In Dear Evan Hansen, a socially anxious high school senior becomes emotionally enmeshed with the family of a fellow student who has taken his own life. Yet, the character who launches into the show’s opening number is Heidi, Evan’s mother, who is raising him alone and finds herself struggling to support her child as he grows up and away from her. Anybody Have a Map?, Heidi’s heartfelt admission of maternal cluelessness, is a soliloquy cum rock ballad performed straight to the audience. It’s a treat to see maternal preoccupations – fear of failing your children, frustration at your inevitable shortfalls – voiced with such candour.
“There is that underpinning of guilt that just always hangs around,” says Rebecca McKinnis, who stars as Heidi, and is a single parent herself. “It’s like, ‘are we doing the right thing?’ No one knows, everyone’s just trying to do their best.”
Currently playing in London’s West End, the Tony, Grammy and Olivier award-winning show explores the stresses and strains of two very different parent-child dynamics. On the one hand there is Heidi, whose work and studies leave her little time for her son Evan. On the other there’s Cynthia Murphy, played by Lauren Ward, a stay-at-home mum interrogating her relationship with her son, Connor, in the aftermath of his suicide.
Heidi and Cynthia don’t appear to have much in common – in terms of either background or personality – yet their impassioned performance of Anybody Have a Map?, which develops into a duet between the two women, points to a shared feeling. Neither mother knows what she’s doing; each is working things out as she goes along, as we all are.
“You can identify with lots of different things depending on when you see it – whether you’re a young mother, an older mother, a grandmother,” says Ward, who has three children herself. She recalls seeing Dear Evan Hansen for the first time during its 2016 Broadway run: “I just sobbed when I saw it; I think it depends on what’s going on in your life.”
Not that these are issues only mothers deal with, of course. There are plenty of fathers who will identify with the themes of Dear Evan Hansen. But as the show points out – via Evan’s absent father and the dysfunctionality of Cynthia and her husband Larry’s relationship – it’s all too often mothers who end up shouldering the greatest load when it comes to child rearing, which leads to self-reproach.
For Cynthia, it’s the guilt of having not been able to save Connor from the despair that led to his death, while for Heidi it’s the more general day-to-day guilt of not being there for Evan because her time and emotional energy is taken up with material considerations.
“You’re paying all of your rent, all of your bills, as opposed to sharing that burden. Hence why Heidi, as a single parent, has to work two jobs, hence why she’s not present as much, and then finds herself feeling a little bit distant from Evan and not really knowing what’s going on with him,” says McKinnis. “As a parent, it’s upsetting and frustrating when suddenly your child is not sharing things with you and you don’t know what’s going on in their head.”
Not that we should let Heidi off entirely, she says, particularly when it comes to Evan’s online life, which spirals out of control as he participates in a social media campaign against loneliness that’s based on an elaborate lie.
“Heidi could delve deeper if she wanted to,” says McKinnis. At various points in the narrative, Heidi remarks to Evan that he slams shut his laptop every time she comes into his bedroom, yet she takes at face value his explanation that all he’s doing is schoolwork. “She’s letting this go on,” says McKinnis.
The show doesn’t make a bogeyman of social media – on the contrary, it highlights the opportunities the internet offers when it comes to sharing experiences and creating support networks. It also acknowledges the important role it plays in the lives of the teenage characters in Dear Evan Hansen, while flagging up the potential for misunderstanding and confusion between these digital natives and their more analogue parents.
Having another parent around may make finances easier, but doesn’t necessarily solve any communication issues. We see this in Cynthia and Larry Murphy’s conflicting approaches to their son Connor. While Larry is strict, Cynthia lets him get away with everything, says Ward, not because she doesn’t care but because she’s “worn down from experience after experience” of failing to save her son from his demons.
As a result, Cynthia and Larry are not on the same page. “If you’ve got a parent hardlining rules, and you’ve got the other parent undermining those rules because they don’t agree, well, it’s not going to work,” says Ward.
Dear Evan Hansen doesn’t present either of these approaches as inherently right or wrong. It focuses instead on the isolation and sense of failure the Murphys, Cynthia in particular, feel in relation to their son, both before and after his death.
But, as Ward points out, the show also stresses the power of forgiveness. When Cynthia can forgive herself and her husband for the mistakes they made – as well as Connor for the decision to end his own life – she is able to move on from this painful experience.
McKinnis agrees, citing So Big/So Small, the show’s penultimate song, as the moment in which Heidi acknowledges her own failures, forgiving herself and in so doing paving the way for a more open, loving, communicative relationship with her son. It’s a message that all parents could benefit from, McKinnis believes, though forgiving our parenting failures is easier said than done.
“We are very, very hard on ourselves. It’s much harder to forgive ourselves than it is to see other people and go: ‘You’re doing fine.’ And we should forgive ourselves because it’s hard – it’s blooming hard work!”
In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org
