Two Minutes’ Traffic: The Twenty-Sided Tavern at the Kennedy Center

It’s funny how things work out sometimes. You tell a story of the fight between good and evil, leaving the outcome to a combination of the random chance of a dice roll and the abilities and choices of a band of people united in common purpose. And you book that story on a national tour and sometimes, you make your DC debut where the portrait of a rising dictator has been screwed into the marble walls and the fight becomes “whose story are we telling and who has the right to tell it where and how.”

Funny old world. 

Anyway, The Twenty-Sided Tavern wraps up its run at the Kennedy Center this weekend! TST is an unusual theatrical creation, using the framework of a Dungeons & Dragons campaign, a rotating crew of improvisational storytellers, and a stage hung with an impressive theatrical set, lighting, and projection design to create a story together with the audience in 2.5 hours. Repeat audiences will notice the ways in which the big story beats remain locked in while the details are what changes show to show, and how by having a rotating crew of performers constantly switching tracks and roles nights to night, even the fixed elements have room to shape themselves according to the alchemy of each specific combination of voices in the room. 

The art of taking a tabletop role playing game to the stage has been explored by artists in countless ways, with the rise of convention gaming and actual play becoming more and more of a cultural force (for more on the wider context, as well as a look at how even the Folger Shakespeare Library is getting in on the action, check out this look at events from this spring). What Twenty-Sided Tavern has set for itself is an estimable challenge: to create entertainment within a narrow set of proscribed restrictions set by its creators, with a genuine effort to embrace the chaos of live theatre and the improv skills of its cast along with the unpredictability of a dice roll to help keep each show distinct (and I’d argue, in the spirit of a home game). It occupies then a distinct place within a complex and changing landscape of bringing TTRPGs into the wider world, and meets this challenges with aplomb and built-in catch phrases. 

And yet, during its two week run in Washington, DC, I kept circling round the Kennedy Center of it all. Many friends of mine who happily attended the off-Broadway run in New York City or wanted to finally catch it closer to home ended up staying away because they didn’t feel safe or welcomed under the roof of our national monument to the arts right now. Staying home becomes an act of protest, just as showing up and being as queer as possible on Kennedy Center stages can be a different act of protest, such as when the TST invited local drag queen Tara Hoot to become part of the show on their DC press night. With the fate of the Kennedy Center hanging in its own political peril, one plucky show has only so much impact. But if there’s one thing we all know about the way we defeat evil in lasting ways, it’s that no one does it alone. I certainly don’t have the answer for how to preserve a space that has meant a lot to me and to generations of artists and audiences, how to fight without compromising what shouldn’t be compromised, and how to make it clear that the president’s actions and desires have already been an unacceptable assault on our community and further denigrating those spaces and communities will not be tolerated or accepted within the walls of the Kennedy Center and beyond. But I don’t have to have those answers, because it’s going to take a lot of answers and actions I haven’t even considered yet and categorically couldn’t complete as an individual. And I can be grateful when a plucky band of artists takes the stage with with a show about how step by step, roll by roll, and hand in hand, we can work together to save the world and write our own stories.