Mental Health in Musicals
Evelyn
Alex Boniello, the actor that played the speaking half of Moritz in the run of Deaf West 2015 revival of Spring Awakening said, “Theater has this amazing ability to hold up a mirror to people” (Cindric, 7). This occurs in the wildly popular musical Wicked where lead characters -- Elphaba and Fiyero -- have an underlying issue of low self worth. It also happens in the more niche productions, Next to Normal and Dear Evan Hansen. Broadway, and theater in general, has figured out how to realistically portray the struggles of mental health issues regardless of gender or age.
The production Next to Normal centers around Diana, a mother with bipolar disorder, her husband Dan and two kids, Gabe and Natalie. The opening scene displays her illness during a conversation with her son, Gabe, as Diana describes implausible scenarios of where he was after coming home late. As the scene progresses one can sense that this family is blatantly dysfunctional, and later in the show the audience finds out that Gabe is just Diana’s hallucination. He died when he was a baby. Because these hallucinations become the major part of her day, her husband and doctors, who are male, suggest electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). Brian Yorkey, the lyricist and book writer of the show, wanted to make the show because he had seen a commercial for ECT and was shocked it was still being used as a medical practice.
He highlights the issue of gender and the therapy. Yorkey explains that what he wanted to explore with the therapy was, “the report which was...many years ago...included a statistic that stated that a disproportionate number of patients who received ECT were women and the disproportionate number of the psychiatrists who prescribe it were male”(Flatow ,12). The show depicts the issue of gender clearly with its clever use of the character Gabe. Having her son be dead and not her daughter, Natalie, further affirms that Diana is controlled by the men in her life. The picture her mental illness has taken on is her son. In addition, Dan’s lackluster reaction after Diana tries to commit suicide continues this problematic pattern. After finding Diana bleeding and in a frenzy, Dan yells “It's gonna be fine, it's gonna be fine./We'll go back to the Doctor's 'cause we caught it just in time./We'll take the pills, we'll pay the bills, we'll do more ECT”(Yorkey, 2008). Dan wants Diana to do these things because he believes it will make her better, when all Diana wants is for Dan to tell her their son’s name.
Before this scene, they had already done one session of the ECT that wiped Diana’s memory for at least two decades; she remembers who Dan is but nothing about her son dying or her illness. By the end of the show she stops letting men guide her life, she stops the therapy and leaves her family, and the second to last song is Dan singing “I Am The One (Reprise)” with Gabe. Knowing that Brian Yorkey envisioned the themes of Next to Normal to be encapsulated in this scene, one cannot help but think that Dan might also suffer from mental illness. This is the first time he didn’t have to put all his free time towards his wife’s mental illness, and this is the first time he gets to lament over what happened so many years ago. The final song, “Light”, bolsters this idea and is sung by the entire cast, without the doctors– Diana has stopped going to therapy, so the need for the characters is nullified.
Next to Normal was in production for ten years, from the time it was first written for the BMI workshop, to its premiere off-Broadway (Kitt, 9). A plethora of copies were proofread by a psychiatrist, psychologist and doctors to make sure it was not a boorish representation(Flatow, 3). Next to Normal ran for 730 shows, including previews from April 2009 to July 2011(Hinds). It starred Alice Ripley in the role of Diana– a Tony-winning performance– Aaron Tveit as Gabe, and Jennifer Damiano as Natalie. The show was well received; Ben Brantley said in the New York Times, “Next to Normal does not, in other words, qualify as your standard feel-good musical. Instead this portrait of a manic-depressive mother and the people she loves and damages is something much more: a feel-everything musical, which asks you, with operatic force, to discover the liberation in knowing where it hurts”(2). It seems this type of show was needed in society. It was nominated for the Best Original Musical in 2009 but did not win. The subject matter may have been too difficult for some, but it still managed to unexpectedly win the Pulitzer for drama the following year(Hinds).
Another difficult topic– teen suicide– is explored in Dear Evan Hansen. The title character, Evan, lives with social anxiety and is getting ready to graduate high school when a classmate, Connor Murphy, commits suicide. The fallout is a social labyrinth because Connor had signed Evan’s broken arm days before his death. When his family finds a letter Evan wrote himself but Connor had stole after a diatribed encounter at school. After Connor’s suicide, Evan, originally brought to the stage by Ben Platt, runs with the reprehensible idea that they were secret best friends, writing emails to one another and not communicating in any other sense. This is questioned, but not enough, because Connor’s family and the people at school saw him as an aloof, livid, and odious person.
