Not a lot of Lincoln Center Theater shows call for setting the preperformance mood with the Grateful Dead, but when “Uncle John’s Band” came over the speakers the other evening before the Bengsons took the stage, it was such an ideal match for their crunchy, mellow, kindhearted, folk-rock vibe that I had to smile.
In Abigail and Shaun Bengson’s “The Keep Going Songs,” though, it’s the dead with a lowercase “d” who are integral. This married couple of music-makers, known for shaggy, melodic, autobiographically inspired theater, wanted to create what they call “a concert. That’s also a wake.”
Directed by Caitlin Sullivan for LCT3, the show is a musing on death: of human beings, and of our planet. The pairing doesn’t entirely work organically. Still, the seeming intent is a processing of grief.
“If you’re in this room,” Abigail tells the audience at the Claire Tow Theater, “we assume you are going through something terrible.”
Shaun adds: “And if you’re not, then we don’t want to hear about it.” (Is he joking? He’s very dry. Hard to tell.)
As Abigail notes, the show is front-loaded with grief. She mentions almost immediately that her brother died the day she and Shaun were asked to do this Lincoln Center run. The hurt of that loss is in fact threaded throughout “The Keep Going Songs,” which, by the way, is a new piece. Despite the title and the shared motif of perseverance, it is unrelated to the Bengsons’ pandemic-inspired show “The Keep Going Song,” with its upbeat, earworm title tune.
This show is sadder, more battered by life, despite the ethereal harmonies and occasional crystallizing comic lyric, like the one about Manhattan as the home of “the lanternfly and the tech bro.” Or the extended, trippily funny dance, during the “Animal Suite” section, in which Shaun morphs into a crab, and makes crab sounds.
The music is often sublime, and Abigail’s enchantress voice could make you believe in ancient gods bestowing gifts on mortals. So it’s frustrating that “The Keep Going Songs” is as amorphous as the grief that vexes her. Whether or not that formal echo is intentional, it makes the show hard to get a handle on.
And it made me miss the playwright Sarah Gancher and the director Anne Kauffman, the Bengsons’ collaborators on “Hundred Days” and “The Lucky Ones,” shows whose looseness had a discernible structure underneath.
Even the single overtly ritualistic segment here, a toast to Abigail’s brother that includes Guinness for a handful of audience members, meanders. I couldn’t help remembering Aya Ogawa’s mourning ritual of a play, “The Nosebleed,” whose tautness in the same LCT3 space only amplified its ache.
Cate McCrea’s “Keep Going” set is constructed of what we’re told are elements recycled from productions in Lincoln Center Theater’s Broadway house. The thrust stage is flanked by bright green, globe-topped streetlights standing askew, as if Sesame Street had been thrown into chaos. (That is not a dis.)
Close to the stage are a half-dozen tiny cabaret tables, then the usual bank of seats — but I wish we’d all been at cabaret tables, because this show cries out for relaxed intimacy. It would help if the lights weren’t up on the audience much of the time, inadvertently hindering communion.
“The Keep Going Songs” feels like the middle installment of a movie trilogy, where the heroes’ hard slog through the valley is all-consuming, and solace is a dream or a memory.
Once, Abigail tells us, when she was at the bottom of a well of pain, she sent her brother a signal-flare text: “hey.” And he sent her back a sustaining shot of grace: “kick ass kiddo.”
Now that’s the title of a Bengsons song.
The Keep Going Songs
Through May 26 at the Claire Tow Theater at Lincoln Center Theater, Manhattan; lct.org. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes.
