I apologize for missing the newsletter last week. I’d just returned from a trip to my childhood home, where I gathered with most of my 10 siblings and attended the bedside of my dad, who appears to be in the final weeks of his life. It was a tender time in ways that are both joyous and painful, and I’ve had some difficulty getting my brain back into theatre.
But I am here now with Part One of a deep dive into Dear Evan Hansen: a musical about mental health. It feels appropriate after watching my dad, whose emotional resilience astounds me as he endures the crucible that brings his life to a close. Dad was always active and an avid outdoorsman. When I was a kid, he skied and ran marathons. In later years, he biked everywhere, and loved being in the mountains. Two years ago, he planned to celebrate his 86th birthday by going ziplining for the first time. Instead, he suffered a massive stroke that threw him into days of physical agony, and two years of painful persistence, bedridden, no longer able to control one side of his body, subject to bouts of debilitating nausea and a frustrating mental fogginess that prevents him from even enjoying being read to. Yet, his bedside is sacred space. He makes sure you know how much he loves you. He tells you, with tears in his eyes, of his gratitude for his Redeemer. And when you sing to him, he interrupts you after every verse to sincerely thank you. He gets frustrated every day with the pain and apparent pointlessness of his sluggish decline. But despite his distress, he always circles back to gratitude. He was even that way in the midst of his stroke. When he couldn’t even recognize me and assumed I was a nurse, he kept thanking me for every little thing I did for him. He has long-established, beautiful habits of the mind that turn today’s trauma into triumph.
I think Dear Evan Hansen is a musical about the importance of building such healthy habits of the mind. Be warned: this analysis is full of spoilers. If you haven’t seen the show or the movie and you don’t want to know the details, read no further. Also, here’s a content advisory: in addition to mental illness, DEH deals with drug addiction, self harm and suicide. There’s a side character, something of a foil for Evan, who makes liberal use of sexual innuendo for comic relief. The stage version includes multiple instances of very strong language, which is reduced but still present in the film version.
According to Stephan Chbosky, director of the movie version, the musical’s message is, “like the song says: you are not alone.” That can’t be right, because what we see over and over through the show and even at the end is that sometimes, despite an aching need for connection, you are alone. The consequences can be fatal, like they were with Connor Murphy. Or you can find a way to be okay, like Evan Hansen. What makes the difference? The answer to that is the show’s message: the stories we tell ourselves matter and you can get to mental wellness by taking accountability for your own stuff and doing the patient, incremental work that helps you choose courageous, hopeful stories.
Perhaps the most powerful way Benj Pasek, Justin Paul and Steven Levenson communicate that message is through the changes in the story Evan tells himself and others about his fall from a tree over the past summer. It starts in the “I Want” song, “WAVING THROUGH A WINDOW”. Evan, a lonely 17-year-old with a cast on his arm, returns to high school for a final year, with a desperate but hopeless longing to be seen. “I've learned to slam on the brake/ Before I even turn the key/ Before I make the mistake/ Before I lead with the worst of me/ Give them no reason to stare/ No slipping up if you slip away/ So I got nothing to share/ No, I got nothing to say” he sings. He’s tried to connect and repeatedly failed, so now he’s closed himself down but “wait[s] around for an answer to appear/ … Can anybody see, is anybody waving back at me?” Despite a therapy assignment to write himself an encouraging letter every day, Evan doesn’t think he has any worth unless somebody else can validate him. “If you’re falling in a forest and there’s nobody around/ Do you ever really crash, or even make a sound?” That’s a well-known philosophical question, but Evan isn’t talking about trees. As he will explain right after the song, he just broke his arm by falling from an oak tree at his summer job. He thought the crash would have brought someone running to help him, but he lay there on the ground for a solid ten minutes with no help in sight. “Did I even make a sound?/Did I even make a sound?” he anguishes. “It’s like I never made a sound/ Will I ever make a sound?” It seems his terrifying fall didn’t even matter if nobody but himself witnessed it, because he doesn’t count.
Evan then runs afoul of Connor Murphy, who is struggling in a similar way, but who uses anger and street drugs as his coping mechanisms. There’s something besides their emotional struggles that connect them: Connor’s younger sister Zoe is Evan’s hopeless crush. When Connor is told his black manicure makes him look “school shooter chic,” Evan gives him a sympathetic smile which Connor mistakes for mockery and screams in his face. Later, after failing to get anyone to sign his cast, Evan’s in the computer lab, dashing off a letter to himself that’s supposed to be encouraging but ends up focussing on how invisible and futile he feels; his one hope is Zoe but she doesn’t even know him. Connor appears and signs the cast, saying “Now we can both pretend like we have friends.” But then he finds Evan’s letter at the printer, recognizes the reference to his sister, assumes Evan is trying to provoke him and throws Evan to the ground when he begs for his letter back. He leaves Evan terrified of something worse than invisibility, public humiliation.
But Connor never reveals Evan’s letter. Instead, he commits suicide and his parents, mistaking the letter addressed to “Dear Evan Hansen” for Connor’s suicide note, arrange to deliver it in person. Evan initially tries to explain, but when they see their son’s name written in big letters on Evan’s cast, that’s all the proof they need that their son actually had a friend. This brings them so much comfort that Evan doesn’t have the heart to clarify. He winds up inventing a secret friendship with the song ”FOR FOREVER” about an outing to an old apple orchard where the Murphys used to picnic. He sings about them climbing the tallest tree together, then, “I suddenly feel the branch give way/ I’m on the ground/ My arm goes numb/ I look around/ And I see him come to get me/ He’s come to get me/ And everything’s okay.”
