Interview: A Hearty Welcome To Jonathan Muñoz-Proulx As The LGBT Center's New Artistic Director

Ovation Award-nominated director Jonathan Muñoz-Proulx will succeed Director of Cultural Arts Jon Imparato (set to retire June 30) as the Los Angeles LGBT Center's Lily Tomlin/Jane Wagner Cultural Arts Center's new Artistic Director. Besides overseeing the Center's two live performance venues - the 200-seat Renberg Theatre and the 50-seat black box Davidson/Valentini Theatre, Jonathan's other priorities are to engage communities through arts programming, bring emerging L.A. artists to the Center's various locations, and to offer workshops and classes for free or at low cost.

Jonathan opened up some from his final days at A Noise Within to address a few of my queries.

Thank you for taking the time for this interview, Jonathan!

Congratulations on being chosen as the new Artistic Director of the Los Angeles LGBT Center's Lily Tomlin/Jane Wagner Cultural Arts Center. What's your official start date? In the interim, will you be completing your duties as the Director of Cultural Programming at A Noise Within?

Yes, I'm thrilled to have had several months to prepare for this transition, April-June. My full-time start date is June 23, but I'm excited to be joining meetings, attending events, and getting to know the Los Angeles LGBT Center community leading up to joining full-time. For now, I've been focusing on wrapping up my work at A Noise Within where I have been the inaugural Director of Cultural Programming for almost four years. During this transition I am producing five events at A Noise Within, curating another twelve months of programming for my successor to inherit, and supporting the company in planning how to steward my community-focused work moving forward. It's an intense time of feeling fully invested in the success of two extraordinary organizations, and I'm honored to have this period to be very intentional about my transition.

Your resume is quite impressive. You've served on a number of Los Angeles County and California arts committees and councils, and have worked with Los Angeles theatres including Skylight Theatre, East West Players, Center Theatre Group, Boston Court Pasadena, 24th Street Theatre, Playwrights' Arena, Pacific Resident Theatre, Chalk Rep, EST/LA, Bootleg Theater, and Watts Village Theatre Company. What specific aspects of your cumulative experience do you plan to fully utilize at the LGBT Center's Lily Tomlin/Jane Wagner Cultural Arts Center?

I'm fortunate to have developed relationships with multiple formative mentors in my life - Gordon Davidson (CTG), Snehal Desai (East West Players), Jessica Kubzansky (Boston Court Pasadena), Gary Grossman (Skylight Theatre), and Geoff Elliott and Julia Rodriguez-Elliott (A Noise Within). Years of conversations with these leaders have cemented my focus on centering equity, diversity, inclusion, and anti-racism on and off stage, on being a leader in service of the community I've been called to serve, on embracing my responsibility to nurture new work and emerging artists, and on my passion for celebrating classic stories that continue to celebrate the universal human experience. I've worked with both large and intimate theatres. I've worked within a spectrum of budget sizes. And I look forward to identifying the ideal balance of these lessons to bring to the Center and its impressive legacy of community-centered programming.

Running LGBT Center's Lily Tomlin/Jane Wagner Cultural Arts Center will be a full-time job. Will you still be on any of your committees or councils? Will you still be an adjunct faculty member at University of Southern California, School of Dramatic Arts?

I'm looking forward to giving the LGBT Center my full attention. I don't expect to remain on any committees or hold any other part-time work. A gift of this position is that it invites me to bring forth my full creative self. The Center truly is a creative home for me - it's a community I've always felt welcomed by, and now I look forward to deeply contributing to its success. This work is my primary focus.

What theatrical projects in the Los Angeles theatre community are you most proud of having a hand in?

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest produced by After Hours Theatre was very special to me. It's actually how Jon Imparato and I met. My creative team and I transformed an empty warehouse space into an immersive set for the play, and each patron was invited to check in with a nurse, change into hospital scrubs, visit the pharmacy (bar/concessions), and explore the secrets and surprises of the hospital while interacting with the characters in the play. What made this project so special was that when I asked audience members what brought them to the show, I was shocked by how many of them said they'd never been to theatre before! Cuckoo's Nest achieved a level of popularity that attracted an incredibly young, diverse community of non-theatre folks, which was extremely exciting and rewarding.

