Well, I didn’t have a charming piece of folkie gig theatre about religion, death and deafness on my 2025 bingo card, but here we are. Ohio at the Young Vic is a thoughtful, autobiographical reflection on loss and leaving, told through narrative and song by married Obie-winning duo The Bengsons, Shaun and Abigail.
A hit at the Edinburgh Fringe, it’s been brought to London by canny producer Francesca Moody (Fleabag, Baby Reindeer). And it is an intimate, idiosyncratic joy.
The Bengsons are autistic and Shaun is suffering hereditary, progressive, degenerative hearing loss through tinnitus. He grew up in a family of increasingly deaf priests and pastors in a Christian community in Ohio but was an atheist by the time he met “Jewish pagan witch” Abigail: his chat up line was “Jesus was an activist”, and apparently it worked. They married three weeks after meeting: the circumstances of their lives are all out there, online, having been the grist to their work.
The difficult and dangerous birth of one of their two children is one of the spurs to this show, and the awareness of mortality that parenthood brings. Ohio also asks what it means to lose faith and hearing. In a neat metaphor, Abigail tells us that even when the hairs in the cochlea can no longer transmit a sound, they will still tell your brain that the sound is there: in other words, they go on singing after they’ve died.
“Welcome! This is a death concert! Shaun’s gonna die at the end!” Abigail shouts, grinning broadly, as they enter and take up position behind a bank of instruments and amps, a mini recording desk and an overhead projector. She’s an exuberant, jump-suited presence, curly raven hair shot with grey. Physically expressive, she has an extraordinary, keening, ululating singing voice. He’s circumspect, bespectacled and dry with a teacherish vibe. As a child God felt like a member of the family, he says, but as a teenager he became “a stern ghost watching you masturbate”.
The terminally shy (of whom there seemed to be many at the performance I saw) should know there’s low-level audience participation here. We’re asked to hum along to songs, shout out captions projected on the back wall, and imagine what progressive deafness will be like, as Shaun modulates his microphone to emulate the background buzz of tinnitus and his increasing inability to hear higher frequencies and consonants. At one sphincter-tightening point, Abigail asks those of us who speak another language to pray in it. “Or just order a cheeseburger,” she adds, as rictus panic flashes through the crowd. Ok, phew.
The songs are lovely, built around vocal loops that Abigal lays down in front of us, and harmonies she weaves around Shaun’s plangent singing and his indie-folk riffs. There’s a deep connection to the soil, the trees and the birdsong of his native Ohio, and to his antecedents, in both the songs and in his spoken words. He vividly evokes a time he almost drowned in a local creek as a child. A conversation at the end between fathers and sons about the things they can no longer hear is profoundly moving.
Abigail wryly acknowledges that there seems to be less of her in this show – the death of her brother, which partially inspired the duo’s 2024 Lincoln Center project The Keep Going Songs, is mentioned almost incidentally. But the squirt of panic as she realises her newborn son can’t breathe is powerfully felt.
Spoiler alert: Shaun doesn’t *actually* die at the end. But Ohio takes us to a place where the Bengsons imagine that happening, and it is a place of sadness but also of peace and connection. At its heart, that’s what Ohio is about: connection, especially the connection between audience and performer. That and the “joyful noise” of life.
Ohio at the Young Vic, until 24 October, youngvic.org.