At this point, Evan’s pretending for the Murphys gives him an alternate reality that transforms his relationship with himself. It’s not true, but the emotions are real: there was a witness to his fall, a friend who came running to get him, and that means he matters. At the same time, in reality, he quickly becomes vital to the Murphys. They have been torturing themselves with stories about failing Connor, or about Connor being a monster who didn’t care and didn’t try. Evan’s fictions help them remember happy times with the boy they’ve lost. They find the peace they need to stop blaming and start appreciating each other.
Next, Evan sings “YOU WILL BE FOUND” at an assembly to honor Connor’s memory. Here his own anguish merges with Connor’s. “Have you ever felt like you could disappear?/ Like you could fall, and no one would hear?/” These lines take us right back to Evan’s despair at the beginning of the show. We hear both his ‘I Want” song and his dismal letter to himself. And we imagine Connor felt the same way as he ended his life.
“Well, let that lonely feeling wash away/ Maybe there’s a reason to believe you’ll be okay/ ‘Cause when you don’t feel strong enough to stand/ You can reach, reach out your hand/ And oh, someone will come running/ And I know, they’ll take you home.” Evan’s alternate reality and his living reality unite here. The story he’s told about Connor running to his rescue has brought about the Murphys taking him home and offering him belonging.
“Even when the dark comes crashing through/ When you need a friend to carry you/ And when you’re broken on the ground/ You will be found.” Instead of telling himself a story about being abandoned and insignificant, broken on the ground, Evan is now telling the whole school that nobody is insignificant, that everybody matters, including him. Only it’s not just the school he’s telling but the world, because somebody videotapes the presentation and it goes viral. He becomes something of a celebrity overnight.
The celebrity is not important to Evan. What he really cares about is his relationship with the Murphys, because Zoe’s become his girlfriend and her parents treat him like a son. At the same time, Evan is becoming increasingly alienated from his single mother, who has difficulty being available because she is both working full-time and attending school. When she tries to connect with him, he resents her questions because they threaten to break open the lies he’s been telling. She’s worried about his skipping therapy and not refilling his meds. Evan doesn’t think he needs those anymore, and starts telling himself that he doesn’t need her either. In that one relationship, he descends into a victim story where she didn’t even answer his calls last summer when he fell (she was at work and didn’t get them). This culminates in a brutal verbal showdown after she’s just discovered that the Murphy’s, of whom he’s told her nothing, have virtually adopted him and want to pay his way to university.
“I know I’m such a burden. I’m the worst thing that ever happened to you. I just, I ruined your life!” he shouts.
“No!” she exclaims. “You are the only, the one good thing that’s ever happened to me, Evan. Sorry I can’t give you anything more than that.”
“Well, it’s not my fault that other people can,” he retorts.
Meanwhile, Evan’s celebrity demands more and more lies from him. Eventually, they lead to somebody else leaking the “suicide note” online, and a public pile-up on the Murphys for being such a lousy family that Connor wrote his suicide note to his buddy instead of to them. When the Murphys start to fall apart and resume blaming each other, Evan confesses that none of it’s true; he made it all up. In “WORDS FAIL” he throws off all the illusions he’s been spinning and ultimately comes down to a fundamental truth: “I guess I wanted to believe/ 'Cause if I just believe/ Then I don't have to see what's really there/ No, I'd rather pretend I'm something better than/ These broken parts/ …'Cause then I don't have to look at it/ And no one gets to look at it/ No, no one can really see.”
By that point, the Murphy’s have already fled the stage or, in the movie version, told Evan it’s time to leave. Bemoaning “All I ever do is run,” and longing for power to “step into the sun,” Evan goes home and tells his mom the truth he’s been running from the entire time: he didn’t fall from a tree last summer; he was feeling so miserable and alone that he let go. In “So BIG/SO SMALL” she takes both his hands, reviews their past trauma and her inadequacies, and assures him that she will always be there for him, no matter what, “when it all feels so big/ ‘Til it all feels so small.” Evan manages to recover.
But how? In the stage version, we see him for a final scene one year later and we can tell that he’s doing well. In the movie version, he goes online and tells the world to leave the Murphys alone – they don’t deserve hate; he was never friends with Connor Murphy and the “suicide note” was just a letter he wrote to himself. Then he goes to school where he is shunned by everyone and sits alone everyday in the cafeteria, reading Connor’s favourite books.
How does a boy who nearly killed himself because of loneliness at the beginning of the year find the strength to endure and grow while being actively shunned at the end of the year?
We’ve seen how. We’ve watched Evan change the stories he tells himself, from that he doesn’t matter to that everyone matters and he’s going to be part of helping those who think they don’t. We’ve watched him find the courage to face up to his own wrongs. And now we see him doing the quiet, incremental work that his self-respect demands, while writing his daily, hopeful letter to himself. It’s a powerful message that harkens back to another, lesser-known song, “TO BREAK IN A GLOVE” and it hits home especially well because of the contrast between his hopeless loneliness when the show opens to his peaceful and purposeful loneliness at the end. The way the songs work together with their recurring motif of falling in a forest is nothing short of brilliant.
So, after watching it for the first time, I told my kids, “Dear Evan Hansen is a near perfect musical.”
One of my daughters strongly disagreed: “It teaches you that when you mess up, everyone will turn their back on you except your mom.”
I started to argue with her, but I couldn’t. She’d made a really solid point.
So… could Dear Evan Hansen have been better with a different ending? What do you think? I’ll give you my answer next week.
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