Pop Psychology Onstage in “Dear Evan Hansen” 

When Kurt Weill, Ira Gershwin, and Moss Hart put together the musical “Lady in the Dark,” in 1940, Freud was big. The great man’s thinking had yet to come under wide attack, and psychoanalysis—at least, here in America—was still a relatively new phenomenon, a science for the privileged. Liza Elliott, the protagonist of the musical, who runs a fashion magazine called Allure, has lots of power but no outward oomph. Depressed and anxious, she works with her analyst to figure out why she, an arbiter of taste, can’t take her own editorial advice and swathe herself in furs and delicious self-regard. As her story is revealed through troubled dreams, it turns out that Daddy and the other men who rejected Liza early on are responsible for all that drabness and repression. Once she gets to the bottom of it all, Liza becomes a happier, more fulfilled person. When Hart wrote the book for the musical, he himself was in analysis (he struggled with his homosexuality), and he was enough of a showman to know that Freudianism would be a nifty shortcut for turning the spotlight on character, especially on the conundrum of feeling “different.”