Review: DEAR EVAN HANSEN Is Troublingly Timely at Split Stage

When Dear Evan Hansen first came out, a decade ago, I remember thinking it was good, but maybe a little, I don't know, cringe? A little too Black Mirror wannabe, "these damn kids and their cell phones" esque. I thought we were beyond that as a culture. Well, uh... I jumped the gun on that one. My bad. What I'd initially dismissed as an exaggerated cautionary tale on Obama-era social malaise has turned into an all-too-prescient look at Gen Alpha adolescence and Millennial parenting. As presented by director Jim Scriven and music/tech director Chris McAllister, Split Stage's production sits between a pitch-black cringe comedy and a psychological thriller, less a musical than a three-hour anxiety attack.

Evan Hansen (Brooks Brady) is a perpetually anxious and awkward high schooler with very few close relationships. He has his mother Heidi (Katie Aiello Jessup), a law student who alternates between babying him and being emotionally and literally unavailable. He has Jared (Adam Drabish), an aggro-nerd who openly despises him but tolerates him for family's sake, and he has an unrequited crush on school band soloist Zoe Murphy (DeLaney Swank), who seems relatively unaware of his interest, let alone existence. A chance encounter with Zoe's bully/stoner/ticking-time-bomb of a brother Connor (Jonathan Parker) just before Connor's suicide leads to a misunderstanding that Connor and Evan were best friends. Too anxious to clarify the situation for Connor's grieving parents (Rori Mull and Bill Elder), Evan tells a little lie. And then another. And then another. And then starts a charity around his OWN interests in Connor's name. And then tries getting closer to Zoe... but everything that goes up must come down, and Evan knows one slip will ruin everything.

Brooks Brady gives a revelatory performance as Evan Hansen, perpetually causing and solving his own problems as fast as he can talk. In Brady's hands, he builds a gentleness and vulnerability that often shades into genuinely pathetic weakness; we wish we could expect more of Evan, but he very literally cannot help himself. He's a tragic man-child even as he does increasingly shameless and despicable things, and Brady never once worries about Evan (or himself) looking cool while doing so; there is none of Ben Platt's self-assured pop inflections or bicep flexing to be found here. As Evan, Brady sweats, stammers, stims frequently and has a very clear and very chaotic inner life always visible. He is counterbalanced by DeLaney Swank's assuredly grounded Zoe. It's hard to play a strong, quiet character without turning them into either a cipher or a sullen teen stereotype, but Swank finds an anchor in the grieving yet abused teenager that allows the rest of the show to rotate around her. (There's a moment where Zoe reveals that Connor, who the whole world is making into an angel, threatened and physically abused her; it even seems as if we're supposed to read between the lines that this may even have been sexual abuse. The writing on the page is a little melodramatic, but Swank plays it as unvarnished truth, with no drama behind the reveal, and it becomes a brutal gut punch.)

Heidi Hansen is one of the show's most sympathetic characters, though not a perfct one, and Katie Aiello Jessup leans into the very Millennial sensibility of still feeling like you're a kid, while being required to function as an adult. The lines of authority and generational contrast between her and Evan are intentionally blurry, and Aiello Jessup embraces both the "fun mom" and "flailing kidult" sides of the character in a way that make total sense for a piece on parenting a teen in the present day. Even when she breaks down and has to go full mom, she projects a sense of still figuring the whole thing out, of not having the answers, and not truly feeling grown, which makes the piece feel more of its time today than it did a decade ago. On the other side of the spectrum are the extremely parentified, extremely adult Cynthia and Larry. Rori Mull and Bill Elder play these roles with a heavier energy than Aiello Jessup's Heidi; clearly, parenting a troubled and violent teen has sucked the happy-go-lucky energy and family fuzziness out of the Murphy clan. As Mull and Elder shade their performances towards healing in the second half, we get to see brief glimpses of what could have been if they'd been able to be a happy, carefree family after all, even as Aiello Jessup's Heidi shifts towards weightier energy at the same time.

As the late Connor, Jonathan Parker is a revelation; those who remember him from his turns as a featured dancer and ensemblist across past Split Stage shows will hardly recognize him here. Sulky, sullen and withdrawn, with a hostility that rarely erupts physically but can be felt in his thousand-yard stare and slow, confrontational physicality, Parker gives us a Connor we rarely SEE do bad things, but are completely confident HAS done and COULD do them in the future. It's a recalibration from the emo kid/school bully presented in the original production; remember, a decade ago the "troubled boy" archetype was more likely associated with Columbine and American Horror Story than with Andrew Tate and Adolescence. This examination of modern-day toxic masculinity extends further with Jared Kleinman, played with endearingly sleazy charm by Adam Drabish. There's a long history of the "computer nerd class clown with the gift of gab" archetype: Curtis Armstrong established it as Booger in Revenge of the Nerds, and Gaten Matarazzo brought it to its culmination as Dustin on Stranger Things. Jared, though, feels a little different, and I can't recall if his character made this much of an impression ten years ago when I first saw the show. Jared is extremely online, a self-proclaimed hacker, and makes frequent dark, sexist or homophobic jokes. It's hard, today, to think of a character like that and not immediately think of things like Gamergate and the manosphere; I can't help but feel that looking into Jared's Discord and Reddit history would reveal some pretty unsavory things. Drabish leans into this villain-in-the-making read on the character, giving him bully energy and never letting him feel like an underdog himself. He's a character we can love to hate with impunity, as opposed to the more morally ambivalent but possibly more dangerous Evan.

Then, there's the matter of Alana Beck. Minnie Jones is carrying the weight of the show and its worldview on her shoulders as this one-woman Greek chorus, a clout-chasing, performatively woke honor student who hitches her future to the mourning-Connor-Murphy train. The show allows Alana to speak for the internet at large for most of its runtime, and her tendency to speak in platitudes and performative wokeness almost certainly read more as comic relief a decade ago. This is a play written before terms like "cancellation" or "milkshake duck syndrome," both of which are the clear threats hanging over Evan and Alana. Jones brings a steely intensity to the somewhat underwritten Alana, embuing her with both dorky charm when merited and with a slight undercurrent of menace befitting the character who IS the internet and social media. As she morphs her persona and perception of her own truth around the social cause she thinks will benefit her, Jones makes Alana scary in an equal but opposite way to Jared.

The only other two markers that this show is from a decade and a half ago, rather than up-to-the-minute, are the absence of explicit references to both TikTok and neurodivergence among all the talk of social media and mental health. McAllister's projections, with vertical video integration and TikTok pop-ins for the social media scenes, addresses the former; Scriven's direction and Brady's performance as Evan address the latter. Evan is as explicitly ADHD/autism coded as 2010s pop culture would let a character like this be (remember the slight cultural taboo about referencing autism anywhere near humor, and the way Community or Big Bang Theory could wink at diagnoses but never explicitly name them). If this is the case, and it certainly seems like the authors intend it to be, what are we to make of Evan and what he did? Is he a villain? A victim? Has he committed actual real-world crimes worthy of real-world punishment? You can even expand these questions further and look at the central philosphical thesis of the show- is Connor worth more dead than alive? In all the talk of "you will be found, you are not alone," what are we to make of the hostile, physically violent cipher at the center of the scam, whose sole contribution to the world was his suicide? These are extremely uncomfortable questions to sit with, and I know my drive home was full of spirited, intense and sometimes emotionally vulnerable questions about society and philosophy, the value of human life versus the greater good. If you're sitll on the fence about seeing Split Stage's latest, ask yourself the question: hen's the last time a musical comedy got you into a debate like that?