In Hamlet's Shadow: Evan Hansen, Suicide, & Distant Dads

[Stephen Christopher Anthony (who played Evan Hansen in Minneapolis), on tour (image from Youtube); David Tennant as Hamlet, image from The Guardian]

This past June 7, my daughter, spouse and I saw Dear Evan Hansen in Minneapolis at the Orpheum Theatre. The 2017 Tony Award winner is on tour, and it was very moving.

I'd heard and liked many of the songs already. But in the context of the play, lines of lyrics that I had taken to be commonplace phrases or idioms ("When you're fallin' in a forest and there's nobody around, do you ever really crash or even make a sound?") suddenly took on new meaning in light of the unfolding plot. These included early lines about climbing trees, / falling, / being found, someone will come running, / etc.

Three-fourths of the way through the show, we gasped with insight. (I will try to avoid spoilers....) It made us want to see it again, knowing what we came to know.

By the end, I also realized that Dear Evan Hansen also touched on many of the same themes and tropes that Hamlet does: distant fathers, mom issues, siblings, suicide, ghosts, surrogate fathers, and lies that eventually need to come to light.

DISTANT FATHERS
In Hamlet, the prince has been away at university while his father was poisoned, but we later learn that the war-like king was not the most affectionate father, and instead, Yorick the court jester seems to have filled in as an emotional surrogate father for the prince. On the day Prince Hamlet was born, the king was fighting Old King Fortinbras in a duel to the death, a testosterone-fest, and huge gamble: each would try to kill the other, and the survivor would get the other's land. I am not the first scholar or critic to comment that this may have been an irresponsible thing for a king and father to do on the eve of his son's birth, as if he could not bear to be humble in the face of his wife's pregnancy and labor, so he had to do something great to gain more attention for himself.

In Dear Evan Hansen, a high school senior, Evan Hansen, has been raised by a single mother after his father ran off with someone else when he was very young, abandoning them physically and emotionally. In both Hamlet and Dear Evan Hansen, suicide seems to go along with physically and/or emotionally distant fathers. In the absence of the father, something is missing for Hamlet and Evan.

MOTHER ISSUES
A great deal of Shakespeare criticism since Freud, and especially Hamlet criticism since Ernest Jones' Hamlet and Oedipus, has been obsessed with Oedipal readings of Hamlet. Some critics seem to want Hamlet to be less obsessed with his mother's sex life and more accepting of his uncle and step-father, who just so happened to have murdered his father and usurped the throne of Denmark. Others want Hamlet to get over his Oedipal hesitation and just kill the uncle, instead of perhaps fearing that killing his mother's new husband would be too much like killing his own father, by Freud's reading.

Evan Hansen has mother issues too, but of a slightly different kind. His mom worries too much about him and hovers a bit at times like a helicopter mom, asking if he's doing his therapy of writing himself letters in a spirit of positive thinking, inquiring about his medications, school, and social life. Because she's a single mom, she's not always present or emotionally available, but when she is, she sometimes micromanages.

SIBLINGS
In Hamlet, the sibling relationship between Hamlet's love interest, Ophelia, and her brother Laertes, is of special importance, in part because her brother warns his sister not to get too close to Hamlet, and in part because, after Hamlet accidentally kills Polonius and Ophelia commits suicide, Laertes wants revenge.

In Dear Evan Hansen, the sibling of Evan's love interest is also of key importance to the overall plot (no spoilers).

SUICIDE
Three characters in Hamlet consider suicide: Hamlet, Ophelia, and Horatio. Ophelia drowns while Hamlet is on his sea-voyage to England. Hamlet returns and, in the final scene, stops Horatio from committing suicide by the poison cup. Hamlet and Ophelia have strong bonds in spite of having broken up at the insistence of Polonius, and Ophelia echoes some themes she may have picked up from Hamlet as well as actually dying by drowning, whereas Hamlet has a figurative death and conversion at sea rather than literally drowning on the voyage.

Two characters in Evan Hansen attempt suicide, one successfully (though it's sad and ironic to speak of actually killing oneself as a "success").

LEVITY WITH GHOSTS
Dear Evan Hansen is, of course, a musical, and while it deals with very serious themes, it often does so with humor, and in the end, gives a kind of happy ending of sorts, although it's hard-earned in some ways.

