Review: My Joy Is Heavy Asks, Can Grief and Happiness Coexist?

A musical about a woman’s struggle to conceive and carry a pregnancy to term was always going to be a tough sell. Set it during a pandemic that most people would prefer to forget and you’re asking for trouble. But Abigail and Shaun Bengson have never shied away from tough subjects. Their 2017 theatrical concert, Hundred Days, was a love story haunted by the specter of death. The Lucky Ones was about a teenager’s fatal delusions of grandeur. And their 2024 show, The Keep Going Songs, was set around the untimely death of Abigail’s brother.

Their latest, the appropriately titled My Joy Is Heavy, is now making its world premiere at New York Theatre Workshop under the direction of Rachel Chavkin. It’s about Abigail and Shaun’s quest to have a second child while hiding out from Covid at her mother’s Vermont home. They’re both a little older and require medical intervention to get them over the hump—but are the drugs making Abigail hallucinate? And what about the depression and guilt she feels about missing special moments with her son, Louie, while she’s at home nursing her chronic pain? The delicate mysteries of the body are difficult to communicate in an examining room, and practically impossible on a telehealth call.

Adding weight to the story is the memory of a previous pregnancy that ended in miscarriage. How do they know the same thing won’t happen to this one? Dare they allow themselves to feel happiness and excitement from a positive pregnancy test? Aren’t they just setting themselves up for heartbreak?

The themes of My Joy Is Heavy dovetail with The Keep Going Songs, especially in its exploration of the coexistence of grief and joy. I was most struck by the show’s depiction of the collision of expectations and reality, how our will to have it all is frequently humiliated by the Gods. It’s an ancient story, but one that bears constant repetition until Americans actually change their behavior around the inevitability of death. I was glad to hear this story in the Bengsons’ heartfelt musical style.

Still, it’s hard to critique a show like My Joy Is Heavy. The stories are personal; the emotions are raw; and the composers are on stage, playing themselves in a skeletal facsimile of Abigail’s childhood home (Lee Jellinek’s set is the ideal meeting place of the banal and fantastic). Criticism of the story has the potential to veer uncomfortably close to criticism of the artists’ lives as they actually lived them.

And yet the hit-or-miss score feels like fair game. The number “Easy/River” exhibits the musical daring and lyrical honesty that have made the Bengsons darlings of the off-Broadway scene. There’s a delightfully zany number about how Abigail’s Swiss yodeling exercises (a novel way to encourage conception) combined with the sound of her mother’s television crime dramas and her son’s YouTube boss shows to create a maddening pandemic symphony. But the song “Underground” verges on cringe—although a lot of that has to do with Steph Paul’s herky-jerky choreography, which suggests White hipsters making a feint at hip-hop.

Fortunately, the Bengsons possess considerable charm, so that even if a number doesn’t quite work, they always manage to pull the audience back in. They smartly set the tone with humor from the very top. Announcing that every performance is “relaxed,” Abigail tells us, “If you have to get up and pee, we won’t be offended. I’m in pelvic floor therapy, and I’m peeing right now.”

Chavkin’s production is full of warmth, conveyed through David Bengali’s video design (a beautiful collage of home movies) and Alan C. Edwards’s perfectly calibrated lighting. Nick Kourtides’s sound design makes us feel like we’re at a concert while also providing for lyrical clarity. Hahnji Jang costumes the Bengsons and the band to look like a group of random New Englanders thrown together into a flash musical happening. While Chavkin hides the musicians behind the set for most of the show, I wondered how they might have been used throughout, not just in video appearances and the finale.

Consummate performers, the Bengsons save their very best song, the title track, for the end. “My Joy Is Heavy” is a stomp clap hey throwback to warm the Millennial heart. And honestly, it’s hard not to feel giddy when Abigail is leading the band in a parade around the audience, a potted plant in each hand like a witchy fortuneteller acting as drum major of a New Orleans funeral band. If her soul-shaking wail doesn’t get you, the brass in your face surely will. I left with a spring in my step and a song in my heart, a fine parting gift from any new musical.