Review: Choose Your Own Adventure at Dungeons & Dragons: The Twenty-Sided Tavern

In a sense, I feel like I still haven’t fully seen Dungeons & Dragons: The Twenty-Sided Tavern. Assessing a show like this, heavily dependent on improvisation and audience participation, means that ideally one ought to see more than one performance, since each show is potentially one-of-a-kind narratively and viscerally. So, while my lone experience with this show left me feeling less than wholly enchanted, others may have another perspective simply by virtue of seeing the show on a different evening.

What isn’t in much dispute is the uniqueness of the experience. Among other things, you won’t hear announcers or cast members warning audience members to turn their phones off. In fact, phones are integral to The Twenty-Sided Tavern, since that is where the audience gets to vote on characters and outcomes, participate in challenges, and just generally interact with the five performers onstage. There are also physical audience-participation moments built into the show, with members being asked to suggest names for characters, come up to the stage to play games, and even at one point act as an understudy of sorts.

If you generally shy away from audience participation in theater, you’ll already know if this show is for you. For everyone else, there remains the question of how much familiarity with the Dungeons & Dragons game matters going in. Cards — or rather, maps, die, and character sheets — on the table: The Twenty-Sided Tavern represented basically my first exposure to the popular role-playing game. While there were occasional moments when I felt confused and alienated from the rest of the audience, most of whom were clearly DnD “adventurers,” the show, if nothing else, gave me a sense of why the game has remained so popular since it was created back in 1974.

It helps to have two enthusiastic emcees at the helm. David Andrew Laws (who refers to himself as “DAGL” both onstage and in the program) and Sarah Davis Reynolds also co-created the show with David Carpenter (the founder and CEO of Gamiotics, the company who designed the software we all use during the show). While Reynolds, the so-called Tavern Keeper, is mostly content to be Laws’s second-in-command, keeping score and making sure the show stays on track, Laws, the Dungeon Master, seems to be having fun playing multiple characters and interacting with the rest of the cast and the audience.

Tyler Nowell Felix, Madelyn Murphy, and Diego Salinas fill out the five-person cast as the Warrior, Mage, and Trickster, respectively. What they do onstage isn’t “acting” exactly, though — or at least, not good acting in a conventional sense. Instead, The Twenty-Sided Tavern comes off as an overextended improv comedy show, with the performers frequently riffing off audience suggestions and each other, sometimes cracking themselves up in the process. Audience suggestions of naming multiple wizard characters variations of “Kate” became a running joke throughout the performance I attended, for instance.

Given how much detail DnD players are expected to fill in coming up with a character for a campaign, right down to specific traits, it seems a failure of imagination on the creators’ part that its actors aren’t expected to bring a similar rigor to their performances. But then, if I thought the improv was funnier, maybe I wouldn’t have minded so much. Only Murphy seems fully comfortable with the show’s improvisational aspects.

Parts of The Twenty-Sided Tavern are scripted, of course, primarily the campaigns that the three characters embark on. But the frequent interruptions for dice-rolling, challenges, and fourth-wall-breaking comic asides have the effect of distancing us from the narrative rather than immersing us in it. Perhaps this was unavoidable given the show’s interactive nature.

But it also left a neophyte like me suspecting the experience of sitting down with friends and participating in a DnD campaign would be more rewarding. Few things are more genuinely immersive than the characters and universes one can create and sustain in one’s own mind (especially given how cheesy-looking Derek Christiansen and Ruby O’Brien’s projections consistently look on K.C. McGeorge’s game-show-like scenic design).

None of this will matter to the hardcore Dungeons & Dragons fans to whom The Twenty-Sided Tavern will appeal the most. And on an objective level, one could say that a show like this can’t be evaluated by typical standards of theatrical performance, design, or direction anyway (especially in this case because no director is credited). At least the 20-sided dice I picked up for free in the lobby looks cool.