In Initiative, a group of young people in the early 2000s finds themselves via the role-playing game, the latest example of its undying popularity
I
t sounds like a big ask, the idea of presenting an audience with a five-hour play. (Or even a four-and-a-half-hour play with several intermissions.) Yet Initiative, a new off-Broadway coming-of-age epic of sorts, flies right by, as emotionally immersive as the Dungeons & Dragons games that enrapture most of its seven teenage characters. Playwright Else Went doesn’t seem worried about the show’s length. “It was very much part of the intent,” they said. (Went is non-binary and uses they/she pronouns.) “When you sit in the theater for long enough – without feeling like the thing that you’re watching is failing you – there’s a certain point that you cross as an audience member, where you enter a new type of commitment. And it is in that state that new things can happen, dramatically.”
Initiative certainly does new things with material that could have been familiar. It arrives, after a lengthy workshop period, at a time when Dungeons & Dragons seems resurgent in visibility, thanks in part to the Netflix smash-hit Stranger Things, which uses D&D players (and game-derived terminology) in its own ‘80s-set fantasy-adventure-horror story. (There’s even a Stranger Things prequel play on Broadway.) Initiative defies some of the cultural cliches about the game, starting with its setting; rather than a self-consciously retro ‘80s, it takes place during the early years of the millennium, following its characters between 2000 and 2004. More subtly but equally bold, the show doesn’t begin with a tight-knit nerd crew role-playing together before life pulls them in separate directions, a standard narrative for these types of stories. In fact, no one in the show plays the game until late in the first of three 90-minute acts, when Riley (Greg Cuellar) acts as Dungeon Master for his younger friends Em (Christopher Dylan White), Tony (Jamie Sanders), and Kendall (Andrea Lopez Alvarez). Eventually, they’re joined by Riley’s best friend Clara (Olivia Rose Barresi), who finds the game to be an unexpected escape from her self-applied academic pressure, romantic/sexual traumas, and the horrors of a post-9/11 United States.
