"I'm listening to Saves the Day's Stay What You Are on the car CD-player, on the way to play Soul Caliber and hold hands with my boyfriend after school ... It's cold, and you can still hear the dull thud of the music from the goth club in the basement under the sushi bar, and I'm wearing a cheap polyester corset, and I think I'm about to be kissed"
"I don't know what it is about adolescence-maybe it's something to do with those underbaked prefrontal cortexes-but I doubt I'm alone in retaining memories from my teenage life that still feel as vivid, twenty-plus years on, as last week's. It's another world, in almost every sense another person, and at the same time its tiniest details, ecstatic or embarrassing, are still definitive, ephemeral and yet indelible."
"It's this sensation-a feeling of swimming through waters that long ago flowed on and out into the ocean-that the playwright Else Went captures so potently in Initiative. Developed over the last ten years with the collaboration of their wife, the director Emma Rosa Went, as well as many of the actors who are now on stage in its premiere at the Public, the show has both the patience and the pain of maturity."
Vivid adolescent memories surface in sensory, cinematic scenes of a Homecoming night full of music, cold air, and expectation. Theatrical work Initiative channels that sensation of past adolescence as both otherworldly and intimately detailed. The production evolved over a decade with collaborative direction and recurring actors, and it unfolds across three 90-minute acts that span four high-school years. The show favors a slow, textured pacing that simmers like slow-cooked food, allowing emotional nuance and the pain and patience of maturity to emerge through accumulated detail rather than episodic brevity.
Read at Vulture
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