A five hour play
FAQ about Initiative at The Public: duration, ambition, invitation, and why it's worth it
What
Okay, friends! Tickets for our play Initiative just went on sale at the Public Theater, so this seems as good a time as any to start talking about the elephant in the room! Yes, Initiative is a ~ very long ~ play. The experience will probably be *just* a bit more than five hours — on weeknights, you will see the play starting at 6:30 PM and probably leave the theatre around midnight. On weekends, Saturday curtain is at 2 PM and there is a 90 minute dinner break built in, so you’ll see the first two acts, leave for a dinner break (or stay in the theatre and go to their fancy in-house restaurant) and then return for the second half beginning at 6:30 PM. On Sunday, curtain is still at 2 PM but there is no long break, so the show will come down around 7:30 PM.
Here’s a brief FAQ rundown:
Q) How many acts is this play?
A) The play is in four acts — the first is about an hour, the second is about 80 minutes, the third aboooouuuut 70 minutes, and the fourth maaaaaybe 70. You will certainly never have to sit for more than 90 minutes without peeing or getting a snack! We believe in peeing, snacking, stretching, and chatting about the play in between acts. Snack-wise, we plan to be liberal and maybe even thematic… should the Public serve lunchables and Capri-Sun and dunkaroos at concessions? Reader, we think yes…
Q) How many intermissions are there??
A) There are three intermissions. There is a break following each act — the effect of this structure is that it makes Initiative (we have been told, by the many kind friends who have been audiences for workshops over the years) actually very easy to watch. The experience in the body is not unlike the experience you have in your home binge-watching a tv-series. Think of it as four sequential episodes, except you’re binge-watching in person, in the theatre, with other humans. Going on the long journey in one room as a group, getting (hopefully!) more invested and comfortable in that room together as time goes on — that collective experience is why we’re doing this.
Q) Why is the play this long?
A) Good question. The short version is: because we could not tell the story we really wanted to tell in any other way. Initiative is set in a high-school in coastal California at the turn of the millennium — it takes place from 2000-2004, and carries its characters from the beginning of their high-school experience to graduation. It’s about watching them grow up, yes, but it’s also about feeling like you are growing up with them. Sitting in the theatre for an hour+ per act, experiencing time-cycles and milestones and shocks and reunions and discoveries along with them, we hope that you come to a place of arrival by the end of the play that is genuinely experiential — you haven’t just witnessed something, it will have happened to you. That’s the idea.
Q) What happens in this freaking play?? What makes it “epic”??
A) Well, we make the humble contention that adolescence is epic. For my part, the first play I ever directed was Romeo and Juliet (I was 16) and I gravitated towards it because I took myself seriously when I was sixteen, and I felt like Shakespeare did too. His play had sex, violence, life and death stakes, love, friendship, and generational conflict. The highs and lows of the characters’ emotional landscapes felt authentic to me, because I felt like I was a real person at sixteen, whose love and whose ambitions and struggles were real, and not deserving of ridicule. And I think I was right. This play is NOT Romeo and Juliet, so that may have been misleading, but it places a handful of young people at a tumultuous moment in their own lives, within a tumultuous historical moment in the world. Content-warning wise, I guess you should know there’s some sex and violence! There will be blood, simulated sexuality, AIM-chatting (be warned!) dungeons and dragons, and full-frontal nudity. Loneliness, queerness, frank discussion of mental health struggles of various kinds, betrayals, some challenging language, despair and rebirth. The stuff of life, babay. Epic as it is.
How
We started work on this play in 2018 — Else had a fellowship at Playwrights Realm and we worked on it there in 2018-19. Many members of the team that are still actively building this thing have been in the boat with us since then! It is typical for new plays in New York to have a long developmental life, but the *truly* durational quality of this play’s journey feels… apt. I have recently been asked several variations of “how do you make a giant thing?” and the answer for me has been “over time.” We did the initial Public Theater reading of the play in 2023 and I think we felt ready to go at that time, but when I think back on the work of the past two years, I’m so grateful for the slow build. Time to think, sketch, dream, meet and select collaborators, have an idea and then a different version, then a better version. Ask a lot of questions. The Public has been very generous with in-house workshop time, so we were in rehearsal for two two-week blocks in 2024 (in February, then in November) so by the time we reach rehearsal in September this year, it will really be week… 6 or 7 in our collective bodies.
