Why Dear Evan Hansen is Dearer As Is
- Rebecca Burnham
- Apr 10
- 4 min read
Last July, I wrote a post Evan Hansen Deserves Forgiveness, arguing that the near-perfect musical would be better with a different ending.
I’ve changed my mind about Dear Evan Hansen. Not about whether Evan deserves forgiveness. But about whether showing him getting that forgiveness would have improved the musical. Thanks to a deep and searching conversation with some extremely thoughtful readers last week, I’ve come around to the conclusion that the lonely ending is more effective than my alternate. Here’s why:
Sometimes, a story about somebody doing the courageous, soul-building thing even when they don’t get what they deserve, is the most powerful. Sometimes, it’s an excellent way to drive home the point.
This is especially the case in Dear Evan Hansen, where the theme is not that we need to rescue each other from our emotional deserts, but rather, that healing becomes possible when we finally take responsibility for ourselves. Evan’s journey begins with him longing to be rescued by somebody else while he’s stuck in a loop of self-rejection and shame. There’s an illusion of healing that happens while he’s living on borrowed goodwill, based on an invented backstory. But he can’t build a real, steady future on a foundation of lies, and he’s constantly wishing he could tell the truth at the same time that he’s desperately trying to prop up the lies.
The real healing begins when he finds the courage to fess up, and then chooses to move incrementally forward from the place where he’s stuck, even though everyone but his mother deserts him. Evan becomes well because he chooses both to be real and to make quiet, courageous choices that allow him to become his own friend. And it’s his own friendship, not the assessment of even people he loves, that really matters. That’s driven home by the fact that he ends the movie without the friends he lost, but happy and looking forward to the future that awaits him anyway.
There are still a bunch of things in the movie version that bother me, especially the disproportionate blame that he heaps upon himself as he looks back on his mistakes. But, the disproportionate blame that others give him is troubling in a productive way; a way that drove me to write an alternate ending last July. And that – getting under the skin of audience members in a way that goads them to do something about it – speaks to the power of a story that doesn’t tie everything up with a shiny ribbon. If it gets us thinking, rethinking, and trying to resolve something that doesn’t sit quite right, it might yield more mature fruit than if the resolution were all that we wished it to be.
All that said, I’m not taking back my wish for different resolutions to The Music Man, Carousel, and My Fair Lady. I think each of those endings creates expectations for women that leave us vulnerable to abuse, as explained in the links. That’s not to dismiss the themes of forgiveness that grace those endings, making them work in ways that delight us or even bring us to tears. But forgiveness doesn’t need to be packaged with the kind of poison that kept me banging my soul for years against the bars of a prison I had constructed for myself out of unworkable paradigms.
We need paradigms that work. At the same time, not all art needs to show us what ought to be. We need stories that guide us forward and we need stories that jar us out of complacency, that don’t leave us alone until we do something about them.
The trick, as a story teller, is to know our audience and what kind of stories they need. Where do they need a road map? When do they need some cognitive dissonance instead? And what help might they need to process it?
In our discussion last week, one of my readers talked about being part of a book club and the insight that came to her as she and her friends discussed questions that were included with the book. This week, I interviewed the creator of an extraordinary new musical (more information on that coming up in a future newsletter) who talked about wanting to offer an optional Q&A at the end of every performance – an opportunity for audience members to unpack the story and explore the questions it had raised at a deeper level.
I love that idea!
If you had the opportunity, after watching a musical that introduced some unexpected perspectives, to discuss them with audience members and some of the cast, would you want to?
Why? Or why not? I'd love to read your thoughts below.
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