Most coming-of-age plays invite us to relate to individual characters as they navigate adolescent turmoil. We watch from outside, recognizing ourselves in their struggles. Else Went’s “Initiative,” receiving its world premiere at The Public Theater, does something far more ambitious and profound: it draws us inside the collective unconscious of seven teenagers coming to terms with trauma, sexuality, violence, and survival in a small California coastal town between 2000 and 2004. Across five hours and twenty minutes (including two intermissions), Went doesn’t ask us to observe these young people—she invites us to inhabit their shared psyche, to experience how individual wounds reverberate through the entire group consciousness.

This is what justifies the epic runtime. Went has written the most authentic and devastating deep dive into teenage experience since “Spring Awakening,” but where Steven Sater and Duncan Sheik’s musical tracks individual arcs within an ensemble, “Initiative” creates something closer to a genuine collective mind. The Dungeons & Dragons campaign that anchors the narrative isn’t merely escapist entertainment—it’s literally the group’s shared imaginal space, where they process real trauma through fantasy metaphor. When one character suffers, we feel it through multiple perspectives simultaneously. When two die in a bridge accident just before graduation, we lose them through the surviving consciousnesses of their friends

What distinguishes Went’s work is its refusal to reduce teenage experience to a single issue. “Initiative” encompasses the full spectrum: sexual identity and closeted self-hatred (Riley and Lo’s toxic dynamic beginning with a sexual encounter at age 14), sexual assault and violated consent (Clara’s experience under the apple tree), gender nonconformity and relentless bullying (Ty, the soft-spoken New York transfer), addiction and family dysfunction (Lo’s descent into dealing and using pills, his mother’s post-surgical dependence), first love and rejection (Em and Kendall navigating the difference between friendship and romance), suicidal ideation (Riley contemplating the bridge), and post-9/11 political awakening (Clara researching the Patriot Act and Guantanamo while adults tell her to “unplug”). These conflicts never descend into melodrama; they remain psychologically true rather than manipulative, precisely because Went is writing from inside the collective experience rather than observing it from outside.

The play’s authenticity has a source that becomes thematically embedded in the work itself. Riley, one of the seven friends, is a talented writer working on a 200-page novel titled “Coastal Podunk” – his attempt to process the suffocation of small-town life and his own internal trauma through fiction. Went’s dedication reveals she’s engaged in the same act: “This play is the letter to my younger self that I cannot receive. It is not nostalgia, nor is it a promise that things will get better, that it will all work out. It is apology and forgiveness, to myself, to my first friends, my first loves.” Both playwright and character use art as survival mechanism, sending their souls into the past “wiser now.” This isn’t autobiography masquerading as drama – it’s drama that understands how young artists metabolize lived experience into meaning.

Under Emma Rosa Went’s direction, the production earns every minute of its five-hour runtime. There are no sections that drag; Went maintains forward momentum even through two intermissions that run past the standard fifteen minutes. The technical elements support rather than overwhelm: projections display the AIM chat conversations (brilliantly flowing across the entire set at times), costumes and props serve the D&D sequences appropriately, but it’s Went’s language and the actors’ complete commitment to authenticity that do the real work. The ensemble is uniformly excellent, with no weak links across the cast spectrum. What makes these performances so compelling is that the actors speak in a language that is exactly how teens of that early-2000s generation would speak – not how adults remember teenage speech, but how it actually sounded, felt, and functioned.

The actors dive deeply into their characters’ psyches, speaking authentically from their individual points of view about how they see the world collapsing around them. Gregory Cuellar’s Riley and Carson Higgins’s Lo create a devastating portrait of internalized homophobia as violence – their locker room confrontation, where Lo forces Riley to his knees before punching him in the face, is almost unwatchable in its psychological precision. Olivia Rose Barresi’s Clara navigates the impossible terrain of assault, political awakening, and survivor’s guilt with remarkable nuance. Christopher Dylan White brings a quiet desperation to Em, the younger brother always in Lo’s shadow, searching for where to “put his hours.” Jamie Sanders’s Kendall is both the emotional truth-teller and the most damaged, while Andrea Lopez’s Ty embodies the particular courage required to be soft in a world that punishes it. Even Harrison Densmore’s Tony, the most troubling character – crude, homophobic, eventually joining the Marines – never becomes a cartoon; he remains recognizably human, which makes him more disturbing.

