When “Dear Evan Hansen” opens at Pioneer Theatre Company on Friday, it will be with an important distinction: It’s the first time a Utah-based theater company will perform the hit Tony Award-winning musical.
The show also has a message that those involved in the production believe has only become more relevant for audiences, nearly 10 years after its Broadway premiere — a message that’s important for Utah in particular.
“It has so many interesting themes that are, you know, just relevant to the world that we live in today,” the show’s director, Karen Azenberg, told the Deseret News. “And I love doing those kinds of shows that are things people want to see but also then spark awareness and just are another avenue to help bring people together to talk about the world we live in right now.”
A message about mental health — and why it matters in Utah
Ever since “Dear Evan Hansen” first premiered in 2016, the musical has sparked a wide variety of discussions around mental health.
The story centers around Evan Hansen, a teenage boy struggling with anxiety who gets caught up in a lie about having been friends with a classmate who died by suicide.
Azenberg, who is also the artistic director at Pioneer Theatre Company, calls many of the issues portrayed in the show “terrifyingly relevant,” especially when it comes to young people and social media — and in Utah, there’s a particular significance.
“The suicide rate for teens in Utah is terribly high compared to the national averages,” she said. “I think it’s so important that we think about that, think about how the internet, which we all think is so wonderful — and is, most of the time, but can also create this loneliness.”
Suicide is the leading cause of death in Utah for those 10 to 24 years old, the Deseret News reported last year, and the Utah State Board of Education calls youth suicide a “serious public health issue” in the state.
The issues aren’t limited to young people, though. Utah ranks 11th highest in the nation in the share of adults with any mental illness, but it ranks third highest for the share of adults with a serious mental illness, and fourth for adults with serious thoughts of suicide, according to a report by the University of Utah’s Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute.
So it was important to Azenberg that PTC’s production of “Dear Evan Hansen” portray mental health issues in an authentic way — and she enlisted some professional help to do that.
As it turned out, though, that professional help came about through a personal connection with the show. One of the rehearsal pianists at the theater, who knew that Azenberg was preparing for “Dear Evan Hansen,” approached her to let her know that his partner, Sean Weeks, is the program director for the Utah School Mental Health Collaborative.
“If you need any resources about teen mental health issues, that’s exactly what they do,” he told Azenberg.
So Azenberg reached out to Weeks, resulting in a monthslong collaboration on “Dear Evan Hansen” that began over the summer and will last until the show closes on Nov. 8.
“We just kind of started talking about if there was any way that we could support (the show),” Weeks told the Deseret News. “First pretty casually, but then it really turned into something that I think all of us ... got really excited about.”
The Utah School Mental Health Collaborative, which started five years ago as a collaboration between the University of Utah’s College of Education and the Huntsman Mental Health Institute, works with schools all across the state of Utah to provide training and resources. So it was in a unique position to not only offer guidance to cast members as they rehearsed, but also to offer community resources to audiences once the show begins.
Supporting the cast of ‘Dear Evan Hansen’
Like the collaborative, Pioneer Theatre Company is also housed at the University of Utah, but it often brings in talent from across the country to perform at the Simmons Pioneer Memorial Theatre on campus.
As Weeks and members of the collaborative attended rehearsals for “Dear Evan Hansen,” they felt like it was important to make non-Utahn members of the cast aware of some recent events that have taken place in the state.
“The mental health crisis in this state is serious,” said Weeks, “on top of some of the recent events that I think has affected our entire state” — in particular, he said, the shooting of Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University last month, as well as the death of President Russell M. Nelson, the president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and the shooting at a Latter-day Saint church building in Michigan.
It was important to Weeks that the cast get this context for their potential audiences, because “all of these things has kind of, I think, created a situation where our community is under a lot of pressure, and I think grieving in a lot of different ways.”
Members of the collaborative also helped support the cast as they rehearsed a show that deals with “emotionally heavy” issues.
“When you are working on a piece like this,” said Azenberg, “it can be emotionally heavy to address those kinds of issues for eight hours a day. I mean, not as heavy as if you’re living with those issues, obviously. But it is, and I felt (the collaborative was) incredibly thoughtful and caring about, you know, making sure our own mental health stayed good.”
Another important contribution was helping the cast and creative team behind “Dear Evan Hansen” to understand what mental illness may look like in real life — and particularly that it was given the seriousness that it deserves.
Still, it was a delicate balance, Azenberg said, between being “truthful and real” about mental health while also recognizing that, at the end of the day, “Dear Evan Hansen” is a musical with a story to tell.
“The timelines of how things are dealt with isn’t always accurate,” Azenberg said, due to the time constraints of the show. But in many cases, she said, there isn’t a single way that symptoms or diagnoses present, which she believes “gives a piece of theater a little more license to find the way to tell the story and be honest and authentic about what the issues are.”
A message of hope in ‘Dear Evan Hansen’
Given that the musical is about a high school student, Weeks believes there are plenty of themes in “Dear Evan Hansen” that teenagers in particular will relate to.
One of the themes Weeks noted was “peer pressure,” adding that the musical shows “how easy it is for, sometimes, things to get taken out of control before you’re even aware of it, when your decisions are driven by a need or desire to simply fit in.”
He believes those issues have been exacerbated by social media and “always being under the microscope — I think that’s one that really will speak to probably every single high schooler that sees this show.”
Ultimately, though, Weeks sees the show’s message as a hopeful one, and he hopes that if there’s any takeaway for teenagers from “Dear Evan Hansen,” it’s that “their parents want to support them and they love them. And sometimes they might disagree on how that looks, but to lean on them and go to them when they need it.”
Students from local Utah schools will get a chance to see “Dear Evan Hansen” during two special matinee performances, which will also include talkbacks after the shows where the students can ask questions. If any questions about mental health come up, Weeks will be on hand to help provide answers.
But students won’t be the only ones who can get their questions answered. There will be a community discussion held after the show’s matinee performance on closing day, Nov. 8, which will be free to the public and moderated by Aaron Fischer, who is the executive director of the Utah School Mental Health Collaborative, and will include Aimee Winder Newton, a senior adviser to Utah Gov. Spencer Cox and the director of the Utah Office of Families, as one of the panelists.
Members of the collaborative will also have a table set up in the theater lobby during the preshow and intermission of each performance, where they will be available to answer any questions that audience members may have about mental health.
For Azenberg, having those discussions and opening up channels of communication is what “Dear Evan Hansen” is all about — and she hopes that’s something audiences will take away from the show.
“There’s a big anthem-y song at the end of the first act, called ‘You Will Be Found,’” she said. “And it’s lovely, but it really is about how it’s important that we all reach out to one another and actually connect and listen and hear and support, so I’m hoping it’s just a little bit of a reminder of all of that.”
“Dear Evan Hansen” runs at Pioneer Theatre Company in Salt Lake City from Oct. 24-Nov. 8.