Mixed Blood Theatre taps inventive director and playwright as its next leader

The house that Jack Reuler built will have a new leader.

Mixed Blood Theatre, the community-engaged Twin Cities company that was launched by Reuler in 1976, announced Tuesday that Los Angeles-based director, playwright and community activist Mark Valdez will be its new artistic director.

A former Mixed Blood resident artist, Valdez, 50, will start full time in July, overlapping for a month with Reuler as he becomes only the second leader in the company's 46-year history.

"I'm super-excited and I love Mixed Blood, which has become an artistic home for me over the last 15 years," said Valdez, who has directed and written multiple shows for the company and twice served as its artist-in-residence. "Mixed Blood has been thinking about what I've been thinking about, which is how to use theater and art to influence larger things and become a tool for change."

Reuler, a Macalester College zoology graduate who founded Mixed Blood when he was 22, was one of the few remaining founders running a Twin Cities theater. He said the theater will be in good hands as Valdez will bring "a breadth of experience."

"Talk about his own identity politics — Mark's a gay Chicano artist from Texas by way of California and also a passionate activist," Reuler said. "I'm super-honored that I will be the second-best artistic director in Mixed Blood Theatre history."

The choice comes after a 20-month national search. Valdez's forté is simpatico with the deep, and sometimes disruptive work that Mixed Blood has done for four and a half decades, said Tabitha Montgomery, the interim managing director and former board president who was instrumental in the search.

"Mark has the heart for change that's really only matched by his creative approach," Montgomery said. "His artistic practice centers and partners with community in a way that's not just visceral and inspirational but motivates you to act. And you can see that in how he uses creative tools to address community needs and lift up community voices."

When he takes the reins, he will lead a company whose mission has grown to include many marginalized groups. Mixed Blood has pioneered practices that are admired in the field, including a pay-what-you-wish scheme that reduces cost as a barrier to entry.

Valdez comes to the Twin Cities at a time when companies have been chastened by the pandemic but are still hanging on.

"Personally, a few years ago I had a crisis of faith about my work and career," Valdez said. "I had convinced myself that if I do a play, an audience will come, see a play, something would resonate, and over time something will change."

He paused.

"In the throes of the pandemic, I wondered, how do we as artists use these tools we have for social transformation and to change policies," Valdez said. "The plays that we do should create the conditions for the kinds of shift the community needs."

Longtime stakeholders hope that Valdez will continue the good work of the theater and take it to the next level.

"As a company, we can't just be focused on telling the story, telling the truth, but do nothing about it," Montgomery said. "Now is a time of reckoning, of imagining new things, of reinvestment in our mission. Now is a time of Mark Valdez."