Hamlet is a tragedy, but there's a remarkable amount of humor in it: Polonius is bumbling, outspoken, and hypocritical, and Hamlet jests with him humorously and mercilessly. Even the ghost, at the end of his first visit, evokes from Hamlet some strange and possibly quite humorous lines and actions, as the ghost asks the witnesses to swear to silence, and Hamlet calls him "Old Mole" (because he's underground, or under the stage), but the voice seems to keep moving around, so Hamlet, Marcellus, and Horatio run around, trying to swear to silence at the spot where his voice seems to be coming from. It's a moment that hardly makes sense if played seriously, but that might have originally been a moment of comic relief.

Hamlet in the graveyard holds the skull of Yorick the court jester and speaks fondly of him, joking about what he might say to the queen about thick makeup, perhaps a reference to Elizabeth's thick makeup to hide scars from smallpox (as many others have noted). Laughing in the face of death is actually quite Shakespearean in this way.

Given what may originally have been levity with ghosts in Hamlet, it's not entirely surprising that there is some levity with a ghost in Dear Evan Hansen, but this levity is handled well, I think, and the ghost is treated like a (sometimes very subjective) memory in the minds of different characters. It works.

SURROGATE FATHERS
Many have commented that Yorick seems to have been an emotional surrogate father-figure for Hamlet, with whom the prince reconnects via memories in the graveyard:
HAMLET: Let me see.
(Takes the skull)
Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow
of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath
borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how
abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rims at
it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know
not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your
gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment,
that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one
now, to mock your own grinning? quite chap-fallen?
Now get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let
her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must
come; make her laugh at that.

Hamlet speaks more fondly of Yorick than he ever does of his father the king, who he respects and fears as a distant and powerful authority figure, but never a nurturing, loving presence.

Evan Hansen also finds a kind of surrogate father figure in someone else's father. There is a touching scene about breaking in a baseball glove, where the father figure speaks of something he claims he felt he had to do, which was about being strict regarding the unusual behavior of his son. It's a heartbreaking moment. And then he gives the baseball glove to Evan, who becomes a kind of adopted son-figure.

So when life withholds from Hamlet and Evan the kinds of father-figures they need, they find or go looking for surrogates or replacements, in healthy or unhealthy ways, and sometimes find what they need, or something close enough to keep them going.

LIES AND REDEMPTIVE FICTIONS
In Shakespeare's Hamlet, Claudius has lied to all of Denmark, claiming that his brother was bitten by a snake while napping in his garden, when in fact Claudius seems to have poisoned his brother as he slept. Hamlet plans to use a play to catch the conscience of his uncle Claudius by having "The Mousetrap" enact something like the poisoning of a king. The basic idea is to use art, a play, to act out a story similar enough to the murder that Claudius, overcome with guilt, may cry out and confess his guilt upon witnessing the play. Or at least, this is Hamlet's initial hope, a best-case scenario. Catching the conscience of Claudius by way of art, it is hoped, may move Denmark toward some kind of redemption.

Evan Hansen doesn't have a "Mousetrap" play to catch the conscience of a king, but it does have lies. These are not malicious lies used to cover up a murder, as in Hamlet, but lies told to cover for a misunderstanding about a letter and to comfort a grieving family. Dear Evan Hansen thereby explores the idea that lies can be told out of kindness, can be helpful, redemptive (necessary?), but in the end, are better surrendered in favor of greater honesty.

The musical is self-reflective in this way: We in the audience are being told a fiction, a kind of redemptive lie, but by the end of the last act, the show will end, and the fiction or lie of the show will have to be surrendered as we return to our own lives.

Dear Evan Hansen is not only about Evan's fiction/attempts at redemptive lies, but also how it interfaces with social media. The musical casts both a critical— and also hopeful— eye
toward the tales &/or fictions, lies, that go viral on social media all the time.

My spouse & I have been teachers most of our professional lives: We are lucky to live in a city with a "healthy communities initiative" to identify & help at-risk students. But many students & adults still fall through the cracks.

The play is haunting about these (in a good way).

The star of the show, Ben Platt, performed on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and [spoiler alert for the next link] Colbert said that seeing Dear Evan Hansen made him weep for two hours.

The musical is really about one troubled, lonely, marginalized young soul who accidentally finds a kind of redemption with the help of another like himself who he met only briefly, but whose ghost gave him and others a reason to weave a fiction involving a friendship between them, It's a fiction that has to be abandoned ultimately, but it's a redemptive fiction.

TEAR-DUCT-CLEANING FEST
So I'd heard that others (like Stephen Colbert) saw the show and wept profusely, but still, I took my seat without any handkerchief in my pocket, so I ended up wiping my wet cheeks on the backs of my hands and arms at the end of many songs. But we were very glad we went and would recommend it highly to those who have not seen the show.