IT sound like a big ask, the idea of presenting an audience with a five-hour play. . Playwright Else seems unconcerned about the show’s length. “It’s very much part of the desire,” they said. (Gone is non-binary and uses they/he.
The initiative is definitely doing new things with material that may be familiar. It arrives, after a long period of production, at a time when Dungeons & Dragons seems to live on in visibility, thanks in part to the Netflix smash-hit Stranger Things, which uses D&D players (and terminology derived from the game) in its own ’80s-set fantasy-adventure-horror story. . Rather than a self-conscious retro ’80s, it takes place in the early years of the millennium, following its characters between 2000 and 2004. Smaller but equally bold, the show doesn’t start with a tight-knit nerd crew playing together before life pulls them in separate directions, a standard narrative for those types of stories. In fact, no one on the show performs until the end of the first of three 90-minute acts, when Riley (Greg Cuellar) acts as dungeon master for his younger friends Em (Christopher Dylan White), Tony (Jamie Sanders), and Kendall (Andrea Lopez Alvarez). Eventually, they are joined by Riley’s best friend Clara (Olivia Rose Barresi), who finds the game an unexpected escape from her self-imposed academic pressures, romantic/sexual traumas, and the horrors of a post-9/11 United States.
There are various other social entanglements that inform the character dynamic, best discovered by immersing yourself in their lives for hours. By the time they play the role, the characters—all convincingly embodied by full adults—feel real as if their fantasy life has more depth. This was informed in part by the experiences of others working in a gaming shop, the community they saw forming there, and their proper introduction to D&D in college. “It’s important to me to think of the game as a nucleus of a community,” another said of the relatively late development of the D&D gaming campaign. “The ways people have been changed by playing this social group game are because of Riley’s authorship, not because Dungeons & Dragons exists.” Emma Rose, the show’s director and wife of others, went on to add: “For this play, it makes a lot of sense to understand the community first as individuals, where they come from.”
It also means avoiding some of the expositional and relational shortcuts that often accompany less extensive work, where archetypes can become the default. “I’m really tired of plays that use that shorthand,” Iba said, “that don’t invest in the humanity of their characters and instead use them as signifiers for some philosophical or sociological argument.” Even though the play includes characters who are gay, bisexual, and who we would probably recognize today as trans, it doesn’t feel like it’s trying to deliver clean, clear lessons like it’s trying to sort out the formative years of millennials. The initiative is clearly rooted in the early 2000s, from post-9/11 anxiety to its beautifully staged instant-messaging conversation. “We called the sequences chat ballets,” Emma said about the scenes in which teenagers are shown balancing multiple IMS at once, which will trigger powerful memories in almost anyone born between 1980 and 1990. “I wanted to look at the early part of the internet and its effects on how we exist socially and interpersonally with each other, even before social media,” said others. Emma further explained that involved organizing some of the acting, not trying to adopt too much digital thinking effect: “What we have to do is not play internet, but really play teenagers in isolated spaces. You can’t embody digital noise. But what you can embody is isolation.”
Other attempts to examine the recent past, especially involving a cultural commonplace like D&D, involve easy references and nostalgia. The initiative is a nostalgic play, but not in the I-Love-the-’80s way it’s often been understood over the past quarter-century or so. Others have clarified that “the original concept of nostalgia is one of pain – not one of comfort, necessarily. It is a painful longing for home or for the past, or some feeling of being in a situation where one will never be again.” The term initially described something experienced by soldiers, they added. “That’s kind of where I tried to hit here. Nostalgia is something that reminds us of things that we may not have appreciated at the time we experienced them, and there’s a desire to appreciate them properly.”
That is precisely the effect of the play, especially in a scene towards the end of the third act. Earlier, the audience saw a more fantastical version of the game, where the characters act out their role-playing adventures, bound around the stage, sometimes with props, costumes, and fantasy lighting. Those descriptions are familiar from other D&D media, though certainly assembled with a lot of clever stagecraft here at the Public Theatre. It was remarkable, then, when a later pivotal game was staged for nothing. For the first time in many hours, we see players sitting on the floor, actually rolling and writing calculations on their character sheets. No costumes, no swords. It’s just as involving, somehow, as the more traditional fantasy sequences. To put it bluntly: “By the time we get to the end game, we have the ability to outthink them.”
That the inviting nature of the show makes the initiative relate less steeply to D&D; Any understanding of youth bonding must do this. “I don’t consider myself an experienced or serious player [of Dungeons & Dragons] In any way, “said Emma,” but the analog I had as a teenager was making theater. For me, that’s a lot of what the game does [in the play] works as a stand-in for what it’s like to make theater in your community. Fittingly, the show takes on a series of magic tricks—less showy than a wizard or a paladin, but in a real-world way, equally impressive.
