Dear Evan Han Thesis

‘Dear Evan Hansen’ Tackling suicide and moral conflict Simply put ‘Dear Evan Hansen’ is about a lonely teenager who gets caught up in a lie. The Broadway musical tackles topics like suicide and social anxiety. It is all combined with the hyper-activeness of social media. The emotionally intense story will leave the audience sobbing into their hands by the end of the performance. The creators, Steven Levenson, Justin Paul and Benj Pasek believe that the show stands as a beacon of hope for anyone who feels lost or alone. The fans of the show believe that ‘Dear Evan Hansen’ should be appreciated as a social phenomenon, and for its brave story telling. ‘Dear Evan Hansen’ is a show that asks the question “If we do something that we know is wrong, that we’ve been told is wrong, that we see as wrong, but everything comes out of it is right, is it as wrong as we’re told?” (Robbins).
The musical starts off with Evan doing an assignment from his therapist. It is a pep talk that has to start with the phrase “Dear Evan Hansen, today is going to be a good day and here’s why…”. The main character, Evan, is an anxiety ridden, high school senior who longs for a girl, named Zoe, who doesn’t know he exists. He has no friends and he is completely invisible to world. He …show more content…
Their works include songs for movies such as ‘La La Land’ and ‘The Greatest Showman’. Benj got the idea for ‘Dear Evan Hansen’ from an incident when he was in high school. A classmate tragically died and “Benj, a sophomore, had to watch as a fellow student who had barely known him claimed to have been his friend, inventing connections between themselves and their former classmate, insistent on inserting themselves into the tragedy” (Winstein and Clements 5). Benj began working on the story in 2011 and asked Steven Levenson to write the script. The three men worked for over three years before they had their first reading of the script in