Faculty

Jonas Oppenheim is a playwright and director who makes work that is funny and occasionally subversive. He enjoys making site-nonspecific theater with a trunk and some extension cords. He believes that good political theater has to be really entertaining. He likes getting his audiences to actively address the problems presented by the play.

His favorite career highlight was when Fox News reported that the Secret Service was "aware" of his George-W.-Bush-era guerrilla comedy about overthrowing the government, I’m Gonna Kill the President!’ A Federal Offense. He toured his street-theater musical Mr. Satan Goes to Wall Street to the national presidential conventions in 2012.

Oppenheim's plays have earned multiple LA Weekly Awards, the John Golden Playwriting Prize and the Peterson Emerging Playwright Award. They have been staged in more than 50 productions around the country including at PS122, Ontological/Hysteric, EST, La MaMa and Ohio Theatre in New York, and at Sacred Fools, Theatre of NOTE, the Freud Playhouse, 24th St. Theater, Miles Playhouse, Highways, Luckman Arts Complex and Art|Works in Los Angeles. In addition, his work has been performed in theaters, universities, backyards, basements, parks and parking lots across America.

Oppenheim has been an invited speaker on immersive/interactive/political/guerrilla theater at Directors Lab West, the Santa Monica College Public Policy Institute and the L.A. Stage Alliance. He is founder and artistic director of the Imagination Liberation Front, a guerrilla theater troupe. He has served as co-artistic director of Sacred Fools Theater Company. A graduate of NYU and CSULA, he teaches playwriting, screenwriting and DIY guerrilla theater workshops for students and activists of all ages.

For CBS Television and Warner Bros. Television, he developed an original pilot, The Families Man, a sitcom about the racial double standard in America. His pilots have placed in the Sundance Episodic Story Lab, Austin Film Festival, and Final Draft Big Break Contest, and been workshopped at Upright Citizens Brigade. He has also written spots for Hulu and web series, and podcasted into the ether. He’s done extensive improv at iO West and Upright Citizens Brigade, performed in a combustible rock ’n roll band, and made leftist radio at KPFK 90.7-FM in Los Angeles.