Abigail and Shaun Bengson got married three weeks after they met, but rather than just feeling joy in finding the love of her life, Abigail felt great anxiety, because she had had a dream when she was 15 years old that the man with whom she would fall in love would die 100 days after they met.
The Bengsons don’t tell us that story in their latest autobiographical indie folk-rock concert, “Ohio,” which they’re performing at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. They told the story in an earlier autobiographical indie folk-rock concert of theirs called “Hundred Days,” which I attended eight years ago in New York. (Shaun grew up in Ohio – hence the title of their new show – but the Bengsons now live in Queens.) This time around, they do talk again about their fear of dying, but the fear at the center of “Ohio” is Sean’s fear of losing his hearing. He has what he tells us is congenital degenerative hearing loss. He tells us about his father, a pastor who liked to sing, who has it too, and has been forced to stop singing. What Shaun evidently finds most devastating about his own loss is that it was music that provided the needed solace when he lost the religious faith of his childhood.
I don’t recall the Bengsons making much of Shaun’s hearing loss in previous concerts, or even mentioning it, although we learn in this show that his congenital hearing problems started in childhood. A cynic might wonder whether they’ve run out of other personal miseries to write songs about. But there really is no room for such cynicism when it comes to the Bengsons. Their lovely, lilting harmonies have a healing hymnal quality. (It seemed totally fitting that “Ohio” is being performed in a former church building) It’s easy to sigh at their wordless chants, and share the palpable feeling of gratitude when they sing of the choir teacher, Mrs. Ween, who brought the teenage Shaun out of the isolation exacerbated by his hearing loss, and introduced him to music. And I believe them when they say “we’re doing this to be less afraid” – the “this” presumably means not just the writing of their aching songs, but also the sharing of them with an audience.
Still, when Shaun says almost at the very end of the hour, “how long am I going to be able to do any of this?” with a pain that slips uncomfortably close to self-pity, I felt like sending him a note with a list of Deaf and hard of hearing musicians, and the address of a support group. Devoted fans might not care — and admittedly, there are many – but my hope is that the Bengsons diversify their subject matter; bring more of the world into their music.
I call “Ohio” a concert, but their Fringe webpage labels it not just music but also theatre and storytelling. It’s true that they have gotten much better at what used to be little more than the patter between the songs; their conversation used to be wooden. Now it feels more natural, good-humored, relaxed; they even engage the audience. But their stories and comments can feel random, and I wondered who came up with the idea of using an overhead projector for graphics of the cochlea and its tiny hair cells in a biology lesson on the tinnitus that Shaun has lived with most of his life.
One of the best things about “Ohio” is that it includes captions for every performance. Of the 3,853 shows in the fringe festival this year, no more than a dozen or so on any day offer captions, and these are mostly for productions performed in a language other than English. Most of the English-language shows that claim to be captioned, upon inspection, actually only offer it once during their run. The producers, and the festival as a whole, don’t seem to grasp that making their shows genuinely accessible, rather than just virtual signaling the word “accessible,” is a matter of human rights. It’s a political issue. Perhaps the Bengsons have started to realize this.
***Ohio is running through August 24th at Upstairs at Assembly Roxy as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe
