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THE MORNING LINE DATE: Tuesday, August 4, 2015 FROM: Melissa Cohen, Michelle Farabaugh, Jennie Mamary Katie Aramento, Raychel Shipley PAGES: 18, including this page. C1 August 4, 2015 Review: In ‘Dear Evan Hansen,’ Teenage Angst Grows Complicated By Charles Isherwood WASHINGTON — The quirks of fate prove both kind and cruel in “Dear Evan Hansen,” a sweet, sad and quite moving new musical making its premiere here at Arena Stage. The title character, a friendless teenager crippled by the depression that only being a friendless teenager can bring, is caught up in the whiplash of web fame when a note he wrote finds its way into the hands of another troubled kid, with complicated consequences. The beguiling score, the finest work yet from Benj Pasek and Justin Paul(Off Broadway’s “Dogfight” and the Broadway musical “A Christmas Story”), blends with unusual dexterity into the sensitive, often darkly funny book by Steven Levenson, whose plays “The Unavoidable Disappearance of Tom Durnin” and “The Language of Trees” were produced by the Roundabout Theater Company. (He’s also a writer for the Showtime series “Masters of Sex.”) The sensibilities of the show’s authors seem in perfect sync, and the director, Michael Greif, delineates the emotional complexities of the material with the same incisive smarts he brought to “Next to Normal,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical that “Dear Evan Hansen” most brings to mind. (Although its score, delicately orchestrated by Alex Lacamoire, is a more mellow variation on the driving pop-rock in “Normal.”) Evan, played with endearing awkwardness by Ben Platt, star of the “Pitch Perfect” movies, faces a new school year with agonized trepidation. Blinking with nervousness, he has the pathetic aspect of a walking apology for existence — and in fact, in an encounter with Zoe (Laura Dreyfuss), the girl he has a secret crush on, the words “I’m sorry” spill from his mouth with a mortifying lack of logic. Nor can he manage to find anyone to sign the cast on his arm — a visible badge of shame in the cruel social economy of adolescence. (He broke it falling from a tree.) Evan is not the only lonely teenager at his school. Zoe’s brother, Connor (Mike Faist), is a misfit of a darker bent. During an encounter in the computer lab, Connor snatches a letter Evan has written to himself, which is supposed to be a daily exercise in pep advised by his therapist, but in this case is a morose cri de coeur ending, “I mean, face it: Would anybody even notice if I disappeared tomorrow?” Days later Evan is called in to the principal’s office and told that Connor has killed himself. His parents, Cynthia (Jennifer Laura Thompson) and Larry (Michael Park), discovered Evan’s note in Connor’s pocket, and assumed Connor was writing a farewell note to a friend. Although Evan first attempts to set them straight, Cynthia and Larry are so overwhelmed by grief — and comforted believing that Connor had a friend — that Evan soon finds himself embraced by the family as a kind of surrogate son, a feeling he finds hard to resist. Among the accomplishments of the musical is its nimble integration of the “real” world with the virtual world of the web, where Connor’s death becomes a minor viral sensation. A tech-savvy schoolmate, Alana (Alexis Molnar), creates a tribute page and a fund is set up to create a memorial orchard. The set, by David Korins, trims the stage in transparent scrims of various shapes and sizes, on which Facebook posts, Twitter messages and other web communiqués scroll and flicker, underscoring how private griefs — not to mention outright fictions — can quickly become public causes, with unpredictable results. More notable, and impressive, is the deft manner in which “Dear Evan Hansen” opens up the hearts and minds of its characters, through both dialogue and song, to reveal their scars, their regrets, the true feelings buried beneath their public facades. Zoe, for instance, who is played with a transparent naturalness by Ms. Dreyfuss, views her parents’ willful rewriting of Connor’s character with wariness. She still sees Connor as he was, and in the beautifully rendered number “Requiem” sings: Don’t tell me that I didn’t have it right Don’t tell me that it wasn’t black and white After all you put me through Don’t say it wasn’t true That you weren’t the monster that I knew But even Zoe begins to buy into the fictions being hungrily constructed by her parents, on the basis of emails ostensibly from Connor to Evan, created and backdated with the help of Evan’s snarky fellow student Jared (a funny Will Roland). Cynthia, played with easygoing warmth by Ms. Thompson, and Larry, whom Mr. Park imbues with a sense of stoic grief, virtually adopt