living son. The dying baby. The two parents. Present together in one unbearable, precious instant.

A video plays. Abigail addresses the camera: “You can’t be a little bit pregnant or a little bit dead. And now I thought, I know, that you can be both. You can be both of those things, sometimes at the same time. So now, you see me, I’m pregnant and I’m not pregnant, there’s life in me and death in me.” She becomes the threshold, the doorway between worlds. “I’m less of myself but I’m more of the whole world.”

Miscarriage, she tells us, takes a long time. It is a labor. You may lactate. It may take many weeks. And all the while, Louie is refusing to potty train. The absurdity and the tragedy coexist. “Let’s talk about joy,” she says, and the trumpet plays the joy theme.The central revelation arrives not as epiphany but as hard-won understanding: “I was so terrified to love that baby / I thought if I didn’t let myself love this baby, that I could protect myself from the terrible pain of losing it. / But love is sneaky, man. She gets in there. / I couldn’t protect myself from grief, / All I did was protect myself from joy.”

This is the answer to the question the entire piece has been asking: Is it possible to find hope in loss? Yes—but only by risking love in the first place. Withholding hope does not protect you from grief; it only robs you of joy. The armor we build to survive becomes the cage that prevents us from living.

The title song, “My Joy is Heavy,” transforms the theater into something like a New Orleans second line parade—celebratory, mournful, communal, defiant. Family videos and photos fill the screens, including images from the audience itself. The entire ensemble is onstage. The Bengsons sing: “My joy is heavy / Oh help me carry / The joy that comes at the end of a life / At the end of a walking / At the very beginning / This heavy joy / That I marry and delight.” The paradox resolves: joy is heavy because it carries everything—life and death, hope and grief, the living, and the dead. It is not light, frivolous joy. It is joy you must carry, like a weight, like a responsibility, like a body. Like the plants handed to audience members at the beginning, asking: will you take care of them?

Abigail and Shaun Bengson deliver performances of astonishing vulnerability and technical mastery. This is not confessional theater that mistakes raw emotion for craft; it is rigorously constructed storytelling that happens to use their own lives as source material. Abigail moves from sardonic humor to devastating grief without false transitions—her body language shifts subtly between present-day narration and remembered trauma, her voice finding different registers for pain, for protective distance, for tentative hope. When she sings “I loved you and I called you in / Oh, I called you mine / Look Shaun, a poppy seed / Look Shaun a bean / A lime / You fit into my hand when it was losing time,” the specificity of the loss—the way expectant parents track fetal development through fruit comparisons, the physical reality of miscarriage held in a palm—grounds abstraction in unbearable detail.

Shaun navigates the more difficult territory of being witness and participant, the partner who experiences grief differently but no less profoundly. His depression, his attempts at wellness culture pushups, his fear about bringing children into climate catastrophe, his conviction that “by the time I sing this song to our baby when it’s born / Every single polar bear will be dead”—all of this registers as genuine rather than performed darkness. When he sings “River,” remembering taking Abigail to the water after the first miscarriage, his tenderness never tips into sentimentality. He is holding her in the shatter of a life, and he knows holding is all he can do.

The band—Aaron Bahr, Ashley Baier, Noga Cabo, Reginald Chapman, Matt Deitchman, Nicole DeMaio—deserves individual recognition not just for musical excellence but for theatrical presence. They create the soundscape that makes catharsis possible while also inhabiting the Bengsons’ world as characters, as chorus, as witnesses. Deitchman’s musical direction holds the entire unwieldy, ambitious piece together. Cabo’s guitar work grounds the folk-punk aesthetic. Chapman’s trombone and tuba provide both musical foundation and, as Gramma Kathy, emotional warmth. The ensemble sings the desperate refrain “Don’t hope / Don’t do it / Don’t get happy” with the same conviction they later bring to “Thank you / Thank you / Hallelujah”—understanding that both impulses are true, that protection and openness are equally valid responses to unbearable risk.

Steph Paul’s choreography creates the “desperate and cathartic and epic” dance break that concludes “I’d Like to Be Happy”—movement that releases what words cannot contain. Hahnji Jang’s costume design allows the Bengsons to remain themselves while also marking shifts in time and emotional register. The production values serve the intimacy rather than inflate it, understanding that spectacle would betray the material.

“My Joy is Heavy” asks enduring questions that extend far beyond pandemic grief or pregnancy loss. Is it possible to find hope in loss? What does it mean to have joy that is heavy—joy that carries both celebration and burden, life and death, hope, and grief? How does one sustain hope during isolation? Can you be present for the living while mourning the dead or dying? What does it mean to mother both life and death, to become the threshold between worlds? Is wellness a prerequisite for happiness, or is that belief itself a form of tyranny? How do you honor every part of your broken heart—not trying to mend it, just holding all the pieces, recognizing the “cracked open holy geode / That lives inside of my chest” as “a home for a phoenix / Or for an animal in need of rest”?

The Bengsons do not answer these questions definitively. They cannot. But they create theatrical space where these questions can be asked with rigor and tenderness, where grief and humor coexist without one diminishing the other, where the specific circumstances of pandemic isolation and pregnancy loss open onto universal experiences of loving what you cannot protect, hoping when hope seems foolish, choosing joy even when—especially when—that joy is heavy.

This is Obie-level work, worthy of the recognition the Bengsons have already received and certain to earn more. It ranks with their best achievements and with NYTW’s ongoing commitment to theater that is both deeply personal and genuinely political—understanding that how we grieve, how we love, how we choose to live in bodies that suffer and fail and sometimes create new life, these are not private matters but communal reckonings. The piece serves as both pandemic document and timeless meditation, specific to this moment of collective trauma and applicable to any moment when people must decide whether to risk love knowing loss is inevitable.

The final meaning of the title crystallizes: Joy is heavy because it carries everything. The living and the dead. The born and the not-yet-born. The hope we protect ourselves from and the hope we cannot help but feel. We hand the plants to strangers, asking them to hold life for seventy minutes. The moment on the bed when all four of them—Louie, the dying baby, Abigail, Shaun—are present together, and it is good, it is so good, even as it breaks.

At the end, after “My Joy is Heavy” transforms the theater into parade, prayer, and thanksgiving, we return the plants. We have carried them for seventy minutes. They loved the ground. And we—those of us who were not born but did not die during the pandemic, who are still here, still carrying our own heavy joys—we leave the theater changed by what we have witnessed, what we’ve remembered together, what the Bengsons have trusted us to hold.