It’s apt that Else Went’s epic theater piece Initiative is opening at the Public Theater just as Netflix prepares to roll out the final season of Stranger Things. Both projects are bingeworthy studies of teenagers from a few decades ago channeling their day-to-day anxieties through spirited games of Dungeons & Dragons. The characters in Initiative don’t have to face down otherworldly demons, but their lives are no less fraught. And playing thieves, mages, barbarians, and paladins allows them to test their bravery and fortitude in the safe space of a basement rec room without the looming threat of high school bullies, intrusive teachers, or indifferent parents battling addiction to prescription drugs.
There’s an admirable ambition to Went’s work, which unfolds at a leisurely but absorbing five-plus hours with two intermissions (Saturday shows run longer, with a 90-minute dinner break). It follows its core group of teens from the fall they enter high school in a small coastal California town in 2000 through the 2024 graduation ceremony where the ambitious, Yale-bound Clara (Olivia Rose Barresi) delivers a heartfelt commencement address. Went has a real gift for sketching believable characters through scenes that play out in naturalistic ways but that deepen our understanding of their particular circumstances — and in honing their conflicts in ways that reflect the all-too-common misunderstandings that often surface in life, especially in our youth.
At first, the focus is on Riley (Greg Cuellar, in a remarkable performance of precocity and self-doubt), a closeted gay boy with a gift for storytelling that he soon exploits as the Dungeon Master. He comes out to the super-bright Clara — who’s been harboring a crush on him — and endures a beating from the ubrer-jock Lo (Carson Higgins) to whom he gave a non-unwelcome blow job in a summer-camp bunk bed just before freshman year. Before long, Riley is recruiting Lo’s nerdy, video-game-playing younger brother, Em (Christopher Dylan White), the brothers’ next-door neighbor Kendall (Andrea Lopez Alvarez), and their reluctant regular-guy classmate, Tony (Jamie Sanders), into evening sessions of D&D that give them a new sense of purpose and belonging.
Director Emma Rose Went and the script perfectly capture the mood of the aughts with nods to the slow speed of dial-up internet, the stultifying atmosphere of high school locker rooms and homecoming dances, and the appeal of role-playing games where the roll of multi-sided dice can dramatically reshape the outcome of a fantasy campaign. Mikiko Suzuki Macadams’ set reflects both the woody look of high school gymnasiums and suburban basements, which lighting designer Christopher Akerlind’s often casts in shadow or dramatic colors. And Kindall Almond’s costumes are vintage-store delights, particularly Riley’s Holden Caulfield-style hunting cap in a red-and-black lumberjack plaid.
Initiative explores the idea of how all of high school is an act of role-playing, of trying out personas to see what fits and of play-acting normalcy out of a genuine desire to either fit in or protect yourself from harm. That notion comes into sharp relief with the arrival of a transfer student from New York, Ty (Harrison Densmore), who’s immediately stuffed into lockers by his peers who peg him as gay but who develops a relationship with one of his female classmates that also allows him to experiment with makeup and gender expression.
In Initiative, there really are no adults in the room — aside from the disembodied voice of Riley’s English teacher (Brandon Burk) whose interest in mentoring Riley (and later Ty) may hold some ulterior, though still above-board motives. Burk also voices an unseen and mostly useless guidance counselor as well as the mother of Lo and Em, a pill addict with an estranged husband whose pesky complaints to her sons are rendered in a mumble reminiscent of the grown-ups in the Charlie Brown cartoon specials. The kids really do have to fend for themselves, forge their own paths, and they mostly manage to do just that — until tragedy strikes in the final act.
The extended running time allows Went to play with the conventions of a bildungsroman in ways that feel fresh. At its best, the show can seem like the trial run for a limited TV series where you can spend even more time with these fascinating young people. Yes, there are lulls — some of the D&D scenes drag down the overall pacing — and the ending feels like a somewhat convenient way to tug at the heartstrings while tying up some narrative loose ends. But there are genuine virtues to allowing the action to unfold more gradually, as the characters to awaken to new realizations about each other and themselves in what can feel like real time. And the cast, while often looking well past adolescence, deliver pitch-perfect performances of individuals in a perpetual state of inchoate transition. Barresi finds hidden depths as the straight-arrow Clara, while White makes the painfully reserved Em appealing both despite and because of his passivity.
Initiative is a exquisitely produced work from emerging artists of almost boundless talent, that also takes as its subject the very act of emerging. It’s a story of promise as well as of achievement. ★★★★★
INITIATIVE
Public Theater, Off Broadway
Running time: 5 hours, 15 minutes (with 2 intermissions; Saturday performance runs 6 hours, 30 minutes with a 90-minute dinner break)
Tickets on sale through December 7 for $109
Culture Sauce 