I am Not Evan Hansen
By: Sydny Long
Tags: Film, Movies, Grief, Musicals, Grief And Loss

Her name was Gwen Spencer.

One of the more overwhelming aspects of my anxiety is its tendency to imbue the insignificant with urgent, profound meaning. Nothing can ever just be what it is. A glance at the clock offers not just the time but a series of numbers to add, multiply, exponentiate in an endless effort to make sense of the senseless. 2:34 is a good omen. 2:35 is not. Missing 2:34 and seeing 2:35 instead is an invitation for disaster. The contents of my refrigerator, who appeared in my dreams, what color the morning newscasters wear—these are signs that must be identified and interpreted immediately to rescue myself from the unexpected. In these minutiae, I see the future before it can catch me off guard. Doing so unravels my present, but I am left with a tenuous sense of control, a cloudy crystal ball whose mere presence extinguishes some of the panicked wildfire raging through my brain.

Though I understand this habit to be highly illogical and a moderately irritating method of coping with uncertainty, I cannot shake the bone-breaking conviction that it is useful because of February 26th, 2017. This was a Sunday during my senior year of high school; I slept in, watched a movie, and finished writing a short story for submission to our school’s literary magazine. The story was called “The Hard Place” and concerned a girl and her companion going hiking on a mountain, inspired by a trip up Grandfather Mountain I had taken the previous summer with my best friend Gwen. In the story, the companion dies. Twenty-four hours later, Gwen would be dead too. I had in essence sealed the fate of my beloved Gwennie, blind to the harbingers of doom that might have alerted me to the tragedy I had crafted. Just as I could blame a spate of bad luck on 2:35, I could pin the unfathomably arbitrary nature of her death on myself and my writing about a grief that I did not know. I invented order from chaos, knowing it was artificial and irrational. When the scaffolding of your world collapses, any order will suffice, no matter what it is spun from.

Since losing Gwen, I have written extensively about grief in an ongoing effort to parse it. I wrote plays, articles, Tweets. It was only through the written word that I was able to contend with her death and the excruciating pain of her absence, and this act continues to soothe my sternum-cracking agony as I molt the skins of anguishes past. In speech, my voice becomes diluted with tears; in body, I shake and shatter. Words can roar even when written in weakness and their permanence, their ability to hold beyond what hands can conceive, have helped me chart my own ascent from the basement of my mind. They are the well and the bucket, the water and the cloud.

It is this need for words and their stabilizing flexibility that drew me to narratives about grief. I felt compelled to live and relive the apocalyptic experience and its aftermath in the confines of a narrative, safe to search these facsimiles for foreshadowing I might have missed and clues to recovery. When I first encountered the musical “Dear Evan Hansen”, I thought that I had found another story to thread myself through in pursuit of those elusive answers. Instead, I became trapped in a tale of deceit, exploitation, and sorrow wearing grief like a Halloween mask, a twisted mockery of an already ugly reality.

On a superficial level, “Dear Evan Hansen” does bear some resemblance to my own story. I was a deeply anxious high school senior just like Evan Hansen. Gwen’s death was a sudden, horrible shock. We both dealt with mental illness. Even the song “For Forever” eerily reflected the events of the day we climbed Grandfather Mountain together, redolent of the endless vistas we feasted on as we sat at the peek and talked about our future. The only issue is that Gwen and I really were best friends, were really bonded by our struggles and joys, were really separated by tragedy. In “Dear Evan Hansen”, this is all an artifice, a lie.

The show concerns Evan Hansen, a high school student who is bullied by loner Connor Murphy and admires Connor’s sister Zoe from afar. Connor suddenly commits suicide and his parents believe that he and Evan are friends because Connor has signed Evan’s arm cast. Instead of telling them the truth, Evan agrees that he and Connor were indeed best friends and goes on to fabricate email exchanges between them for Connor’s parents to read. Evan uses this imagined relationship to get closer to Zoe and solicit emotional support and love from Connor’s parents, feeling that his single mother is too preoccupied to supply what he needs. He also exploits Connor’s death in the name of “mental health awareness” and goes viral with a speech he makes at a memorial for Connor, which essentially boils down to a series of platitudes about “never being alone” that reflect his own struggles and wants, not those of Connor. Eventually, this lie begins to spiral out of control: people on the Internet begin to attack the Murphy family based on Evan’s words, to the point where someone leaks their address and specifies which window belongs to Zoe so that she can be attacked. Evan is forced to tell the truth eventually, but does not face any true repercussions for his actions. His mother forgives him, as does Zoe in the epilogue. Evan ends the show telling himself that he is enough, smilingly oblivious to the lives he has upended and the death he has exploited.

