“Dungeons & Dragons” has been cool for a while now — or forever, depending on who you ask — but the iconic tabletop roleplaying game has recently achieved a new level of mainstream status: adaptations that are willing to explore the time it takes to play an actual campaign.
On one end of the “D&D”-themed media spectrum, you have more “traditional” the box office success of Paramount’s “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves” and the love letter to the ’80s version of the game’s storyline built into the Duffer Brothers’ “Stranger Things,” which set to debut its fifth and final season on Netflix later this month. On the other, you have the immense popularity of actual-play TV series, like Critical Role and Dropout’s “Dimension 20,” and Off-Broadway hit “Twenty-Sided Tavern,” which use D&D-style mechanics and real-time play to explore new IP and worlds created apart from that of “Dungeons & Dragons” maker Wizards of the Coast.
Joan Marcus
Joan Marcus
Sitting somewhere in the middle is the latest entrant into the “D&D”-inspired genre, “Initiative,” a five-hour long play opening at The Public Theater in New York City on Nov. 20 and now set to run through Dec. 7. (See Variety‘s first-look images of the play in the pictures above and below.)
Written by Else Went and directed by Emma Rosa Went, the play — which will include multiple intermission and, for Saturday performances, a 90-minute dinner break — is described as “a bittersweet reflection on adolescence at the dawn of the new millennium.”
Per the Public, “Initiative” (named in a nod to a key component of “D&D” gameplay) “charts the intertwined lives of seven teens from 2000-2004, as they become friends and more than friends, wrestle with their potential, face incalculable loss, and struggle to find their way in (and get out of) ‘Coastal Podunk, California.’”
Joan Marcus
Joan Marcus
Much of the throughline of the play — which stars Off-Broadway newcomers Olivia Rose Barresi as Clara, Greg Cuellar as Riley, Harrison Densmore as Ty, Carson Higgins as Lo, Andrea Lopez Alvarez as Kendall, Jamie Sanders as Tony and Christopher Dylan White as Em — centers on the group’s “D&D” league, and four critical portions of the show are devoted to their time spent playing together in character, as well as how the game acts as a central motif for their real-life journeys.
“I think the very initial seed of it was actually, in my first ever playwriting class, we were asked to write a scene, sort of of a gesture of kindness or love,” “Initiative” playwright Else Went told Variety. “And I wrote a scene about a bunch of people playing ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ in a basement who are interrupted by a phone call that a tragedy has happened, a car accident, and then they sort of hold each other and work through the impact of that and then return to the game as a space of safety. And then that thought evolved and evolved and had a gravitational pull of all these other elements of my own life in high school in this small town, and building community through collaborative storytelling — because ‘D&D’ is a type of theater — and then the play just grew outward from there.”
Joan Marcus
The initial concept for “Initiative” was written by Went in 2016, and now-director Emma Rosa Went and star Barresi collaborated with Went for that first version of the show in high school. During Went’s fellowship at Playwrights Realm between 2018-2019, Went expanded that script into what eventually became the five-hour final product — a big swing to take in the theatrical world as attention spans have notoriously decreased among audiences.
“We expanded the action and accordioned it out and included all of these other people and experienced their stories in regular sort of rolling time, and consequently the play got much longer,” director Rosa Went said. “And then we realized that that was actually the theatrically exciting container for it, and that it felt intrinsically right for the story of these young people taking place over their high school career, to actually watch them age over the four year period, over the durational timeline.”
Went and Rosa Went have been in residence at The Public for roughly the last year and “Initiative” was first programmed there two years ago, giving them a “very long, generous runway” to prep the show, including four weeks of rehearsal throughout 2024 and four more weeks of rehearsal that began this October after casting was finalized earlier this year. That meant that some cast members had been familiar with their parts for a few months and others for several years.
“In terms of process — and I feel this both for my character, Clara, but also for Andromeda, my ‘D&D’ player character [in ‘Initiative’] — I would say that the last nine years since I first met the character has been a process of building the rings around Saturn, is how I see it,” Barresi said. “I’ve taken a lot of time to find small things — songs, images, ‘D&D’ trinkets that I have from my ‘D&D’ real life — to build every meteor in this ring that is around the character that I play. So I feel insanely lucky, and I feel like we would all agree with that, to have had as much time as we have had — be it nine years, six years, a couple months, whatever, to sort of be able to find each space rock and bring it in.”
While those subtle bits and pieces of the performances are a key part of the play, the actors also needed to focus on a great deal of blocking and physical movement over the course of the five hours, including multiple choreographed fight scenes.
“It’s athletic. It requires the full breadth of my being — emotionally, psychologically, physically,” said Cuellar, who plays Riley, the show’s Dungeon Master, and is charged with hundreds of lines of narration. while in motion, to get the actors and audience through the “D&D” campaigns. “So I try to create a sense of arc, especially for the aging and in between every school year. Something sort of evolves that I have in the back of my mind of vocally, what is happening, physically, how the person is changing. So I’ve really tried to track that out. And from there, the great thing about it is that even though it’s long, Else has done a phenomenal job of just taking care of the actors so that I can step into the role. And if I just allow my instrument to flow through the lines of it, I really ultimately get to where I need to go by the end of the play.”
As for whether non-“D&D” fans will enjoy the show — and find it to be worth its five-hour runtime — the creative team has taken care to make it accessible without losing its potential die-hard audience either.
“There’s also just a beautiful way in which the humor permeates it,” Lopez Alvarez, who plays Kendall, said. “And Greg is doing amazing, amazing work with voices and physicality that really brings it to life. I think that anytime that we encounter ‘D&D,’ it fleshes it out a little more. So you start with a very basic like, ‘We’re playing a game! What are we doing?’ And then it expands into the scene that you saw today, which is this is fully realized, ‘We are playing this game. We know how it works.’ And I think that the audience watching it, by then will be like, ‘I understand what’s happening. I get it.’”