Hansen, Shmansen
About halfway through “Dear Evan Hansen,” I realized that I had turned into a grumpy old man. Maybe not old (?!), but certainly grumpy. It happened at the touring production in Tulsa, Oklahoma. In an auditorium filled from orchestra to second balcony, I was the only one who was not grooving on the performance. That’s 2,364 happy campers and one quarrelsome, disaffected patron in the middle of Row N.
I think “happy” doesn’t begin to do it justice. Speaking as the mean-spirited observer I am, half the audience felt aligned with Evan Hansen: people who had struggled with the violent, Darwinian world of high school and not done as well as they might have liked. The other half loved the play itself, with its middlebrow picture of youthful vulnerability, and just enough snark to cut bring the glycemic index down to “bearable.” Here we must thank the character of Jared, who gleefully acknowledges his own gift for manipulativeness, but then regrettably owns the fact that he, too, is lonely. I would have preferred pure, consistent snark.
There were a few things, I suppose, that I liked well enough. The set was a simple arrangement of moving platforms backed up against a scramble of digital screens. That seemed like a perfect match of message and stage design. The play is all about the way social media operates in amplifying the gusting emotions of its consumers, ranging from yearning high school students to otherwise normal adults.
I couldn’t have hoped for a more on-target portrait of the way emotions are engineered into programs and campaigns in the shape-shifting storm cloud of an American high school. The idea is to keep emotions high so that everyone who wants/needs it can experience a moment of fame. Evan Hansen wants nothing more (or less) than to escape his obscurity and to be noticed by his schoolmates. Sorrow itself is insufficient. We cannot experience loss or bereavement without ginning it up into something public and charismatic.
That’s the linchpin of “Dear Evan Hansen.” The main character stumbles into the suicide of another student and manages to parlay it (playing his inner Jesse Eisenberg), into a full-blown act of magical transformation. He gets the girl. He gets the loving family. Only at the end, does the ruse come apart.
But I regret to say that it takes too long to get there. I have spoken to a friend who loves the music, who listens to it as part of the soundtrack of his life. For my money, it was a shapeless, unmemorable drone. At every turn in the storyline of the play, there are a few ruminative chords where the character gets his bearings before declaring his innermost soul to the audience. The play proceeds in a series of these set pieces with little interaction between the figures on the stage. The music gradually rises to an anthem of whatever (grief, loneliness, guilt, wistfulness) until it resolves and gives way to the next declaration. It felt oddly monologic in the context of a play. One monologue good. Sixty-three monologues, not so much. But I exaggerate.
The other thing I liked is one of the fundamentals of the show: hope is good and life is worth living, even if it needs to be sustained by illusion. Everyone agrees that Evan Hansen’s ruse was (maybe) bad in itself, but good for other people. Bereaved parents appreciate the gift of an orchard that memorializes the son who took his own life, even if said orchard is part of an elaborate lie.
I’m pretty sure I believe in the power of illusion and that facts matter less in the way we negotiate reality. But “The Book of Mormon” said it much better. Whatever the fictions that operate in our lives, the key thing is that they help to create community. Even if I’ve heard it many times before, that is a truth worth telling again. Just don’t make me sit through it in “Dear Evan Hansen.”