The musical, however, is rarely described this way. “A high school senior suffers from social anxiety disorder which leads him to struggle at school. His journey of self-discovery and acceptance begins following the suicide of a fellow classmate.” “A timely and timeless new musical about struggling to connect in a hyperconnected world…” “Dear Evan Hansen is the deeply personal and profoundly contemporary musical about life and the way we live it.” All of these pleasantly vague summaries and poppy buzzwords attempt to inject thematic relevance into a story that is not really about anything. There is no journey of self-discovery and acceptance, no grand mediations on life or technology. Social media makes sporadic appearances; characters issue hollowly inspiring sentiments like “you are not alone” and “it’s the hard way, but it’s the right way” that land with all the emotional resonance of a Pinterest quote. There are endless directions that a story about a death fraught with so much drama could have gone in, but the musical settles heavily into a downward plod propelled by Evan’s selfish decisions. His behavior is invariably chalked up to his anxiety disorder, which becomes his sole character trait. It’s okay that he’s lying about having an intimate relationship with a dead classmate—he’s too anxious to tell the truth. He deserves the fame and clout he accumulates as a result of speaking about his own issues at Connor’s memorial—he’s just so brave for talking about mental health. Zoe and Connor’s parents and his mother were all right to forgive him for his elaborate lie—he didn’t really mean it. The show is about insulating its protagonist from the ramifications of his actions via a glossy veneer of “mental health awareness”, not so much a journey as it is a passive drop further into indulgent stagnancy.

As a mentally ill individual who lost her best friend suddenly and horribly, I feel dually amused and insulted by the cheesy contrivance of “Dear Evan Hansen”. Sometimes, I can laugh at how ineptly the show fumbles its characters and storylines, joking about how I would never let Evan Hansen get on any stage to speak at my school. I had to contend with a great number of people who feigned trauma and exaggerated friendships with Gwen in the wake of her passing to secure some pity and loosen some academic deadlines. These individuals pretended to know the moody, but goofy girl I loved, spinning her death into an opportunity to center themselves in an imaginary high school narrative. There were potential Evan Hansens everywhere I looked while I and Gwen’s other true friends treaded water together, scarcely able to keep our heads above the water. In retrospect, I can laugh. At the time, I only cried.

With a film adaptation of the musical just a few weeks away from a national theatrical release, I now find myself closer to tears. The trailers and ads do not inspire eye-rolling dismissal, but a crushing sadness as I see my story, the worst experience of my life, boiled and distilled down into a blandly inspiring tale of a boy using the suicide of a classmate to take what he feels he deserves in the name of “mental health”. My debilitating grief has been packaged into a punchline, my anguish into a spit-shiny musical number about fabricating emails from a dead boy. Worst of all, however, is the expectation that all of this be taken seriously. The naked, mawkish yanking at the heartstrings, the sly suggestion to bring boxes of tissues and some polish for a future Oscar statuette—it further defiles the kernel of horrible truth tucked into the show’s empty center. A story about death and grief can be one of the most powerful tools imaginable, stacked with innumerable words that can in turn house entire worlds of meaning and love. To squander such a story with such a massive platform on the desecration of that grief and still expect commendation for being “brave” about the subject is unforgivable to me.

I do not want people to stand outside of cinemas with signs and megaphones. I do not want people to harass the cast or the creators behind the musical and the film. I do not even want people to feel guilty for having listened to or enjoyed the show. I simply want to share my story and express how “Dear Evan Hansen” has eclipsed experiences like mine with its patronizing depiction of mental illness—specifically, narrowly anxiety, contributing to a societal narrative that “mental illness” equates only to palatable expressions of social anxiety and depressive episodes—and championing of exploitative behavior in the wake of tragedy. Words have helped tremendously in my grieving process, but they have also hurt. Their plasticity can be taken advantage of to wrap ineffectual and even harmful intentions in a glittery armor of comforting truisms, a statement masquerading as a story. The words in “Dear Evan Hansen” ultimately amount to very little and it is the trivial sum of these shiny parts that inspire dread when I see those trailers and the headlines predicting box office success. The opportunity for grief and debilitating anxiety to exist uncensored on a screen or stage before people who might need that moment of reassuring clarity more than air has been dashed in favor of a commodity that has shaved those elements down into a neat, not-too-upsetting product for easy consumption.

My pain is not a product that can be capped by a pop song and sold to audiences impressed by the mere mention of “panic attacks” and “cyber-bullying”, as if the existence of these entities lend credence to a story that stocks it shelves with such vagaries but sells none of them. The anxiety and compulsions I experience are not excuses for my actions. The people who were devastated by Gwen’s death are not pawns in my story or fodder for a narrative that excludes Gwen from her own story. I am not Evan Hansen. I do not have that privilege.