Initiative runs for five hours with two intermissions. That length sounds punishing until you are twenty minutes in and the play has no interest in testing your patience. It holds your attention through people worth following and scenes that keep shifting their center of gravity. You stay because the characters earn the time.
Written by Else Went and directed by Emma Rosa Went, the play tracks a group of friends through four years of high school at the start of the millennium. Riley (Greg Cuellar) becomes the figure who most clearly demonstrates what that journey costs, but the play never belongs to him alone. The play’s first scene is Riley giving his male best friend a summer-camp blowjob, an impulsive act that sets everything else in motion. What follows is a four-year negotiation with the universe about desire, safety, and who gets to decide when you are allowed to want what you want.
The play understands how to use space. Take the locker room. It does the work locker rooms always do in stories about teenagers, where hope, aspiration, misunderstanding, and violence share the same space. Multiple characters pass through it over the four years, each navigating their own version of exposure and consequence. The play keeps returning to a handful of locations like this, and each return lands differently. A power balance shifts. A friendship strains.
The production is minimal, as the Public often is, but it gives each recurring setting just enough definition to ground the story as it cycles through bedrooms, hallways, and hangouts. A kissing tree, a couch for video games, a simple window, and a desk are enough to suggest the whole ecosystem of their world. The design trusts the actors to carry the weight.
Which is why the Dungeons and Dragons session lands with such force. When Riley steps into the role of Dungeon Master, robe, athletic gestures, full theatrical charge, it is not a detour into nerd culture. It is a moment when creativity offers what life has not: a space where he can control the narrative, at least for an evening. The game becomes another way for these friends to negotiate who they are to one another, and watching Riley fully inhabit that role is a genuine pleasure.
The script also knows that Riley’s arc is not the only one worth tracking. While he navigates what he knows he wants but cannot safely pursue, the girl who acts like she is already living in the city she has not moved to yet develops a crush on the overly shy, pensive nerd. It is a straight relationship that clearly isn’t working, though you aren’t quite sure why until you watch it play out. Their confusion becomes its own kind of pain, two people trying on roles that should fit but do not, without the clarity to understand what is missing.
The ensemble, Olivia Rose Barresi, Harrison Densmore, Carson Higgins, Andrea Lopez Alvarez, Jamie Sanders, and Christopher Dylan White, plays the long game with the kind of restraint that lets five hours breathe without sagging. They understand that the big arc is built from smaller ones, and they trust the material enough not to push. You feel the four years in their bodies and voices as they move through the same rooms under new pressures. Though the cameos are infrequent, Brandon Burk’s offstage voice work lands every time. His spot-on delivery quietly makes a few of the scenes.
Initiative succeeds because it earns its scale. This production keeps earning that attention scene by scene, room by room. The final effect is not that you endured a long play. It is that you spent five hours with people who felt real enough to hold the stage. It offers the satisfaction of bingeing an outstanding limited series, the kind you wish would run another season.
Now Playing: Initiative is running at the Public Theater through December 7. Saturday performances include a 90-minute dinner break.
Tickets: Purchase directly from The Public Theater at https://publictheater.org/productions/season/2526/initiative. Prices begin around $100. The production is performed in LuEsther Hall at the Public Theater, 425 Lafayette Street, New York, NY 10003.
