About

Jonas Oppenheim is a writer-director-producer whose plays have received over 50 productions around the U.S. His guerrilla-theater production “I’m Gonna Kill the President!” A Federal Offense toured to parks, parking lots, backyards, basements, warehouses, and alleys across the country during the George W. Bush and Trump presidencies. His street-theater musical Mr. Satan Goes to Wall Street performed in Zuccotti Park – ground zero for the Occupy movement – and in the streets outside both 2012 presidential conventions. His most recent show, The Planet Earth Farewell Concert, produced by Sacred Fools, premiered in the Hollywood Fringe Festival in 2024.

 

He served one term as Co-Artistic Director of Sacred Fools, where he premiered his plays Free $$$ and The Mother Ship. New York productions include PS122, Ontological/Hysteric, EST, La MaMa, and Ohio Theatre; Los Angeles productions include Sacred Fools, Theatre of NOTE, the Freud Theater, 24th St. Theater, Miles Playhouse, Highways, Luckman Arts Complex, and Art|Works. His plays have received L.A. Weekly Awards for “Best Adaptation” and “Distinguished Achievement,” and he is the recipient of an Individual Artist Fellowship from the California Arts Council, a grant from the Puffin Foundation, the Peterson Emerging Playwright Award, and the John Golden Playwriting Prize. He has been a teaching artist with the 52nd Street Project and the Virginia Avenue Project, and an invited presenter at the Santa Monica College Public Policy Institute and at Directors Lab West, where he conducted a workshop on interactive/immersive theater entitled “Theater and the Military: the Strangest of Bedfellows?”

 

He developed an original sitcom with CBS Television and WBTV, and he was a story producer on Season 3 of American Gangster: Trap Queens on BET+. Season 1 of his scripted comedy podcast, The Love Ark (it’s The Love Boat on Noah’s Ark!), is available everywhere. He’s improvised comedy at iO and UCB, performed in a combustible rock’n’roll band, and made leftist radio at KPFK 90.7-FM. He has taught playwriting, screenwriting, and guerrilla theater to kids, adults, and students of all ages. He grew up in Los Angeles, where he currently lives with his excellent wife, child, and cat.