Sarah on theater

I fear I’m a sucker for a long play; my butt’s sore but I’m happy to report that this is worth the time. Epic in length (at five hours!) if not necessarily in scope, Else Went’s “Initiative” chronicles the lives & times & self-discoveries of a group of high schoolers over the course of four years in the early 2000s. Kids of that era will recognize a slate of cultural touchpoints, especially the heavy use of AIM to chat online, which was a key piece of the contemporaneous social dynamic. Most of the characters participate in a Dungeons & Dragons group, and several of them are queer, but neither experience is a prerequisite to enjoy the play.

The main effect of the runtime isn’t an overly long or complex plot - you could hit the key beats in half the time if you were in a hurry - but the affordance of time for all these characters, relationships, & moments to breathe & marinate. These are formative years, after all, and the experiences need space to burn into your brain. Not everything is tied off neatly - nor should it be - and in some cases, we’re left overt hints for what happens next. For instance, the casting notes dictate that one character must be played as pre-transition by a trans performer, and although we get allusions to that, this isn’t that story. The effect of this is pretty nice: it feels focused but also like an episode in lives which will carry on past the curtain call.

Even as this is a five-hour simmer, the pacing stays lively, the tone is bright and funny, and direction by Emma Rose Went (wife of the playwright) is nicely varied. D&D scenes, for instance, are sometimes staged with the characters sitting in a basement, and other times in full wizard drag with video projection to change the scene. I caught myself grinning quite a lot out of, like, sheer surprise and delight. I appreciated that these scenes weren’t leaning into tropey wish-fulfillment role-playing for the characters, especially the queer ones - it’s less about the personas they’re occupying and more about kids having fun, escaping the pressures of their lives for a little while, except, of course, when real-life resentments bleed into the game.

This is all quite a feat of endurance for the cast, not only because of the runtime: they’re pulling double duty with the teenage angst scenes and also the complex sword-‘n’-sorcery business. Greg Cuellar, especially, as Riley, is doing a dizzying amount of work as both the emotional center and the group’s dungeon master, but I didn’t feel like there were any weak members in the ensemble. I really enjoyed spending the time with them.

I think landing the plane on something like this is challenging; it’s hard to strike a balance between the sprawling naturalism and a satisfying-enough conclusion of narrative threads for the audience. My friend and I left the theater both feeling a little surprised and wanting something more out of the ending. A conflict unresolved. A crush unvoiced. That’s life, I suppose, and so it’s not unsuitable for a piece like this, but I admit that it left me with an ever-so-slightly soured impression of a play I otherwise really enjoyed. Maybe I’m imposing my idea of what story this ought to be over the story it is. Maybe I haven’t considered it carefully enough. Sometimes, that’s how it be.