Greg Cuellar '17 Stars in ‘Initiative’ at The Public Theater

Acting alum Greg Cuellar '17 is starring in Initiative, a groundbreaking new play by Else Went having its world premiere at The Public Theater. Billed as "a reflection of adolescence at the dawn of the new millennium," Initiative tells the story of a singular friend group, composed of seven people, between the years of 2000 and 2004 as they attempt to get out of "Podunk California;" or as Helen Shaw of The New Yorker puts it, Initiative is "a five-hour marathon about teen-age life." The play’s runtime is indeed five hours and on Saturdays it’s six—with multiple intermissions and a 90-minute dinner break. Initiative is part of a trend that takes on alternate media as its subject matter. The show centers the popular Dungeons and Dragons tabletop game and explores the time it takes to actually play a campaign. Emma Rose Went directs the production. 

Cuellar, who plays Riley, the group's Dungeon Master, has been part of the development of Initiative for the past six years, and is joined on stage by Olivia Rose Barresi as Clara, Brandon Burk as Mr. Stone, Harrison Densmore as Ty, Carson Higgins as Lo, Andrea Lopez Alvarez as Kendall, Jamie Sanders as Tony, and Christopher Dylan White as Em. The play, which centers on the group's "D&D" league, uses the game as a thematic mirror for the real-life journeys of the characters as they grow up, get closer or drift apart, and deal with loss. 

"I think the very initial seed of it was actually, in my first ever playwriting class, we were asked to write a scene, sort of a gesture of kindness or love," Went told Variety. "And I wrote a scene about a bunch of people playing ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ in a basement who are interrupted by a phone call that a tragedy has happened, a car accident, and then they sort of hold each other and work through the impact of that and then return to the game as a space of safety. And then that thought evolved and evolved and had a gravitational pull of all these other elements of my own life in high school in this small town, and building community through collaborative storytelling—because ‘D&D’ is a type of theater—and then the play just grew outward from there."

"It’s athletic. It requires the full breadth of my being—emotionally, psychologically, physically," Cuellar told Variety. "So I try to create a sense of arc, especially for the aging and in between every school year. Something sort of evolves that I have in the back of my mind of vocally, what is happening, physically, how the person is changing. So I’ve really tried to track that out. And from there, the great thing about it is that even though it’s long, Else has done a phenomenal job of just taking care of the actors so that I can step into the role. And if I just allow my instrument to flow through the lines of it, I really ultimately get to where I need to go by the end of the play."

Greg Cuellar He is a Los Angeles-based actor of Lipan Apache descent. While at Columbia, he was a Bob Hope Fellow and won the Jack Kent Cooke Graduate Award. Cuellar’s past credits include performances at The Guthrie Theater, Classic Stage Company, New Light Theatre Project, and George Street Playhouse. Initiative opened November 4 at The Public Theater and runs until December 7, 2025. Tickets can be purchased here.