Did you grow up wanting to be in theatre?

Oh, yes! When I was a very little kid my mom took me to see Once Upon a Mattress performed in a middle school library. I loved it! I remember writing my first play before I actually knew how to write words. I wrote it with a series of pictures in a row to represent dialogue, and when I handed the "script" to my family to perform, I remember being frustrated that they kept politely asking me to translate each picture so that they knew their lines - wasn't it obvious?? I was always a producer.

What did you want to be? Director? Actor? Producer?

I wanted to be an actor. I attended the USC School of Dramatic Arts. I graduated and got an agent. I went to auditions. Though I loved acting, I didn't love the process of finding work as an actor. I loved reading plays though. At the time, I was working five days a week in a windowless call center, sometimes late at night, and while I waited for the phone to ring, I kept a stack of plays on my desk to read. I read multiple plays each night. I'd go to the downtown public library once a week with my reading list of plays, I'd pay the $1 for one hour of parking, I'd sprint to find the plays like I was on some sort of game show (to avoid paying more for parking), and I'd always meet the limit of how many books the library allowed you to borrow at once. I remember checking out a play, and the librarian stopped, looked at me, and said, "You're the first person to ever check this book out." I read at least one play a day for three years. My enthusiasm for this research showed me that I wanted to choose the stories I told, and that's how I knew I was a director.

Who were your role models growing up?

In high school I was very inspired by Anne Bogart and obsessed with viewpoints. As an adult I did not go to grad school, but instead formed opinions about staging, composition, movement, and color by going to L.A. art galleries. I was particularly impacted by the visceral light and space artists James Turell, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Hellen Pashqian, and Diana Thater. They all show up in my work.

Tell us about being driving distance from La Jolla Playhouse as a teen and how you took advantage of its many offerings.

I grew up in San Diego, and at the time La Jolla Playhouse had a program that offered students unlimited free rush tickets to any performance. I would see shows again and again and became very familiar with the work of titan directors and designers such as Des MacAnuff, Howell Binkley, Sergio Trujillo, Robert Brill, and Paul Tazwell. In high school, I remember seeing a Broadway tour that came through town and being able to guess correctly who the lighting designer was at intermission without looking at the program!

Would you implement a similar program at LGBT Center's Lily Tomlin/Jane Wagner Cultural Arts Center?

I'm excited to learn how we can make our programming as accessible as possible, especially when doing so can create pathways to new audience members discovering and feeling impacted by theatre for the first time.

Do you plan on directing some productions at LGBT Center's Lily Tomlin/Jane Wagner Cultural Arts Center?

I look forward to directing at the Center, as well as select projects outside of the Center when possible. My primary focus, however, will be curating work that deeply engages with our community. The work will guide which creative voices are necessary at the helm. While I'll always be a director, I'm incredibly excited about collaborating with emerging and veteran artists to bring to life the most diverse stories possible, as responsibly and authentically as we can.

Do you have a tentative list of shows you'd like to produce?

Of course! But I don't think this job is about me or my wish list. It's about supporting the community I'm in service of. So, it will require some time to get to know the various constituents who engage with the Center, to understand what they want and need from our programming, and then I get to curate programming that facilitates and reflects the conversations I'm hearing. I of course have a list of plays I want to do, and many of them will certainly show up in our programming over the years, but this is not my theatre - It's our community's theatre, and my role is to facilitate the needs of our audiences by responding with programming that feels vital, cathartic, and healing.

Thank you again, Jonathan! I look forward to what new ideas you'll bring to the LGBT Center's Lily Tomlin/Jane Wagner Cultural Arts Center.

Outgoing Jon Imparato had this to add, "Cultural Arts is a program that I started from the ground up 25 years ago. I feel like I can finally relax because I know we found the right person to be my successor. I have no doubt that Jonathan will do an outstanding job as the Artistic Director of The Lily Tomlin/Jane Wagner Cultural Arts Center."

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