10 Things to Know About the Bengsons, the Folk-Punk Duo Behind My Joy Is Heavy

My Joy Is Heavy, now running off-Broadway at New York Theatre Workshop, is the latest stage offering from Abigail and Shaun Bengson, the married songwriting duo that lay their personal stories on the table with each project they create. “They believe that grief and joy are the same thing,” reads their shared bio, a statement that makes perfect sense if you’re already a fan of their exultant and cathartic work. It’s the folks that are new to the boisterous world of the Bengsons that will want to listen up.

Here are 10 things to know about the Bengsons (including a few listening materials) that will get you totally up to speed.

1. Shaun and Abigail Bengson met and married within three weeks.

The Bengsons’ creative partnership and life partnership started at exactly the same time. They met in 2007 playing for a band in New York City where they decided to start their own band. Sparks flew after their first rehearsal and they were married three weeks later. Now with 19 years, two kids, and an award-winning musical collaboration under their belt, you have to admire the Bengsons’ powers of intuition.

2. Their whirlwind courtship became the subject of their first musical, Hundred Days.

If you want to simultaneously get a sense of the Bengsons’ folk-punk musical style and their marital partnership, listen to “Vows,” the opening track on the Hundred Days album. The show, which premiered in San Francisco in 2014 and ran at New York Theatre Workshop in 2017, kicks off with their wedding but turns into a story about the fear of love and loss. It’s a poignant corollary to My Joy Is Heavy so take a dive into the Bengsons’ archives to get an even fuller picture of their family journey.

3. Speaking of their family journey…

The Bengsons had their first child, Louis, in 2016. Abigail has commented on how becoming a parent influenced her and her husband’s creativity: “It changed the writing process profoundly. Having Louis was very uncomfortable in many ways but it was so full of love, too, and that combination is an amazing place to make art from. It’s deepened our emotional sphere.” She added, “But along with the joy of loving a child, you also realize the precariousness of life. The stakes get really, really high.” You can feel every bit of that realization bubbling in their subsequent work.

4. Speaking of their subsequent work…

Autobiography is at the root of most of Shaun and Abigail’s productions and they followed Hundred Days with more deeply personal shows. In 2018, they premiered The Lucky Ones, inspired by traumatic events from Abigail’s childhood; in 2024 they came to LCT3 with The Keep Going Songs, a show about grief and resilience in the wake of Abigail’s brother’s death; and this past fall, they went to London’s Young Vic with their show Ohio, which delves into Shaun’s complicated relationship with faith and his ongoing struggles with degenerative hearing loss. Look up any one of these projects on Spotify or YouTube and you’ll be in a Bengson rabbit hole for days.

5. The Bengsons know how to throw a party.

No, the Bengsons don’t shy away from the harder parts of life. But their work is anything but gloomy. Just look at how they titled My Joy Is Heavy and you’ll understand that they’re all about finding the light not just in spite of the dark, but inside of it. If you go to one of their shows, chances are you’ll end up smiling ear to ear and feeling the urge to dance out of your seat like it’s Lilith Fair in 1997. Watch this teaser for My Joy Is Heavy and you’ll see what I mean.

6. They may be downtown darlings, but they’ve seen the bright lights of Broadway.

In late 2024, just a few months after dissecting their raw grief in The Keep Going Songs, the Bengsons landed on Broadway in one of the airiest entertainments of the season. They were tapped to be the house band for All In: Comedy About Love, a show inspired by Simon Rich’s comedic New Yorker essays about love and heartbreak. It featured a revolving door of A-listers from John Mulaney to Jimmy Fallon, and the Bengsons anchored it all with a set list of love songs by The Magnetic Fields. They’re creatures of small, hip venues, so audiences who caught them at the Hudson Theatre got a rare treat.

7. Their song “Ashes” made a splash on So You Think You Can Dance.

This indie-folk duo grabbed America’s attention all the way back in 2013 when they lent their song “Ashes” to season 10 of So You Think You Can Dance. It was used to score a contemporary dance choreographed by Sonya Tayeh and performed by Alexis Juliano and Nico Greetham, a pair that went on to perform the popular routine on tour. So you think you’ve never heard the Bengsons? Think again.

8. My Joy Is Heavy started as a 27-minute YouTube piece.

It was mid-pandemic and Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. created Arena Riffs, a commissioned musical series that invited artists to make work that could fill the void left by all the shuttered theaters. The Bengsons turned in My Joy Is Heavy, a 27-minute musical piece filmed during the COVID lockdown from their home in Vermont that opened up Abigail’s struggles with chronic pain, depression, and pregnancy loss. In true Bengson fashion, they seized the opportunity to turn darkness into light.

9. This show is a reunion for the Bengsons and director Rachel Chavkin.

Tony winner Rachel Chavkin is helming the stage premiere of My Joy Is Heavy at NYTW, and audiences should know that her collaboration with the Bengsons dates back at least a decade. In August 2016, Chavkin and other members of the theater company The TEAM premiered their “surrealist road trip story” Anything That Gives Off Light at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival with a folk-punk score by the Bengsons. Chavkin, at the time, was only months away from making her Broadway debut directing Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812, and three years later, she’d win a Tony Award for directing the hit musical Hadestown. Thriving careers have sent Chavkin and the Bengsons all over, but like-minded artists always find a way back to one another.

10. The Bengsons received the 2024 Obie Award for Sustained Achievement in Performance.

When the Off-Broadway Theater Awards celebrated the Bengsons in 2024, the American Theatre Wing presented the honor with the following comments: “Creating space for grief is an essential part of the practice of resilience. To do so with the buoyancy, grace, and imagination that these collaborators bring is an unforgettable theatrical event. Through spell-binding songs and heartfelt stories, this duo’s disarming, warm voices invite us to consider, in the safety of the communal theater, our own losses and how we don’t have to cut pain out of our lives in order to find joy.” That pretty much says it all.