Theater in Review: Dear Evan Hansen (Music Box Theatre)

	Ben Platt, Rachel Bay Jones. Photo: Matthew Murphy

Evan Hansen is an adolescent accident waiting to happen: Armed with the defenses of an aspen leaf, he faces life with a deer-in-the-headlights stare. He's the kid who gets picked last in gym class; whose yearbook is missing his friends' signatures, because he has none; who spends his Saturday nights alone, in his bedroom, surfing the Internet. Even at home, he's alone; his father ran off long ago and his stressed-out mother, Heidi, stuck in a low-wage job as a nurse's assistant, alternates between smothering attention and neglect. As played by Ben Platt he exists in a perpetual crouch, his body tensed in anticipation of the next insult or personal slight. When he speaks, it's in a rush that comes to a crashing halt in mid-sentence, as if, thinking better of it, he decided to strangle the idea before anyone makes fun of it. At other times, he begins on a tentative note, then trails off, each word landing a half tone higher than its predecessor. It's the sound of hope fading away, and it couldn't be more poignant.

At first glance, Dear Evan Hansen would appear to be a conventional tearjerker about the sorrows of youth, but the new musical's authors have something much more complicated in mind, something that becomes apparent near the end of the first act. A fellow student has died, and Evan is being made to speak at a school assembly-cum-memorial service. Everyone believes he was best friend to the late Connor Murphy, an untruth that he has done nothing to squelch. Evan, terrified at being the center of attention and fearful of being caught in a lie, stands downstage, trapped in a beam of white light. He speaks haltingly, reading from index cards that he promptly mixes up, then drops to the ground; he follows them and remains there, an abject figure hobbled by self-hatred. The anguish on his face is almost too much to bear -- but keep watching, as Evan's fear hardens into resolve; drawing on an inner strength he didn't know he possessed, he stands, embracing the lie and launching into a ballad, "You Will Be Found," which is moving, inspirational -- and, under the circumstances, entirely specious. It's a stunning transformation, the season's first real star-is-born moment: Platt's ability to juggle both sides of his character -- the deeply wounded, love-starved kid and the calculating con man who will do anything for attention -- is nothing less than extraordinary.

This being 2016, of course, Evan's speech is recorded on countless smartphones and posted on the Internet, going viral in a matter of hours. Suddenly, he has become the national spokesperson for kindness to your fellow teenager. What does it matter that his fame is based on a fictitious relationship? Many plays have taken account of life in the digital era -- Privacy, staged at the Public Theater, even invited us to get on our smartphones in mid-performance -- but Dear Evan Hansen is the first show to really grapple with the implications of social media, that disembodied no-man's-land where everyone can express their feelings without regard to the consequences. As it happens, it's also a place where feelings can be manufactured, without regard to truth.

Steven Levenson's book is really a kind of snare designed to entrap the title character, who makes a single dubious, if well-intentioned, decision that unleashes a disastrous chain of events. At the suggestion of his therapist, Evan writes letters to himself, personal pep talks that are supposed to build his confidence. By accident, one such missive falls into the hands of Connor, a high-school outcast of another stripe -- the hostile, class-cutting, pot-smoking type, also possessed of a hair-trigger temper. When Connor kills himself, the letter is found among his possessions, giving his grief-stricken parents, Cynthia and Larry, the idea that Evan was Connor's only friend.

Evan tries to tell the truth, but seeing the pain in Cynthia and Larry's eyes, he chooses to comfort them, fabricating a few details of a fantasy friendship. But the Murphys are ravenous for more, and Evan can't stop himself from filling their need; he even gets his sole sort-of friend, the cynical operator Jared, to forge more emails, inventing an entire correspondence between him and Connor. (When anyone questions why he and Connor were never seen together, Evan asserts that it was a secret relationship, much of it conducted via the Internet; this is one of several nagging little details that occasionally fail to convince.) Soon the Murphys, desperate for a parental do-over, have co-opted Evan, which suits the boy fine, not least because he has a raging crush on Zoe, Connor's sister. But everything spins out of control when Alana, another student, convinces Evan to create The Connor Project, a not-for-profit for troubled teens. From there, it's a short step to that school assembly and Evan's speech and his unwanted Internet stardom.

