‘A nucleus of a community’: the five-hour stage play about Dungeons & Dragons

It 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.

The complete cast of Initiative by Else Went and directed by Emma Rosa Went. Photograph: Jackie Abbott

There are a variety of other social entanglements that inform the character dynamics, best discovered by sinking into their lives for several hours. By the time they’re role-playing, the characters – all convincingly embodied by full adults – feel so real that their fantasy lives have more depth. This is informed partially by Else’s experiences working at a gaming shop, the community that they saw forming there, and their proper introduction to D&D in college. “It was really important to me to think of the game as a nucleus of a community,” Else said of the relatively late formation of the D&D campaign in the play. “The ways that people are changed by playing this game in this social group are because of Riley’s authorship, not because Dungeons & Dragons exists.” Emma Rose Went, the show’s director and Else’s wife, added: “For this play, it makes so much narratively to understand the community first as individuals, where they’re coming from.”

That also means avoiding some of the expositional and relational shortcuts that often accompany less expansive work, where archetypes can become the default. “I’m really tired of plays that use that shorthand,” Else said, “that do not invest in the humanity of their characters and rather use them as signifiers for some philosophical or sociopolitical argument.” Though the play includes characters who are gay, bisexual, and who we’d probably identify now as trans, it never feels like it’s trying to impart clean, clear lessons so much as attempting to sort out millennials’ formative years. Initiative is carefully vividly grounded in the early 2000s, from its post-9/11 anxieties to its beautifully staged instant-messaging conversations. “We called those sequences chat ballets,” Emma said of the scenes where teenagers are shown balancing multiple IMs at once, which will activate powerful memories in virtually anyone born between 1980 and 1990. “I wanted to look at the early part of the internet and its effects on how we exist socially and interpersonally with each other, right before social media,” Else said. Emma further explained that this involved fine-tuning some of the acting, not trying to adopt an overly digitally minded effect: “What we needed to do was not play the internet, but actually play teenagers in isolated spaces. You can’t embody digital noise. But what you can embody is isolation.”

Other attempts to examine the recent past, especially involving a cultural phenomenon like D&D, have involved easy references and nostalgia. Initiative is a nostalgic play, but not in the I-love-the-‘80s way it’s been most commonly understood over the past quarter-century or more. Else clarified that “the original concept of nostalgia is one of pain – not one of comfort, necessarily. It’s a painful desire for home or for past, or some sense of being able to be in a situation in which one cannot again be.” The term initially described something experienced by soldiers, they added. “That’s sort of where I tried to hit with it. Nostalgia is a thing that reminds us of things that we may not have appreciated at the time we experienced them, and there’s a desire to appreciate them properly.”

That’s precisely the play’s effect, particularly in a scene towards the end of the third act. Earlier, the audience has seen a more fantastical version of the game, where characters are acting out their role-played adventures, bounding around the stage, sometimes with props, costumes, and fantasy-environment lighting. Those depictions are familiar from other D&D media, though certainly assembled with plenty of clever stagecraft here at the Public Theater. It’s striking, then, when a later pivotal game is staged without any of that. For the first time in many hours, we see the players sitting on the floor, actually rolling dice and scribbling calculations on their character sheets. No costumes, no swords. It’s just as involving, somehow, as the more traditional fantasy sequences. Else put it succinctly: “By the time we arrive at that last game, we’re capable of doing that imagining with them.”

That inviting nature of the show makes Initiative relatable without being steeped in D&D; any understanding of youthful bonding should do it. “I don’t consider myself an experienced or serious player [of Dungeons & Dragons] in any way,” Emma said, “but the analog that I had as a teenager is making theater. For me, a lot of what the game is doing [in the play] is functioning as a stand-in for what it feels like to make theater with your community.” Appropriately, the show pulls off a series of magic tricks – less showy than a wizard or a paladin, but in its real-world way, equally impressive.

• Initiative is showing at the Public Theater in New York until 7 December