Fri, July 17 at 7:30 PM
DEAR EVAN HANSEN AND THE NEED FOR RADICAL UNDERSTANDING
A NOTE FROM THE DIRECTOR
BEING SEEN
When I first saw Dear Evan Hansen on Broadway more than a decade ago, I remember walking out of the theatre with the unmistakable feeling that I’ d just witnessed something that changed musical theatre. It felt unlike anything I’ d seen before. Its contemporary score, emotionally transparent characters, and innovative staging made it feel as though musical theatre had suddenly stepped into the present. It wasn’ t just telling a story. It was asking urgent questions about loneliness, identity, and our deeply human need to be seen.
At the time, social media was reshaping how we connected with one another. Fast forward to today, and an entire generation has grown up with smartphones in their hands, experienced a global pandemic during some of their most formative years, and now faces a future increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence.
Today, Dear Evan Hansen feels like it’ s about so much more than social media. It’ s about the growing epidemic of loneliness. It’ s about the pressure to curate who we are instead of simply being who we are. It’ s about mental health, belonging, and the quiet fear that, in a world where we’ re more connected than ever, we might still go unseen.
As I began preparing to direct this production, I found myself wanting to better understand the world these characters inhabit as we made the decision to place it in 2026. During a long road trip, I listened to Jonathan Haidt’ s The Anxious Generation. His central idea is that we’ ve moved from a“ play-based childhood” to a“ phonebased childhood,” and that this shift has coincided with dramatic increases in anxiety, depression, loneliness, and self-harm among young people. Whether every conclusion ultimately proves correct, the book gave language to something I’ d already been sensing.
According to the CDC, 40 percent of U. S. high school students reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness in 2023. Nearly half of teenagers also say social media has a mostly negative effect on people their age. Those aren’ t just statistics. They
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