Once in a great while, if you’re really lucky, you come upon a job of stage work that makes you remember what you’ve always been seeking: theater’s potential writ large. I entered the Public Theater at 2 pm on a Sunday with some trepidation, and left at 7 pm (five hours, your math is right) walking on air, having experienced a major cadre of talents engaged with a major American play, Initiative, written by Else Went and directed by Emma Rosa Went.
Late at night, in a Yosemite cabin in May of 2000, two adolescent boys from a little town in northern California engage, as kids will, in a single brief sexual encounter. That casual event is destined to resonate through seven youngsters’ lives, more than any of them will ever realize, across the next four years until high school commencement in 2004. Yet Initiative is not of the gay-play genre per se, any more than it’s a clichéd saga of teen angst in the vein of a Grease or Breakfast Club.
What it is, really, is a novel: the dramatic equivalent of a group bildungsroman. Its portrait of seven lives under construction (so to speak), divided into chapters, is crafted with an attention to detail, and an emotional intelligence, that kept reminding me of something out of Flaubert or Elena Ferrante. Bursting with small, telling moments that are occasionally interrupted by consequential ones – you know, like life – Initiative is the product of a playwright serenely convinced that her characters are not to be dismissed as privileged suburban layabouts; that their stories are substantial and deserving of respect.
Went’s people come from three graduating years, which in adolescent terms is like the clash of generations. From the Class of 2004 come Riley (Greg Cuellar), the loner with a literary bent; Lo (Carson Higgins) the jock, expecting his pitching arm to be his exit ticket; and Clara the brainiac (Olivia Rose Barresi), whose Christian homeschooling has prepared her for straight A’s but not for the social rituals of cafeteria and prom.
A year behind them are Lo’s little bro Em (Christopher Dylan White), an affable but troubled gamester, and plus-size Tony (Jamie Sanders), who respects mischief but has contempt for everything else. Out of the Class of ’06 are alluring Kendall (Andrea Lopez Alvarez), sophisticated beyond her years, and Ty (Harrison Densmore), an elfin émigré from Gotham carting empathy and secrets. And then there are the adults, whom we perceive as the kids do, from afar: the anguished cries of Lo and Em’s opiated mom; harangues from a teacher or counselor, heard but not seen or listened to. (Brandon Burk skillfully provides the offstage voices.)
The students’ modes of communication, as they navigate the minefields of classroom, home and free time, range from muttered non sequiturs to banter and horseplay, which is to say they have ready means of deflection always at hand. Candor and eloquence are more likely to be found in the incessant IM’s (“instant messages” to us codgers) that director Went shares with us in a fascinating array of aural and visual cues. Projection designer S. Katy Tucker, and sound designer Angela Baughman, offer notable assists in conveying the fugues of e-patois that’s the lingua franca of today’s youth.
But for piecing together the characters’ obsessions and fears, you can’t do better than clock their sessions of Dungeons & Dragons, the wildly popular fantasy-roleplay game run by a Dungeon Master – Riley, of course – whose scenario is subject to the whims of the Quest participants and the rolls of a 20-sided die. The Wents take pains to make the nature and rules of the game clear to even the novices among us. Then, over time, the players take their roles of warrior, magus or demon ever more seriously. Props and costumes emerge, and the entire LuEsther space becomes a fantasy land (strong contributions from lighting designer Christopher Akerlind here) where the kids’ real-life conflicts start to be played out – cosplayed out! – within the events of the Quest, domains converging to an ominous end. This is storytelling at its most audacious.
I can’t say enough about the seamless performances, said to be the product of years of development work with director and writer. Not only is the cast – the majority of whom are in their 30s – fully believable as high schoolers, but I swear you can track their maturing over four years in subtle alterations of voice, gesture and carriage. It’s ensemble playing at its finest, and the best argument for funding permanent companies, not to mention establishing an American national theater, I’ve encountered in a long time.
One could carp, I suppose, at some of the choices, or point out scenes that could use a trim. (Me, I wish the Wents would explain the title as a dimension of D&D game play, the factor that determines the order of battle; we already understand that among these teens, active agency is in short supply.) But I’ll be dismayed, if not surprised, if some write off the work as overly ambitious, “Much Ado About Millennials,” as if the terrors of bullying or ostracism or getting dumped weren’t as meaningful as anyone else’s. There’s a real mental health crisis among young people in this country, an epidemic of depression and suicide to hear some tell it, correlating with widespread doubt, purposelessness and, yes, a lack of initiative; and we condescend to it at our peril. As another social dramatist who also swung for the fences once noted, attention must be paid.
Initiative opened November 20, 2025, at the Public Theater and runs through December 7. Tickets and information: publictheater.org