The whole sorry story is treated by the authors with a remarkable double vision, keeping us engaged with Evan as he careens ever closer to disaster -- even giving him a callous streak as he struggles to hold on to his newfound popularity -- yet never losing sight of the terrible pain that drives him. The songs, by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, similarly combine real feeling with sharp-eyed observation as they briskly move the story along. The number "Waving Through a Window" poignantly details Evan's bleak prospects. ("We start with stars in our eyes/We start believin' that we belong/But ev'ry sun doesn't rise/And no one tells you where you went wrong.") In "For Forever," Evan discovers how glibly he can invent stories about himself and Connor. In "Sincerely, Me," Evan and Jared collaborate on writing the Evan-Connor "correspondence," including some hilarious examples that are jettisoned for not sticking to the original narrative. In "To Break in a Glove," ostensibly a discussion about baseball, we see Larry becoming the father Evan never had. The lyrics make their points with considerable economy and wit; the music frequently strikes a note of longing that goes a long way toward explaining how and why Evan becomes entangled in his web of lies.

Michael Greif's staging is both well-paced and nuanced, never losing sight of the heartbreak at the story's center; he has also assembled a cast of performers who wear their characters like old clothes. Laura Dreyfuss does remarkably complex work as Zoe, who regards her dysfunctional clan with a cold eye even as she falls for Evan. Jennifer Laura Thompson and Michael Park deftly walk a mutual tightrope of loss and fury as Cynthia and Larry, who see Evan as the all-purpose solution to their problems. Mike Faist provides a welcome jolt with each appearance as Connor, who keeps returning from the dead as the voice of Evan's conscience. Will Roland sneers effortlessly as the ever-skeptical Jared, who alone knows what Evan is up to. Kristolyn Lloyd is letter-perfect as Alana, one of those terrifyingly organized high-school strivers, the sort who never makes a move without considering how it will look on her college applications.

Special mention is due to Rachel Bay Jones as Heidi, who is determined to help Evan, if only she can figure out how. (The opening number, "Anybody Have a Map?," featuring Heidi and Cynthia, an ode to the helplessness that every parent feels at one time or another, gets things started on the right note of perplexity and frustrated love.) There's even a touch of Amanda Wingfield about her as she pathetically encourages Evan to make friends and enter college scholarship competitions. But there's a darker, more skeptical look in her eyes as the Connor Project takes off, and the scene in which she realizes that the Murphys have all but adopted Evan, leaving her feeling like one of the Hundred Neediest Cases, is brutal in its honesty. So, too, is the mother-son confrontation that follows; musicals rarely offer such raw emotions, so intensely delivered, and Jones makes every moment count, especially in her wounding Act II solo, "So Big/So Small."

The production also benefits from an original and powerful production design. David Korins' set is dominated by a series of sliding panels, in varying sizes, and video screens, which the projection designer, Peter Nigrini, fills with images of online postings, viral videos, and such key texts as the original "Dear Evan Hansen" letter. The visuals scroll across the screens, which are also frequently in motion, creating a powerful impression of a kind of online vortex that threatens to pull the characters into it. Japhy Weideman's lighting carves the characters out of the darkness surrounding these images, creating stunning tableaux that reveal just how much technology has altered our perceptions of the world. In addition to providing a clear and transparent reinforcement, sound designer Nevin Steinberg provides a variety of effects, including the half-heard voices of people posting messages on social media. Emily Rebholz's costumes neatly delineate each kid's place in the school's social strata, and draws sharp contrast between the well-heeled Cynthia and the working-class Heidi, who is almost always in surgical scrubs.

Dear Evan Hansen does go a little wobbly near the end, with a final scene that ever-so-slightly soft-pedals the consequences of Evan's actions. (The scene also contains a nifty coup de théâtre, in which the digital universe is banished, and, for the first time, the characters are fully in the corporeal world.) But to its credit, the show realizes that even if Evan has come a long way, he has far, far to go. In any case, if the reviews and box office are any indication, he's going to be with us for quite some time -- and deservedly so. -- David Barbour