Dan is the play’s deuteragonist. He goes on a parallel journey to his wife Diana, which is marked by the challenge of reckoning with his grief over the loss of Gabe and the strain on his marriage. Throughout the play, Dan chooses to repress his grief to achieve a state of functional normalcy in his family life. He expresses this desire in “Who’s Crazy / My Psychopharmacologist and I”: “And I was / A wild twenty-five / And I loved / A wife so alive / But now I believe I would settle / For one who can drive” (17). Since he keeps framing his emotional repression as necessary to support Diana, he ends up drained, tired, and unsure of what Diana really wants or means by her statements when she seeks more vulnerability from him.

Though Dan and Diana have opposing approaches to grief, it is important to note that Dan is not an antagonistic figure. He doesn’t see emotional repression as a control tactic or a way of asserting his power over Diana. Rather, he sees it as the only viable way of surviving the grief that he and Diana share. His encouragement for Diana to continue pursuing treatment—including her trial of electroconvulsive therapy—comes from a sincere desire for Diana to live beyond the suffering that Gabe’s death has caused them both. On the other hand, his repression also exposes the insecurities that mark Dan’s functional façade. In “I’ve Been,” Dan admits that what he fears most in the world is going through life without Diana. Inasmuch as he has extended himself as Diana’s primary support system, Diana also functions as a support system for Dan, her presence reassuring him that they can continue to live on despite what they’ve been through together.

Dan learns to challenge the notion that he needs Diana to survive his grief when Diana realizes that she needs to move out of the house to seek therapy on her own terms. She encourages Dan to directly engage with his grief, rather than run away from it, which leads directly into the major turning point for his character: Acknowledging the presence of Gabe, which represents the first time he has acknowledged Gabe’s death in years. Soon after Diana leaves, Dan accepts Doctor Madden’s offer to speak to a therapist, signaling his growth from emotional repression.

Natalie Goodman is the play’s other deuteragonist. She is the teenage daughter of Dan and Diana, whose character arc revolves around her reaction to the influence that her family life has on her individual life. Natalie is partly a passive character, as she has little agency to affect her parents’ decisions. However, the agency she does have enables her to make impactful decisions about her own life, from sabotaging her winter recital to resuming her relationship with Henry at the spring formal dance.

Natalie feels trapped by the circumstances of the family life defined by her “paranoid parents.” She overperforms at school at the cost of her physical and emotional health, believing that she can use achievement to justify her experience of toil and suffering. She explicates this worldview, along with her aspiration to use her musical skills to earn a full scholarship to Yale, in “Everything Else.” When Dan and Diana fail to attend her winter recital, Natalie ends up sabotaging her performance, believing they have prioritized support for Diana’s mental health again over support for her work and ambitions.

Natalie reckons with the perception that her parents value Gabe, the child they lost, over herself, the child they still have. When Dan and Diana fail to attend her recital, their neglect upsets her deeply and motivates her heavy use of Diana’s medication drugs as a coping mechanism for the pain their dynamic makes her feel. Natalie is thus growing up through a cycle of inherited trauma, experiencing the emotional pain that Diana experiences through the neglect she feels Diana projecting towards her. Diana also recognizes echoes between Natalie’s romance with Henry and her own romance with Dan. 

Diana eventually resolves her tension with Natalie by encouraging her to pursue her own happiness as a priority over Diana’s comfort. For her part, Natalie chooses to take this resolution seriously by reuniting with Henry at the spring formal dance, asking him if he would still want her if she experienced the same mental illness that her mother has. Henry’s continued support for her implies a positive resolution of Natalie’s inherited trauma cycle.

Gabe Goodman is a symbolic character who exists within the theatrical conventions of the play, allowing Yorkey to give Dan and Diana’s grief a concrete manifestation. While Gabe is a prominent presence in the play, even appearing as one of the first characters to enter the stage, he does not exist as a person inhabiting the same reality that Natalie, Henry, Dan, and Diana’s therapists do. He is a projection of Dan and Diana’s emotions, which explains why his character remains static and flat throughout the play.

Since the real-world Gabe died in infancy, teenage Gabe represents all of Diana’s fantasies of how he would have turned out had he survived. This is hinted at during “Just Another Day,” when Diana enumerates Gabe’s varying extracurricular activities, like jazz band, key club, and football. In their first scene together, Diana also tells Gabe that she sits up thinking about the ways Gabe could have died later on as a teenager, using it to fill the hours as she sits up waiting for him to “return” home from a night out.

Gabe sometimes voices Dan and Diana’s emotions, amplifying them as he does in “You Don’t Know” and “I Am the One.” This amplification underscores the idea that he doesn’t exclusively exist as a projection of Diana’s mind: He also embodies Dan’s grief, voicing his emotions when he chooses to direct them at Diana. Ultimately, the resolution of Dan’s character arc hinges on him acknowledging Gabe for the first time. In speaking Gabe’s name and feeling his loss, Dan learns to stop repressing his memories and grief in order to survive them.

Henry is a supporting character who functions as the foil and romantic interest of Natalie. Henry is drawn to Natalie when he sees her practicing piano before classes start every morning. However, his penchant for jazz and improvisation clashes with her preference for technical mastery. Similarly, he frequently uses drugs, which Natalie resists until she sees it as a coping mechanism for her resentment against her family.

Henry’s true character shines through his concern for Natalie. His reckless behavior is revealed to be a façade as he comes to define himself through his commitment to Natalie and her emotional needs. In “Perfect for You,” Henry elaborates that because the world is in such a dire state, he can reassure himself that things are okay as long as he gets one thing to function well. He chooses his relationship with Natalie to reassure him against the state of the world’s collapse.