(Laura Collins-Hughes’s article appeared in The New York Time, 4/6; via Pam Green.)

There’s a line near the start of the new musical “The Lucky Ones” that’s a deliberate hedge — an explanation of the rules of the show that also leaves those rules a little murky.

“This is a true story,” Shaun Bengson tells the audience from the stage of the Connelly Theater in the East Village. “Even the parts that never happened.”

And with those words, Mr. Bengson and his wife, Abigail — the other half of the folk-rock duo the Bengsons, the indie-theater darlings who created the show for Ars Nova — attempt to draw a cloak of privacy around themselves and the people they love.

Ms. Bengson, 35, has a tale to tell about the autumn she was 15, when her family shattered and the seemingly safe Eden she grew up in was lost forever. Yet she is terrified of compounding anyone’s anguish.

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