Chapter 12 - Cast-off Casts: The Orthopedic Imagination in Dear Evan Hansen and Lady Bird

Summary

Everywhere the star of Dear Evan Hansen (2015) goes, the cast goes with him—and by cast, I mean the orthopedic kind. In 2017, the show's iconic prop—a plaster arm cast with the name CONNOR written on it in sharpie—made an appearance at the 71st Annual Tony Awards, where the host wore one in homage to the Broadway hit. Months later, Ben Platt, who played Evan Hansen at the time, appeared on The Today Show, where the presenters wanted to reassure viewers at home that the actor's arm was not actually broken.

The prop is in deceptively good shape. Indeed, it turns out that the plaster cast is reapplied for each performance and sawed off at intermission. A behindthe-scenes photo shows a dressing room shelf covered in a dense accumulation of casts—what looks to be a month's worth. That the designers have made such a material investment in making and breaking this prop nightly suggests how central it is to the production.

Although there have been many studies on the role of prostheses in performance, relatively little has been said about orthoses. This chapter focuses on a modest but noteworthy genealogy of plaster casts in coming-of-age narratives, where broken arms have become a recurring symbol of adolescence. Despite their acute thinginess, plaster casts have become a troublesome metaphor embedded in a larger cultural script about health and aging. To start to unpack this metaphor, I focus predominately on the Broadway megahit Dear Evan Hansen (specifically Ben Platt's run from 2015 to 2017), before turning briefly to one of 2017's most talked-about films, Lady Bird, which deals with many similar issues.

Before going further, it is important to distinguish between two rehabilitative technologies—prosthesis and orthotic—by saying that an orthotic is typically meant to support a body part in some way rather than replace it, as a prosthesis would. However, the term “prosthetic” now encompasses a range of meanings, including anything having to do with extending the human sensorium. Sarah Jain calls this widespread usage the “prosthetic imagination.” Jain explains that according to the prosthetic imagination, a deficiency must be overcome in order to make the body so-called “whole.” Orthopedic casts perhaps signify the opposite, since so-called wholeness (i.e., a healed bone) is symbolized through the plaster's removal rather than its application.