Two things to know before going to see teen drama epic, Initiative: It’s five-and-a-half-hours long, and contains a lot of Dungeons & Dragons.
You need to have staying power for this long, long play (Public Theater, to Dec. 7)—a smattering of our audience bailed during each of the show’s two 15-minute intervals. Surely, you might think, if it’s pitched at such an epic length there must be an epic point to it. But if you’re a teen drama fan you’ve pretty much seen it all in your favorite shows and movies.
Perhaps it was the many minutes given over to the playing of D&D (fans of which will be in clover). Or maybe it was its fits-and-starts storytelling, but Initiative—written by Else Went, and directed by Emma Rosa Went—may leave you wondering something rather blunt: Why is it so long?
The play follows the lives of a group of teenagers between 2000 and 2004, attending a California high school (the town is referred to as “Coastal Podunk”). Clara (Olivia Rose Barresi) is intelligent, headed for bigger things, but involved in an early relationship tangle with Riley (Greg Cuellar) and Lo (Carson Higgins). A significant early part of the play is about the latter pair having a clandestine sexual encounter at a sleepaway camp, Riley himself being secretly gay, and Lo claiming not to be (after performing oral sex on Riley), then becoming a mind-game playing, vicious homophobe.
Clara moons after Riley, Riley kind of wants Lo, but also recoils from him, especially as his vitriol towards Riley become more violent. Riley may also want his gently suggestive unseen teacher who flatters his writing all the time to the point of suggestive flirtation and grooming. Misunderstandings and perceived rejections lead everyone to be miserable for a time.
Elsewhere Kendall (Andrea Lopez Alvarez) is more sexually assertive than Clara, and has a crush on Em (Christopher Dylan White), Lo’s nicer brother. The two boys live with an unseen, drug addict mother, and seek sanctuary in the family basement where they use the one home computer (remember that time?) to message the other teens via AIM.
The inter-teen electronic messaging pile-ups are entertainingly performed, in person and via words beamed on to the wall. Jamie Sanders is also excellent as Tony, Em’s ginormous doofus of a friend who later goes full incel, while later arrival Ty (Harrison Densmore) seems like the new queer kid at school, although appearances can be deceiving etc.
It’s initially intriguing that the actors in Initiative are playing teenagers while in reality are in their mid-to-late thirties; you wonder if they will age during the play. But no. “The characters are all millennials, and the actors are all millennials,” Emma Rosa Went recently told the New York Times. In drawing on their own memories, “they’re doing a kind of time travel.” It makes sense in theory and conception, but looks and feels odd on stage.
There are some well-written, well-staged moments peppered throughout, particularly around the friendship of Clara and Riley. Higgins brings a menace and wrenching upset to Lo, and White a softness and mystery to Em. But when Dungeons & Dragons games start being played for long stretches—and despite an attempt to link the games to the characters’ life situations—the show loses focus.
Initiative feels long but not meaningfully epic, even if some scenes—involving grief, desire, coming out, and identity—have a moving power. The play concludes with a commencement speech, which is all about endings being beginnings: a deflating anti-climax which is less an ending, more an ellipsis after the play’s collection of micro-dramas finally evaporates.
