Dan Was The Villain In Next To Normal. In this essay I will...

First I heard part of "I Am The One (reprise)" on a Youtube short. Then I watched the pro-shoot... and now it is stuck in my head. I saw comments there about how there is no villain except for the son and ... well...

He's dead.

I disagree. Dan is pretty messed up, and he makes it his wife's problem (and in turn she helps make it everyone else's problem).

To set the stage, in the opening scene, the son chides Diana for "watching the news". This combined with the scenarios she mentions puts this in the era of the 24-hour cable news cycle. In "Who's Crazy/My Psychopharmacologist and I" we learn she can't consistently drive. They are portrayed as reasonably well off, as they have psychiatric care in the US before Obamacare, but not enough to own a house in the city. This puts them at least in the suburbs. Now, I realize not everyone in the world knows what this means, so for them, I will explain: Rural communities are often spread out enough to make getting anywhere without a car an expedition, and American suburbs were designed to be de facto segregation by virtue of requiring a car to navigate (to price black people out of living there). This means that most of the time, the mom is alone at home all day, with nothing but her TV and her thoughts.

Then in "The Break" we learn that she was put on medication months after the death of their son, and it doesn't seem like it was her idea. In "Why Stay?/A Promise" Dan both continues to assert how he is doing her a favor by putting up with her, but also implies that his image of her being normal is what she was like in her twenties (almost 20 years ago at the time of the musical). This is probably not a level of energy she has outside of her mania anymore. Finally, in "Make Up Your Mind/Catch Me I'm Falling", we learn that their marriage wasn't planned, but that having a kid made her more enthusiastic about the idea.

Now, if we put this all together, we can get a picture of what seems to have happened. Gabe died, and not only was Diana sad and all together a downer, but she was possibly starting to have second thoughts about the marriage as a whole. Dan sends her to get medicated, and shortly afterwards they have another kid. A kid that that last song I mentioned indicates she didn't really want. He doesn't notice when she her mania is starting, and in fact he prefers her that way. We also get to see him try to sculpt her memory in the second act to be in a way he prefers. We also also get the impression that he wants to pretend that the son never happened, and he doesn't seem willing to talk about the whole experience at all. She is generally dependent on him, and he seems to have been able to dictate the terms of her medical care. The fact that he can see Gabe near the end indicates that he hasn't been well this whole time either.

In short, Diana would not have been allowed to move on if she had stayed, because Dan wouldn't let her.