From Hero to Villain: Why We Suddenly Hate Evan Hansen

The reviews are in: everyone hates Dear Evan Hansen.

That may come as a surprise. After all, the show once won six Tony awards, including Best Musical. When it first came out, the New York Times called it “more and more ingenious with each viewing,” the LA Times deemed it as “enthralling” and “beautifully acted,” and Entertainment Weekly called it “as good as musical theatre gets.”

So what made theatregoers turn on this so-called “cultural phenomenon”?

Of course, there are the ethics. Dear Evan Hansen tells the story of a high school student, Evan, who is battling social anxiety. He is encouraged by his therapist to write himself letters. When a student commits suicide at his school, an accidental discovery leads others to believe that Evan’s letters are from him – and Evan goes along with it, gathering support from the student’s family and friends. This is obviously immoral of Evan to do, and reviewers of the recent film adaptation did not take that lightly.

But I wonder why audiences are not able to grant him forgiveness. Mama Rose forces her daughters into child labor and exploits them for her own personal gain. Sweeney Todd murders people and eats them. We can all agree that these characters do seriously bad things – we may even agree that they are very bad people. Hell, they don’t even change the way that Evan does. But if we don’t feel empathy for them, we don’t have a story. We don’t have a show. The entire point of theatre is to explore the human vulnerability that lives in us all – even the worst of us.

And spoiler alert: like Evan, these characters do not get happy endings.

Not to mention the fact that many beloved characters who do bad things do get happy endings – and we are able to accept and celebrate their evolution. Why can we forgive Jenna from Waitress for cheating on her husband? Why can we forgive her love interest, Dr. Pomatter, for taking advantage of a professional, medical relationship with a patient and allowing it to become sexual? Seeing into their vulnerabilities allows us to understand that, although their actions are wrong, their motivations feel inwardly real and justified. When it comes to Evan Hansen, audiences are less willing to lend this empathy.

Maybe the story just didn’t translate well on film. After all, negative feedback increased significantly at the change of medium. But at the same time, stories like Gypsy and Sweeney Todd did not seem to suffer the same consequences onscreen. So…could that really be it?

Or maybe it’s Ben Platt. Many reviewers noted that it was more difficult to feel sympathetic toward a 27-year-old man as a 16-year-old. Not to mention the fact that Platt’s father served as one of the producers for the film, leaving viewers feeling skeptical. But many movie musicals – Grease and Rent, for example – cast adults as children, and the films still remain classics. And it doesn’t come as much of a surprise that yet another actor has familial connections.

So what is it really?

Perhaps that is because we are so used to consuming media where people with mental illnesses are all bad (ie: the Joker) or all good (Emma in Glee). The tropes of “manic villain” and “adorable victim” are so ingrained in our psyche, we begin to feel anger and fear when we see a character who defies them. Evan makes a really bad, hurtful choice. He takes advantage of other people. And this is not okay. Evan also was left by his father, tried to kill himself, and suffers from a mental illness that significantly impacts his life. These facts about him can all exist simultaneously – and they all elicit an emotional response within us. We are forced to live with the dichotomy of Evan’s vulnerability and his deceit.

This doesn’t excuse his behavior (and the show doesn’t either; he loses his friends and his credibility in the end), but knowing it helps us to understand his motivations and complexities. Maybe we aren’t ready to confront the fact that social anxiety, and other mental illnesses, can cause someone to hurt other people – but can also be extremely difficult to go through and stem from real trauma. As someone who lives with the management of Generalized Anxiety Disorder and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, I’m not here to say that Evan’s actions are justified. He has a responsibility to seek help and stop allowing his mental illness to negatively impact others. But that doesn’t mean I don’t see any good in him. And when he sings, “I never meant to make it such a mess,” I believe him.

In 2016, when Dear Evan Hansen came to Broadway, it seemed like many others believed him too. But the past few years have been difficult for all of us. And maybe…we’re just too tired to handle Evan’s story. Nevertheless, I still think it’s a thought-provoking story to tell.

So go see Dear Evan Hansen. And feel how you feel about Evan’s choices and their repercussions. Barbra Streisand said it best: “Art does not exist only to entertain, but also to challenge one to think, to provoke, even to disturb, in a constant search for truth.” Sometimes, the truth – that people who battle mental illness have the capacity to be both good and bad, that people can be both hurting and hurtful – isn’t easy. And theatre is here, always, to help us reconcile that.