A new off-Broadway play, Initiative, is captivating audiences with its five-hour runtime, exploring the lives of seven teenagers in the early 2000s through the lens of Dungeons & Dragons. The play, written by Else Went, deliberately uses its length to create a deeper emotional commitment from the audience. “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,” Went said.
Initiative arrives amid a resurgence of Dungeons & Dragons popularity, partly due to Netflix’s Stranger Things. However, the play avoids retro 80s nostalgia, instead setting its story between 2000 and 2004. It also subverts expectations by not starting with a tight-knit group of players; the characters only begin their D&D campaign late in the first act, when Riley (Greg Cuellar) acts as Dungeon Master for his younger friends.
The play draws on Went’s experience working at a gaming shop, where they observed the community forming around the game. “It was really important to me to think of the game as a nucleus of a community,” Went explained. Director Emma Rose Went, Else’s wife, added: “For this play, it makes so much narratively to understand the community first as individuals, where they’re coming from.”
The characters, all played by adults, feel authentic and grounded, avoiding archetypes. The play includes gay, bisexual, and trans characters but focuses on the complexities of millennial formative years rather than delivering clear lessons. It is meticulously set in the early 2000s, featuring post-9/11 anxieties and scenes of instant-messaging conversations, which the creative team called “chat ballets.”