We have tested different versions of the presentation style (i.e. is it better in one long event broken up into four parts, or in a two-part evening, etc) and collectively reached the form that the general public will encounter this fall. We feel hopeful that this form is both mindful of your physical needs and retains the original clarity of the artistic intention — we didn’t want to water it down or break it up or compromise the vision, and happily, we were not asked to. We are asking something real of the people involved in making this thing, and we’re asking something real of you too, to come see it. It felt clear in our hearts and minds and bodies that this was the right thing to do.
Why
What Else and I are wanting to help create in the theatre landscape — not *just* with this play, but certainly with this play — is a theatre of deep feeling. I go to plays for a lot of reasons, like anybody else — I can be tickled, and made to think, and delighted, educated, and entertained — but chiefly what I want is to be cracked open. I want to be got at, if that makes sense. I don’t want to be unaffected, unprovoked, unmoved. I think people’s hearts are more hungry and flexible than we give them credit for, and for us, plays about characters navigating real need and desire and stakes and encountering the joys and obstacles of their lives with an ambitious depth of feeling, is what the true benchmark seems to be. I’m not wild about ironic distance as a tone (though some people do it brilliantly, it just isn’t our voice) and what Initiative is hopefully an invitation to, is an opportunity to dig deep into real characters. This opportunity is for the performers, of course, but also for us, in the audience. To care so much about one little group of kids. To see, will they get together. Will they learn to do it right. Will they apologize. Will they grow, will they kiss, will they get out of this town. Will they connect, or miss their opportunity. Are they going to be okay? I want to see a play where we care about people deeply, and where we see in them versions of ourselves, our friends, and our beloveds from past and present, who reflect back to us aspects of our past and present. So we have tried to make one of those for you.
The duration is not the only aspect that enables this experience, but it’s part of it. When a certain kind of formality in the room wears away (inevitably around hour three) something else emerges. A pure desire to see what happens, a leaning in, a fraying of the usual emotional defenses we put up. When we’re tired, our walls drop a little, because we lack the social stamina to keep them erected. Then, something weird can happen. We can let go a little, I think. We can really go somewhere together. Also, because exhaustion enables catharsis, in a funky kind of way. There is not a consistent formula at work here, but if there was one, it might look like: ‘get hooked, get horny, get tired, and CRY.’ Get free, get wrecked, get healed.
Why, again
For the longest time, Else’s ‘about me’ section on New Play Exchange was just “I want to make theatre worth the trouble,” and her description of Initiative was just “a big play about growing up in the new millennium.” What she meant in the first case, is that theatre is so hard to make. It’s expensive, impractical in many ways, and it takes SO many people and so much time and effort. What would it mean to make it truly worth the trouble? For me, I think it means making a thing that is not just reaching for great craft (god, we hope, we hope!) but also reaching for great heart. That has a kind of honest, brave, striving about it. An effort to lay the self bare, why not. And to call Initiative “a big play about growing up in the new millennium” is as accurate as any description could ever be. It’s a big play, partly because it was just a big TIME. Because (as a millennial, which experience is of course the contextual backdrop of this play) the world felt huge when we were young, and in the moment *right* before the internet took over everything, the world (politics, the cosmos, our own destinies) still felt vast and unknowable. But also, adolescence is a big time for us ALL. What does it mean to become yourself, what does it take? Who will you love, what will you lose, will the world embrace you? Who is your community, what is your calling?
In that light, I submit to you, five hours feels very reasonable indeed :)
Love you, thank you, see you in the theatre — we hope you cry, we hope you dance ;)
xx