Evan. He lives with his mother, Heidi (Rachel Bay Jones), who works long hours as a nurse and is also taking night classes to become a paralegal. Although her character has less stage time than most of the others, Heidi is drawn — and portrayed by the fine Ms. Jones — with the same clarifying honesty as the rest, and her late-coming solo, in which she welcomes back Evan after the saga of Connor has taken a dark turn, is among the most touching songs in the score. “Dear Evan Hansen” has its flaws. The integration of the ghost of Connor into the material can be awkward and doesn’t actually add much to an already complicated story. (It also echoes a little too strongly a story line in “Next to Normal.”) But if he’s going to hang around, it would be nice to see him with a little more nuance; alive or dead, he seems to be the generic goth kid clad in what Evan casually mocks as “school-shooter chic.” The last beats of the story feel a little rushed, and Mr. Pasek and Mr. Paul’s music tends to be stronger than their lyrics, which occasionally lapse into gauzy blandness (“All we see is light/ ’Cause the sun shines bright/ Like we’ll be all right”). But the musical invests a familiar cultural trope — the angst of the lonely teenager — with freshness and vibrancy. Ill-considered though it may be, Evan’s attempt to fill the void left behind by Connor, and the void in his own heart, feels affectingly truthful. “Dear Evan Hansen” also raises the potent question of whether our booming social networks are causing more adolescent despair than they can possibly cure. Dear Evan Hansen Book by Steen Levenson; music and lyrics by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul; directed by Michael Greif; choreography by Danny Mefford; music supervision, orchestrations and additional arrangements by Alex Lacamoire; co-music supervisor and additional orchestrations by Christopher Jahnke; vocal arrangements and additional arrangements by Mr. Paul; music director, Ben Cohn; sets by David Korins; costumes by Emily Rebholz; lighting by Japhy Weideman; sound by Clive Goodwin; projections by Peter Nigrini; stage manager, Judith Schoenfeld. Presented by Arena Stage, Molly Smith, artistic director; Edgar Dobie, executive producer, in association with Stacey Mindich Productions. At Arena Stage, Washington; 202- 488-3300, arenastage.org. Through Aug. 23. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. WITH: Ben Platt (Evan Hansen), Will Roland (Jared Kleinman), Rachel Bay Jones (Heidi Hansen), Jennifer Laura Thompson (Cynthia Murphy), Mike Faist (Connor Murphy), Laura Dreyfuss (Zoe Murphy), Michael Park (Larry Murphy) and Alexis Molnar (Alana Beck). A version of this review appears in print on August 4, 2015, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: That Note Isn’t What It Seems. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe C1 August 4, 2015 Review: In ‘Freight,’ a Black Man Follows the Script for Five Incarnations By Laura Collins-Hughes Abel Green arrives out of breath from running for the train. It is the 1910s, and he is an actor hopping a boxcar on his way to a minstrel show. But performing is something he’s done since long before he ever was paid for it. “See, all Negroes are actors by necessity,” he tells us conversationally, getting dressed out of the suitcase he’s brought along. “The script is passed down generation to generation. The Negroes who know they lines tend to live longer than the Negroes that don’t, generally speaking, as it pertains to dealing with white folks.” America’s constricting racial framework is ever-present in Howard L. Craft’s century-spanning “Freight: The Five Incarnations of Abel Green,” at Here, yet this rich and thoughtful solo play is most concerned with a more intimate self-examination: how to be good to one another within black culture, when the larger culture rewards complicity. Posing this question with a sardonic humor that recalls George C. Wolfe’s “The Colored Museum” and Robert Townsend’s “Hollywood Shuffle,” the play is made up of five monologues, each spoken by a different version of Abel Green (J. Alphonse Nicholson): the minstrel in the 1910s; a faith healer, grown rich on the donations of believers, in the 1930s; an F.B.I. informant, infiltrating the Black Panthers in the 1960s; an actor who turns his back on an H.I.V.-positive friend in the 1980s; and a can-collecting homeless man, circa 2010, who once made a fortune hawking subprime loans. Their consciences are badly smeared at best. Presented by the StreetSigns Center for Literature and Performance, in association with New Dog Theater Company, “Freight” is directed by Joseph Megel on a set (by Daniel Ettinger) that morphs from boxcar to subway train with the aid of Eamonn Farrell’s video and sound design.