Initiative ★★★

In 2002, Take Me Out opened at The Public Theater and quickly became the talk of the town, not only for Richard Greenberg’s terrific script about a fictional baseball team, but also for its two nude shower scenes that explored the complicated dynamics of masculinity and homophobia. The instant hit transferred to Broadway and won the Tony Award for Best Play, and its 2022 revival proved the work still resonated, earning another Tony for Best Play Revival.

That kind of bold, risk-taking success has long defined The Public Theater, an incubator for such cultural milestones as A Chorus Line, The Normal Heart, and Hamilton. Now the esteemed institution is back with another show featuring a working shower and a baseball player; only this time, the athlete is a high schooler in California.

The play is Initiative by Else Went, an alum of the Public’s Emerging Writers Group who’s making her Off-Broadway debut. The show garnered advance attention for its eyebrow-raising five-hour running time, an investment – by the theater and by potential audiences – that even the most seasoned playwrights would struggle to obtain.

Is this play worthy of five-plus hours of time? Unfortunately, no. Has this impressive risk paid off? Not yet.

Will it? Almost certainly.

Perhaps not with this show, at least not with the script as it now stands, but even with this play’s substantial dramaturgical issues, it’s clear that Went is a major talent.

Like Take Me Out, Initiative is set in the early 2000s. It follows seven small-town high school students over a four-year period, and the first part before intermission (the play is divided into chapters, not acts) rocks. Went opens with a painful seduction scene on a Yosemite youth trip between two eighth-grade friends: baseball player Lo (Carson Higgins) and aspiring writer Riley (Greg Cuellar, terrific) that ends not only with both young men feeling vulnerable and confused, but also with a dramatic question that colors the entire rest of the play. Asks Lo: “You ever think about dying?”

Soon the teenagers are back at high school, along with overachiever Clara (Olivia Rose Barresi, glorious), a childhood friend of Riley’s who’s been home-schooled for years and is only now returning to the public school system. Almost immediately a Chekhovian love triangle emerges, with Lo interested in Clara, who’s in love with Riley, who’s gay but still closeted and also still sexually attracted to Lo.

Life, death, college applications: Went captures adolescents and their angst beautifully. The teens text; they disappoint each other in ways trivial and consequential; they struggle to understand their feelings, let alone communicate them. Events that might seem minor in an adult’s rearview mirror – like the school’s homecoming dance – feel, to them, epic.

That epicness of emotions goes some way toward justifying the production’s extended running time, and the play succeeds when it focuses on the fumbling, bumbling choices and behaviors of the students as they try to figure things out for themselves. Their parents are either absent or totally dysfunctional, so the teenagers all appear to be navigating puberty on their own, save for Mr. Stone (Brandon Burk), a somewhat odd English teacher who’s heard but never seen.

So far, so good. Enter Dungeons and Dragons, the collaborative role-playing game that all but Lo participate in, and the storytelling veers into a problematic cavern. Sure, the experience is a bonding one for the teenagers, a way for them to escape from their daily lives and to deepen their friendships, but except for one incident with relatively low stakes because it happens to a character the audience knows little about, the role-playing sequences have too little bearing on their real lives.

Initiative devotes an inordinate amount of time and energy to D&D in its second and third parts, time that could have – and should have – been devoted to developing the other four characters in the play, each of whom is underwritten – one shockingly so – to the point that only one of the four, Kendall, played with colorful zest by Andrea Lopez Alvarez, emerges as a distinct person. The others all feel fuzzy, and frustratingly so.

Why did no one grab a sword and chop the indulgent game scenes to pieces? Director Emma Rose Went, who creates genuine magic in the intimate scenes, is married to the playwright.

That closeness may have complicated the critical distance the piece needed during development. That is for the talented Wents to figure out – and let’s hope they do – because despite the show’s narrative missteps, much of Initiative is thrilling.