Essay on Dear Evan Hansen: Mental Illness Glorification at Its Fiinest

📌Category: Plays
📌Words: 1160
📌Pages: 5
📌Published: 17 June 2021

In this paper I will be dissecting the hit musical Dear Evan Hansen, but in a way it has not been before. Its overbearing popularity and cult following has it held upon a certain pedestal. From representation of common issues such as mental health and drug abuse, to its story of grief from the loss of a loved one and the day-to-day struggles of being a teenager in our modern world, it seems to be a harmless protest to our modern society. Within the outsider’s perspective, this seems to be groundbreaking and exactly what needs to be spoken out against. But the way in which they do it is less honorable. If the sibling physical and mental abuse is not enough for you to stray away, then the manipulation and gaslighting from our main man, Evan Hansen, should be enough for you to say “sayonara” to the piece itself. The absolute dumpster fire of a plot is hidden behind beautiful pieces of music and relatable characters that strike you right in the heart when anything bad happens to them. Though this musical can be touching and catchy, the sheer weight of its problematic message should be spoken out against and not be placed on the backburner of the Broadway world.

Before I proceed to the negatives of this production, I would like to discuss its popularity and just why it stood out among the rest. Dear Evan Hansen opened December 4th, 2016 and was currently still running before COVID-19 protocols came into place. It has been performed 1,360 times, and has won six Tony awards, as well as a Grammy (“Dear Evan Hansen Broadway @ Music Box Theatre - Tickets and Discounts”). Alongside the plethora of awards, this musical has grossed, as of March 8th of 2020, $241,083,756 (“Dear Evan Hansen Broadway @ Music Box Theatre - Tickets and Discounts”). On paper, this is a money maker and clearly made an impact on the community, but the question is why?

The plot follows a troubled teen named Evan Hansen who struggles with his mental health and writes letters to himself to remind him that “today is going to be a good day, and here’s why” (“Dear Evan Hansen (Original Broadway Cast Recording)”). One of his letters gets into the wrong hands, and a boy named Connor Murphy uses it as his suicide note. Since Evan was mentioned in the note, the family thinks they were close, and he plays along with it. Alongside all of this, he has an intense crush on Connor’s sister, Zoe, and uses this false friendship to get closer to her. The family soon realized that he was faking it, and Evan was returned to his single, mentally unstable mother, which he casted aside to live this double life. Finally, after a plethora of lies and self-discovery, he creates a web presence to “honor” Conner’s life, and suddenly everything is okay again and Evan is the hero of the day.

This is not the first musical that has association with mental health, like Next to Nothing and We Have Apples, but this is different. Theater itself is a political artform and, “has been used to highlight important social issues. "Cabaret" discussed the Holocaust,” (“Exploring Mental Illness Through Musical Theatre”). This artform is emotion driven and change wanting, but at what cost? Instead of highlighting and raising awareness to the effects and struggles of mental illness, it portrays Evan, someone who suffers from anxiety, as an obsessive madman. This pushes the toxic idea that, “People with anxiety and other mental disorders are manipulative monsters,” (Yoon). As a person with anxiety, I would never do anything close to what Evan Hansen has done to that poor family, and the string of lies that brought him to that ungodly series of events. His actions alone make having this already difficult illness even more intense because of the backwards depiction of the illness as a whole and the symptoms that come with having it. 

Instead of going right out and saying just how harmful this musical could be to youth struggling with mental health, they instead highlight it as a good example of what they can look like. Stacy Mindich, the producer of Dear Evan Hansen has said,

But once we saw just how the show was affecting people, we realized that some things are more important than marketing messages and talking points, and we quickly embraced our unique ability to impact mental health stigmas. (Reilly)

Their “unique ability to impact mental health stigmas” is to bash and humiliate the actual struggles experienced. Having someone presenting as a manipulative monster who cares only for himself and pushes away anyone who does not get him to the point, he wants to be at is a weird way of being supportive to the community. 

Another red flag is the plot itself and how it revolves around the tragic action of suicide and the trauma it releases onto the family, friends, and community. A quote that puts this idea in the best way possible is, “Kids who take their own lives are not your plot devices, yet that’s exactly how Dear Evan Hansen treats Connor Murphy,” (Theodosia). The writers took such a sensitive subject and milked it to the point where the enemy of the story became the hero, and the victim was lost, only remembered by the “Connor Project” mentioned towards the end, that Evan Hansen received all the attention and admiration for. This is one of the biggest problems within the storyline itself. 

On top of Evan earning the love from his community and the online world, he is also praising an abuser and someone who the family, more specifically Zoe Murphy, had bad experiences with. In the song, “Requiem”, the first sung lines are, “Why should I play this game of pretend? Remembering through a secondhand sorrow,” (“Dear Evan Hansen (Original Broadway Cast Recording)”). From this line alone, you can see that they never considered just how she may have felt throughout this process, and even if she encountered grief at all. She then goes on to sing these phrases:

Why should I play the grieving girl and lie,

saying that I miss you.

And that my world has gone dark without your light?

I will sing no requiem tonight. 

   (“Dear Evan Hansen (Original Broadway Cast Recording)”)

From this, it seems like she truly was uneasy with Evan overwhelming them and “filling” in for Connor. This was also apparent within the lines sung by the parents as well. Connor’s father exclaimed that, 

I gave you the world, you threw it away.

Leaving these broken pieces behind you

Everything wasted, nothing to say.

So, I can sing no requiem.

(“Dear Evan Hansen (Original Broadway Cast Recording)”)

Two of the people in the family have made it known that he was not this upstanding citizen that Evan has made him out to be, yet he still tries to “raise awareness” for his own selfish game. This is yet just another example of portraying mental illness in a way that makes it seem like an excuse to be an overall shit person. 

In this paper I have laid out just why Dear Evan Hansen, especially the character Evan Hansen, is a horrible portrayal of mental illnesses and the people who suffer intensely from said illnesses. It romanticizes and justifies the suffocating idea that people with anxiety disorders are “manipulative monsters,” (Yoon). It also blows off the feelings of actual victims. This musical does not represent or support people with mental illness but exploits and beredes them. 

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