Tag: review

The windows are down, the sun is a kaleidoscope through the reddening leaves, and I’m listening to Saves the Day’s Stay What You Are on the car CD-player, on the way to play Soul Caliber and hold hands with my boyfriend after school … It’s cold, and you can still hear the dull thud of the music from the goth club in the basement under the sushi bar, and I’m wearing a cheap polyester corset, and I think I’m about to be kissed in this parking lot under a full moon … It’s Homecoming, and I’m talking with the friend I’ve known since we were three, because we both came with guys who are in fact a couple, but one of them has parents who can’t find out he’s gay, so we’re their covers so they can meet up at the dance …

I don’t know what it is about adolescence—maybe it’s something to do with those underbaked prefrontal cortexes—but I doubt I’m alone in retaining memories from my teenage life that still feel as vivid, twenty-plus years on, as last week’s. It’s another world, in almost every sense another person, and at the same time its tiniest details, ecstatic or embarrassing, are still definitive, ephemeral and yet indelible.

It’s this sensation—a feeling of swimming through waters that long ago flowed on and out into the ocean—that the playwright Else Went captures so potently in Initiative. Developed over the last ten years with the collaboration of their wife, the director Emma Rosa Went, as well as many of the actors who are now on stage in its premiere at the Public, the show has both the patience and the pain of maturity. It feels slow-cooked, basted in rich juices and allowed to simmer. That the production is five hours long—three 90-minute acts unfolding over the course of the central characters’ four years in high school, plus intermissions—is certainly crucial to this quality, but it’s the pace and texture, rather than the length per se, that really distinguish Initiative. A play can run a marathon (see Gatz) or it can brew like tea, building a somatic experience that concentrates and darkens over time. This steeped and tannic quality is what keeps the Wents’ project—notwithstanding the Jimmy Eat World and Sugarcult blasting during the preshow, the dramatized AIM chats of its characters, and the Dungeons & Dragons sessions that become central to its story—distinct from nostalgia. Nostalgia is about consuming a version of the past as comfort food. Initiative is—to steal a “good 50-cent word” from one of its characters—elegiac. It’s about loss and survival and the way in which imagination can become as tangible and critical as a climbing rope on a cliff face.

If, unlike the play’s characters, you weren’t experiencing your own high-school odyssey over a fistful of D20s, here’s a brief nerd primer: Most role-playing games are a mash-up of make-believe and chance. You play a character with “ability stats,” number scores that represent things like Charisma, Strength, and Intelligence, which in turn determine how successful you might be at performing certain actions during the game (like seducing an innkeeper or smashing a skull). But to generate those stats and perform those actions, you’ve always got to roll a die. “Initiative” is rolled for when your party of characters enters combat: In the face of a threat, who gets to make the first move? Who will attack and who will defend? Who’s got the agility to maneuver or the constitution to endure, and whose fate comes down to luck alone?

The whole endeavor—the danger, the thrill, the arcane rules and the fun of breaking them, the conscious, experimental creating of self—presents a meaty metaphor for coming of age, and, like all seasoned D&D players, the Wents and their actors take its stakes entirely seriously. Initiative is no parody, nor is it rarefied content meant solely for former Wizards of the Coast aficionados. Its characters don’t even begin “the game,” as they call it, until almost a third of the way through. Before, during, and after, they’re fighting the comparatively banal yet infinitely more harrowing battle of their own young lives, weathering high school while facing down the new millennium and, soon enough, a new war, from their home in “Coastal Podunk” California.

“Nothing happens here,” says the aspiring writer Riley (the fantastically malleable Greg Cuellar, reminiscent of a young Alan Rickman) to his English teacher, Mr. Stone (played in live voiceover by Brandon Burk; adults have no physical presence in this world). Riley dreams of escape, and, in their own ways, so do all the characters of Initiative — the driven, pure-hearted former homeschooler, Clara (Olivia Rose Barresi), who’s aiming for Yale by way of perfect SATs; the brothers Lo (Carson Higgins) and Em (a heartbreaking Christopher Dylan White), who take opposite tacks as they cope with an absent father and opioid-addicted mother; the free spirit Kendall (Andrea Lopez Alvarez) and the shy, sweet misfit transfer student Ty (Harrison Densmore). Even Em’s big lug of a buddy Tony (Jamie Sanders), who casually throws slurs around (like a true early-2000s gamer bro) and groans over how long it takes to download porn on dial-up, is desperately looking for a way out. Like the others, he needs a path toward a solid sense of self, a place where wounds aren’t simply being triaged but can begin to heal.

It’s this desire for some control over their own destinies—especially in what, says Clara, panicking in the face of post-9/11 American aggression, feels like its own “really horrible time to be alive in America”—that draws the wandering young souls of Initiative toward D&D. Getting to be a brilliant spell-caster or a divinely inspired paladin doesn’t hurt either. Confronted with a real world that hardly makes the case for the existence of love or kindness, let alone magic or God, who wouldn’t choose fantasy? (The show’s creative team, especially projection designer S. Katy Tucker, does rich conjuring work where this fantasy is concerned, and my only regret is that they and their director are confined to the LuEsther, a theater that clearly partitions action and audience in a way that saps some of the energetic potential of Initiative’s emotionally immersive story.)

As if in refutation of the puritanical outcry over D&D in its early days, Went’s characters use the game to attempt to construct a more just moral universe. In this sense, the play’s location in time is crucial, not simply for the facts of that moment—George W. Bush, Lil John and Avril Lavigne, shouting at your mom who wants to use the phone that you’ll be done with the internet in “LITERALLY ONE MINUTE”—but for its ethos. Millennials are, at least for now, the last generation of believers. We grew up wanting to “fix the world” and thinking it could be done. We didn’t know the word “problematic.” Clara and Riley—with their big hearts and weak armor, untempered by irony, vulnerable to the catastrophes of disillusionment—might as well be our patron saints.

These smart, soulful best friends are at the heart of Initiative, and their conversations, whether casual or charged with heartbreak, showcase some of Went’s most sensitive writing. (Though, the play is full of gems, like this one from Kendall to Em: “How come every time we hang out I feel sad? … Like… it’s comforting kinda. Like I can be myself with you, and myself is actually kinda sad, and that’s okay.”) Barresi and Cuellar hold each other up with palpable tenderness, each one crafting a long, poignant arc from innocence through the fogs and thorns of experience. A scene in which Riley (who naturally becomes the Dungeon Master in the game) narrates a solo campaign for the suffering Clara—literally taking her out of herself by leading her through an adventure as the paladin Andromeda—is profoundly moving in its generosity. Likewise the care that Lo, an increasingly aggressive jock and in plenty of outward ways a “bad kid,” shows as he shields his recessive younger brother from the brunt of their mother’s violent illness. Or the gentleness with which Kendall applies makeup to Ty’s face to hide a bruise. Initiative is stitched through with moments like these, like colorful patches on a heavy pall, little saving throws against the dark. Depending on when you were born and how much time you’ve spent rolling dice in basements, it might take you back, but its real achievement, bracing and compassionate, lies in its encouragement to keep walking forward.

Initiative is at the Public Theater through December 7.