Evan has a crush on Connor’s sister, Zoe, and hones in on how nice Evan’s version of Connor was by singing about what he loves about Zoe but in her brother’s perspective. After that song, the entire Murphy family trusts Evan until he tells them about the letter. This is where there is a deliberate flaw. Evan has social anxiety disorder (SAD), but nowhere in the show is it said, even though fans of the show know what Evan has. It is important to note this detail because there are critic reviews that describe Evan as a normal teenager that simply doesn’t like people. A New Yorker piece states, “Shyness causes his shoulders to hunch up, and he avoids eye contact with an interlocutor…[his mother] is never home, or never home for long and her only child let’s his resentment out in quick verbal jabs”(Hilton, 5). Yes, Evan does all these things, but he is clearly suffering. In a later scene, Evan is talking with Connor (In reality, Evan is having a conversation with himself) and Connor asks how Evan broke his arm. After a poignant and languid conversation, Evan admits to purposely letting go of the tree he was climbing, with hopes of falling to his death. This scene occurs on a completely black stage with just spotlights on the characters to highlight the transgression. Evan finally tells his mother how tenuous he felt. This scene is reinforced as his mother holds him and sings that she understands where he is coming from, and that she felt that way when his father left(Hinds). A simple description of the scene sounds trite, but as Platt sits watching Rachel Bay Jones, Heidi, they both look and act like they have waited forever to tell each other how they truly feel. Jones holding Platt during the whole song brings tenderness to the scene, and instead of hurting for the characters, the audience senses how happy Evan is. The difficulty of discussing his mental health is treated realistically. Finally telling his mom this secret is the type of scene that creates a musical for posterity, because so many can relate to its portrayal of a struggling young person.
When asked how they dealt with writing about the sensitive topic of teen suicide, writing duo Benj Pasek and Justin Paul said, “we weren’t trying to sugarcoat things, but that also wasn’t trying to provoke anything”(Cox, 2). Next, they discuss a scene where Steven Leveson, the book writer, adds lines to make sure the real Connor did not get lost in the image Evan fabricated. The lines come in the very last scene. It is a year later and Evan is home from college for an unstated reason, and he is waiting in an apple orchard. This orchard pops up throughout the show, and is really why Evan’s lies start. When Evan meets the Murphys they quickly mention the orchard, and Evan says it was where they hung out. The original orchard had closed and they could be there without fear of others finding them. Then he made the “Connor Projects” mission to reopen the orchard. Evan is much more confident; maybe the letters are working. The audience can definitely see a change in the character from the way he dresses to his body language. Zoe has invited him there because he has never been to the orchard. She asks what Evan was reading, and he explains that he found a list of Connors favorite books and that he has planned on reading all of them to try to understand who Connor was. This is important because it shows he is progressing and his mental health is improving. He was hopeless until he found ways to work through his issues productively.
Dear Evan Hansen is still running on Broadway, now in their second year after opening in December 2016. Ben Platt left the musical on November 19, 2017, he had been with the project since the beginning and decided to leave the emotionally demanding part. Evan has been replaced twice and is currently being portrayed by Taylor Trensch. The rest of the original cast is still there, Rachel Bay Jones as Heidi Hanson, Laura Dreyfuss as Zoe Murphy, and Mike Faist as Connor Murphy. But before he left, Ben Platt was awarded Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Musical at the 2017 Tony Awards. The Dear Evan Hansen cast and crew won five other awards including Best Musical, making it an automatic Broadway Classic.
These popular culture pieces of art allow sensitive topics to be discussed, no longer enshrouded in shame. Through the arts, audiences can see themselves and those they love and experience a diverse combination of mental illnesses and human struggles. JD Kurds, the artistic director of the Deaf West production of Spring Awakening, said in his Broadway Backstory podcast interview “I think above all, humanities are afraid of the others”(Hines, 31 ). This is the reason these topics are done in theater -- to put them in front of the public eye and give them the knowledge that “[They] don't need a life that's normal, that's way too far away/ But something next to normal would be okay”(Yorkey).
Works Cited
Flatow, Ira. “Singing About Mental Illness in Next to Normal”. NPR, April 14, 2009. https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=111889509
Hinds, Patrick. “Episode 8: Next to Normal”. Broadway Backstory, Todaytix, Season one
Episode eight, February 21, 2017.
https://www.todaytix.com/broadway-backstory/episodes/next-to-normal
Hinds, Patrick. “Episode 6: Deaf West’s Spring Awakening”. Broadway Backstory, Todaytix,
Season one Episode eight, January 3, 2017.
https://www.todaytix.com/broadway-backstory/episodes/deaf-wests-spring-awakening
Cindric, Kieron. “How Musical Theater Exposes the Truth on Mental Illness”. Playbill,
Brightspot, July 8,2016
Cox, Gordon. “‘Dear Evan Hansen’ Duo Pasek and Paul on Addressing Teen Suicide with
Sensitivity”. Variety, Word Press, June 7, 2017.
http://variety.com/2017/legit/news/dear-evan-hansen-teen-suicide-pasek-paul-1202457510/
Mayo Clinic Staff. “Electroconvulsive therapy”. Mayo Clinic, January 16, 2018.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/electroconvulsive-therapy/about/pac-20393894
“Social Anxiety Disorders”. Teen Mental Health, February 15, 2016.
http://teenmentalhealth.org/learn/mental-disorders/social-anxiety-disorder/
Als, Hilton. “Pop Psychology Onstage in ‘Dear Evan Hansen’”. The New Yorker, California,
December 19 and 26, 2016. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/12/19/pop-psychology-onstage-in-dear-evan-hansen
Pasek, Benj and Justin Paul and Steven Levenson. Dear Evan Hansen, New York, July
2016.
Kitt, Tom and Brian Yorkey. Next to Normal, New York, November 2008.