The setting of Else Went’s “Initiative” is a pillar of American culture: high school. The play covers four years in its teenage characters’ lives, from the summer of 2000, right before the older ones enter ninth grade, to commencement in 2004.
Where the show departs from common theatrical specs is by giving itself the breadth to fully engage with that time span: Directed by the playwright’s wife, Emma Rosa Went, the production at the Public Theater takes up five hours of stage time (with intermissions and a dinner break, the total time commitment can reach six and a half hours). This looks daunting, but it also feels fitting for a story set during one of the great American obsessions, judging by the space those years take up in people’s heads and the inordinate amount of energy artists devote to revisiting them.
At this length, some slackness does set in, which isn’t an issue in itself — shows, like people, need room to breathe. What is more surprising, and frustrating, is what is missing.
Without going for full-blown docu-realism, more information about the characters’ socio-economic backgrounds or family situations would have helped. Instead those are addressed in a patchy manner. We know that the mother of Lo (Carson Higgins) and Em (Christopher Dylan White) is messed up on pills, for example, but that’s it — like all adults in the play she remains unseen, though the kids can hear her muffled yells from the basement where they use the computer and play video games. That Clara (Olivia Rose Barresi) grew up in a Christian household is briefly mentioned then dropped. Literally: pray tell? The rambunctious Tony (Jamie Sanders) remains so untapped I wondered why he was even there. Perhaps this vagueness is meant to fit a show set in a nondescript California town referred to only as Coastal Podunk, but a few anchoring details wouldn’t hurt. Just because some adolescents tend to be solipsistic doesn’t mean a playwright should follow their lead.
The characters orbit around a central kernel formed by besties Clara and Riley (Greg Cuellar). She’s the only one whom Riley, an aspiring writer, has told he’s gay. Lo knows, too, but the reason this bullying jock is in on the secret looms over the story.
As the kids make their way through school, their group grows to include Kendall (Andrea Lopez Alvarez), who’s technically younger — she’s in eighth grade when we meet her — but acts a lot older. Whether that is by design or a flaw in execution is another problem. Is Kendall a preternaturally free spirit or did she have to mature fast because of some external factor? For some reason the Wents could not spare a couple of minutes to tell us.
There is plenty of time, however, for lengthy sessions of Dungeons & Dragons, which is central to “Initiative” — the title is a reference to the order of turn, usually in combat, during a game.
Em, Clara, Kendall and Tony participate in campaigns masterminded by Riley. (Ty, a shy transfer student played by Harrison Densmore, joins a little later.) The D&D scenes tend to be indulgently long and perfunctorily staged. Worse, they rarely provide illuminating insights into the teenagers’ lives. The characters are at the age when they define themselves and their place in society, so role-playing in the codified fantasy of D&D could parallel real-world explorations, but “Initiative” does not make much from that conceit. (Qui Nguyen’s play “She Kills Monsters,” from 2011, is smarter and much funnier about those back-and-forth connections.)
The show much more effectively deploys the other major way through which the characters communicate. It is set when AOL Instant Messenger was taking flight and radically altering the lives of teenagers; sometimes we see projections of their chats, sometimes cast members speak them out loud. The result is paradoxical: virtual conversations that both reinforce and alleviate the characters’ sense of isolation. Still, it’s hard to shake the sense that the play takes up an epic canvas but leaves it half filled.
Initiative Through Dec. 7 at the Public Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 5 hours.
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