On "Dear Evan Hansen" and self-preservation

Last week in New York, I went to see “Dear Evan Hansen,” the new original Broadway musical with music by Pasek and Paul and book by Steve Levenson. The show tells the story of Evan Hansen, a socially ostracized high school senior who writes letters addressed to himself as part of a therapy exercise. When Connor Murphy, a classmate bully, steals one of Evan’s letters, Evan panics—only to discover the next day that Connor has committed suicide, and the letter circumstantially appears to be his suicide note. On the spur of the moment, Evan fabricates a friendship with the classmate, and ultimately forges close relationships with the classmate’s surviving family: his parents and his sister, Zoe, on whom Evan has a crush. Evan must confront the consequences of his lie, and navigate the complications of his relationships, new and old.

For Evan, the self-addressed letters that his therapist prescribes serve as a means of self-expression, even when he lacks the vocabulary and the courage to articulate his feelings to others—namely, to his concerned mother. The letters, which begin “Dear Evan Hansen, today is going to be a good day, and here’s why:” are a sacred space, a venue for the expression of the unpleasant, the humiliating, the intensely personal, and everything between.

And Evan has plenty of material to draw upon. Because although nobody actively antagonizes Evan, no one really likes him, either. Even his mother, a working single parent, doesn’t seem to have time for him. By all definitions, he feels invisible. “On the outside always looking in, / will I ever be more than I’ve always been?” he sings in “Waving Through a Window,” his solo. “‘Cause I’m tap, tap, tapping on the glass / I’m waving through a window / I try to speak but nobody can hear / So I wait around for an answer to appear.” What Evan does by lying to the Murphy family is unethical, the show suggests, but it’s his only chance to be seen, to feel wanted. Can we really blame him?

In the show, the conceit of letter-writing dovetails with the integration of social media into plot and theme. This concept manifests in stage design: surrounding the physical stage settings are screens of varying size. As Evan gains fame through the Connor Project, his commemorative Internet campaign against bullying, screens flash images of his social media accounts. Follower counts rise. His online presence expands. If invisibility was a problem for Evan before, he encounters the opposite problem: hyperbolic publicity, and with it, scrutiny.

It should come as no surprise that “Dear Evan Hansen” pairs the epistolary form and the newfound, intense connectivity of the Internet. It might be easy for older, critical voices to tear down the fundamental notion of social media: to scorn the idea of pouring so much spirit and energy and self into an empty and infinite void.

But there's something beautiful about that connectivity, that limitless reaching out and touching. Social media is a kind of letter: a letter to the unknown, to a vast cyberspace, to the people waiting on the other side of the screen. “If you only look around, from across the silence, your voice is found,” the company sings in “You Will Be Found,” the closing number of the first act. “Someone will come running, to take you home.”