Betsy Robinson

Sep 12, 2017 4:07 AM EDT

Postscript. After reading this blog, a friend asked for more of an explanation. Here it is: I think the whole thing went wrong at the end of the first act. The scene is Evan in front of his school assembly, having been pressured to talk about his bogus friendship with Connor who committed suicide. (They had no friendship.) Looking back over it, I think I know what the writers decided to do, faced with a conflict. The truth is that Evan is perpetrating an ever-ballooning charade and using and abusing many people. He is lonely and the interest of people now that he is a celebrity due to the "friendship" is seductive. But the end of the first act is a song. I've heard that Ben Platt sings it through pouring tears and snot, and I believe that is privately his mortification for what he is doing, as well as his pain and longing. But the song he's been given to sing is of a fantasy perfect day with this friend. It is lovely and completely bogus. There is no lyric or music in it to express the conflict of what he's doing, and the whole thing is seductive, and rather than stick with the reality of what he's doing, the audience leaps out of reality and grabs this fantasy of perfection and relates to his pain at wanting it, erasing the reality that the actor himself may be playing--which does not read as self-loathing, because there is nothing in the material to support that. That's when the big lie happened for me.My whole solar plexus went sick and hard. And then when all these kids in the audience screamed and cheered at the end of the song (which is exactly what the producers would have needed for the end of a first act), I felt sicker and also angry at the audience.All that set up the complete lack of serious consequences that ensued in the second act after Evan admits to the family he's duped and his mother what he's done--it made that exponentially more false. The family tells nobody about the ruse and people contribute money to create an orchard in the name of the dead kid who had no interest in trees. Evan gets off scot free. The girl he seduced (sister of the dead kid) forgives him. He now can connect to people--magic! During the ruse he stopped taking his antianxiety meds because apparently rather than cause even more anxiety, pretending to be somebody he's not and taking a ride on somebody else's tragedy is a great remedy for social anxiety. His mother assures him she'll always and forever love him. He lives happily ever after. And we (the gullible audience) are assured that if you fall, you will always be found (forget the fact that the dead boy fell big-time, was in terrible trouble before killing himself, and obviously he was not "found" or saved or taken care of or even really acknowledged for who he really was in this play). What was sickening was that the writers and director solved the first act technical problem by creating a lie, ignoring real pain of a kid who committed suicide, promising kids who watch this that, as one kid interviewed said, "You can fall and somebody will catch you. There's hope." And you can lie without consequences and if the lies are good enough, people will just pretend they didn't happen.Truth is ignored because the fantasy is so much sweeter: everything will be all right, somebody will always be there for you, you are never alone. Truth is hard: We are all ultimately alone. Bad things will happen and we can tolerate them and face our mistakes. Real peace comes by entering the void of our ultimate aloneness and finding our Self. And that takes courage and the willingness to be very uncomfortable. Perhaps that is just too hard for people to understand.

- Betsy Robinson