The Dungeons & Dragons campaign functions as more than narrative device – it’s the externalization of the group’s collective unconscious. When Riley serves as Dungeon Master, guiding his friends through the quest to defeat the necromancer Ulfric and rescue the corrupted paladin Andromeda, he’s creating a space where they can process real trauma through fantasy metaphor. Em’s mage Nym seeks validation from the Royal Mage Academy (mirroring Em’s search for identity separate from his brother). Kendall’s thief Lilaia survives through cunning (reflecting her own outsider status). Clara’s paladin Andromeda battles corruption and makes an oath to protect others (the inverse of her own violation). The climactic battle, where Andromeda is rescued through statistically improbable double natural-20 rolls, offers a grace the real world will not provide. It’s a shared imaginal space where fair outcomes are possible, where teamwork defeats evil, where the dice sometimes fall your way. The title itself is a D&D term – the roll that determines who acts first in combat – but it resonates beyond the game: these young people are taking initiative in discovering who they are, claiming agency over their own narratives.

The final movement takes a devastating risk that pays off completely. After Lo drives his car off the bridge while intoxicated (killing both himself and Riley, who was standing there contemplating suicide), the play refuses to theatricalize death. In the commencement chapter, Riley and Lo simply appear – no lighting changes, no sound cues, no ghostly effects. Riley sits next to Clara on the swings; Lo enters the basement to talk with Em. The conversations feel utterly natural, as if they’d never died. This staging choice captures something true about grief: the dead don’t feel like theatrical ghosts, they feel present, still themselves, which makes their absence even more devastating. The naturalism is so complete that for a moment even the attentive viewer might forget they’re gone – and that confusion adds to the emotional gut-punch when you re-remember.

Clara’s commencement address, delivered with Riley’s ghost standing beside her, provides no false comfort. “This is a beginning,” she tells her graduating class, struggling to find hope in a world that has been “attacked” and is “at war.” Her speech acknowledges what the adults in the play consistently failed to: that continuing on, surviving, doing what we can “when it feels like we can do so little” is sometimes enough. “We will fix some broken things and make them better,” she promises. “Even if those things are small, even if those things are ourselves, it is a worthy task.” She stands before her peers with “two other people who you cannot see, but who you do see” – Riley and Lo, the dead who haunt every surviving consciousness. “Life will not answer questions about death,” she admits. “Great talent is lost, great potential, and the world keeps turning.” Her conclusion offers only the most modest hope: “The world seems to me a very dark place right now, but the only thing to do, the only choice we have, is to light our torches, and venture into it.”

Went doesn’t provide easy answers to the questions she raises: How do we discover who we are when the world pressures us to conform? What does it mean to respect boundaries when cultural scripts encourage us to push past them? How do national events shape the inner lives of young people? Is forgiveness possible without apology? She trusts her audience to sit with these uncertainties, just as her characters must. The play’s resonance in 2025 feels almost painfully acute – today’s young people face their own catalog of collective anxieties (climate crisis, political chaos, social media’s particular toxicity), and Clara’s words about lighting torches and venturing into darkness speak across the decades.

“Initiative” is that rare theatrical achievement: an epic that justifies its scale, an ensemble piece that creates genuine collective consciousness rather than parallel storylines, and a coming-of-age drama that refuses to sentimentalize or simplify the brutality of adolescence. Else Went has crafted a letter to her younger self that becomes a letter to all of us – an invitation into the shared psyche of survival, trauma, and the modest hope that lighting a torch might be enough. Under Emma Rosa Went’s direction, this becomes essential American theater, the kind of ambitious, emotionally honest, politically engaged work that reminds us why we need the stage. At five hours and twenty minutes, it asks a lot of its audience. It gives back more than it takes.