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Not lots of Lincoln Center Theater exhibits name for setting the preperformance temper with the Grateful Dead, however when “Uncle John’s Band” came to visit the audio system the opposite night earlier than the Bengsons took the stage, it was such a great match for his or her crunchy, mellow, kindhearted, folk-rock vibe that I needed to smile.
In Abigail and Shaun Bengson’s “The Keep Going Songs,” although, it’s the dead with a lowercase “d” who’re integral. This married couple of music-makers, recognized for shaggy, melodic, autobiographically impressed theater, needed to create what they name “a live performance. That’s additionally a wake.”
Directed by Caitlin Sullivan for LCT3, the present is a musing on demise: of human beings, and of our planet. The pairing doesn’t solely work organically. Still, the seeming intent is a processing of grief.
“If you’re on this room,” Abigail tells the viewers on the Claire Tow Theater, “we assume you’re going by way of one thing horrible.”
Shaun provides: “And if you happen to’re not, then we don’t need to hear about it.” (Is he joking? He’s very dry. Hard to inform.)
As Abigail notes, the present is front-loaded with grief. She mentions nearly instantly that her brother died the day she and Shaun have been requested to do that Lincoln Center run. The damage of that loss is the truth is threaded all through “The Keep Going Songs,” which, by the best way, is a brand new piece. Despite the title and the shared motif of perseverance, it’s unrelated to the Bengsons’ pandemic-inspired present “The Keep Going Song,” with its upbeat, earworm title tune.
This present is sadder, extra battered by life, regardless of the ethereal harmonies and occasional crystallizing comedian lyric, just like the one about Manhattan as the house of “the lanternfly and the tech bro.” Or the prolonged, trippily humorous dance, through the “Animal Suite” part, during which Shaun morphs right into a crab, and makes crab sounds.
The music is commonly chic, and Abigail’s enchantress voice may make you consider in historic gods bestowing items on mortals. So it’s irritating that “The Keep Going Songs” is as amorphous because the grief that vexes her. Whether or not that formal echo is intentional, it makes the present exhausting to get a deal with 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,” exhibits whose looseness had a discernible construction beneath.
Even the only overtly ritualistic section right here, a toast to Abigail’s brother that features Guinness for a handful of viewers members, meanders. I couldn’t assist remembering Aya Ogawa’s mourning ritual of a play, “The Nosebleed,” whose tautness in the identical LCT3 area solely amplified its ache.
Cate McCrea’s “Keep Going” set is constructed of what we’re instructed are components recycled from productions in Lincoln Center Theater’s Broadway home. The thrust stage is flanked by brilliant inexperienced, globe-topped streetlights standing askew, as if Sesame Street had been thrown into chaos. (That shouldn’t be a dis.)
Close to the stage are a half-dozen tiny cabaret tables, then the same old financial institution of seats — however I want we’d all been at cabaret tables, as a result of this present cries out for relaxed intimacy. It would assist if the lights weren’t up on the viewers a lot of the time, inadvertently hindering communion.
“The Keep Going Songs” looks like the center installment of a film trilogy, the place the heroes’ exhausting slog by way of the valley is all-consuming, and solace is a dream or a reminiscence.
Once, Abigail tells us, when she was on the backside of a effectively of ache, she despatched her brother a signal-flare textual content: “hey.” And he despatched her again a sustaining shot of grace: “kick ass kiddo.”
Now that’s the title of a Bengsons tune.
The Keep Going Songs
Through May 26 on the Claire Tow Theater at Lincoln Center Theater, Manhattan; lct.org. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes.
