Since his official July 1 start, Vincent “VJ” Orduña has made history as the first African American to serve as artistic director at the Omaha Community Playhouse (OCP). It meant a homecoming on many levels for the Omaha native, who grew up performing at home, churches and schools wherever his father’s military assignments took the family.
The graduate of Omaha Central, a legacy school in his family, earned a theater degree at Midland University in Fremont, where the prodigy directed a main-stage show at 21. He won a post-graduate scholarship to study at New York Shakespeare Conservatory. He made audition rounds, landing parts in “bus and truck” tours and off-Broadway, all while employed by NYC’s Board of Education SPARK program for young people, directing shows in schools.
“I was very fortunate because the gig with the school district gave me my first grown up job with benefits and I was not worried about paying my rent,” he said.
He then made his home and career in the Pacific Northwest, leading a theater program in Renton, Washington, directing area theater companies. The last several years he’s lived and worked in Seattle.
“I’ve actually never had a day job that wasn’t theater, and gosh it’s been almost 38 years now,” he said.
Though he didn’t serve in the armed forces, Orduña comes from a veteran family whose military service extends back to fighting with Pancho Villa in the Mexican Revolution and to flying with the Tuskegee Airmen in World War II. His father, Vince, piloted a helicopter in Vietnam, surviving multiple shoot-downs and dealing with PTSD. The Orduñas own an even richer athletics and arts heritage. An uncle, Joe Orduña, was the starting I-back on the first Husker national championship team in 1970. VJ’s father turned down a scholarship to play for Nebraska to enter the Army.
Some family members expressed an aptitude for both athletics and arts. VJ played football and ran track in his youth until sports practices interfered with music rehearsals and he chose the latter. His brother, Matt, was on the Husker football roster until an injury derailed his career and he opted to follow his family’s arts legacy. Matt is a veteran film-TV actor.
“We’re a big music family,” VJ said.
His late mother, Johnice Orduña, was a singer, musician and music director. Great aunt Claudette Valentine, aunt Nola Jeanpierre and cousins Carole Jeanpierre, Elyssia Reschelle Finch, Eschele Childers and Quentin King are music artists who’ve graced Omaha stages. Nola and Echelle performed in “South Pacific” at the Playhouse. VJ and his mom acted in an OCP production of “The Wiz.”
Valentine was music director for several shows VJ was in at the old Center Stage Theatre.
“There’s a lot of creatives in my family,” VJ said.
“The Orduña family has been a beacon of light in the performing arts community for decades. It’s only fitting VJ is the one to step into this position. He carries with him deep-rooted, rich history in the arts with current, real-time theater affairs,” said Omaha native and Broadway veteran Q. Smith, who worked with him in the University of Nebraska at Omaha’s Summer Musical Theatre Academy.
Not only are the Orduñas a fixture in Omaha’s arts scene, they are in its Black community as well. The potency of that background, combined with his new position at a 102-year-old organization that’s struggled with diversity, equity, inclusion, is ever present for him.
“It feels surreal. It’s an incredible responsibility,” he said. “I feel incredibly honored. I’m also really cognizant that it’s a unique and wonderful opportunity. One of the things that’s impressed me is how this organization has been trying to lean into embracing a larger community, which I think can be hard when you’re pulling a hundred years of history behind you. I’m really excited about trying to address that.”
While building his theater career he said he “never entertained the idea” someone that looks like him could be where he is now at OCP, where few roles existed for him on stage or off.
“Growing up I personally always felt like an outlier as I moved through the world of theater,” he said.
For a long time he never considered returning to work in theater in Nebraska. But over the course of the last five years certain experiences started pulling him back and introduced him to “a new Omaha” he didn’t know had emerged.
“That was really exciting. I was blown away by how Omaha’s grown and changed,” he said. “On the national stage I know how the industry has opened up. That wasn’t my memory of Omaha, which is why I think so many of us moved away.”
This new appreciation began upon returning to care for his mom. Veteran Omaha arts educator Becky Noble, now OCP executive director, knew of his arts education work and recommended him to Hal France when he was looking for someone to help build out UNO’s Summer Musical Theatre Academy. France hired Orduña to direct the first three shows.
“The size and scope of that program and the amount of attention it garnered was surprising to me,” Orduña said of the then start-up academy that just completed its fourth year. “It felt really great to know that Omaha has invested in its young people. And then just the number of young people that were involved and from so many different schools and the amount of diversity that fearlessly came out and felt like they could be a part of this storytelling was really rewarding.”
Interest in the academy “kept growing exponentially,” he said, until the audition turnout for, “Legally Blonde,” the last SMTA show he directed, “reached 75 maybe 80 kids, including 37 talented young men. “I told them to keep doing this, that the industry needs you.”
Orduña loves that the Academy, like Omaha Performing Arts and the Nebraska High School Theatre Association, has Nebraskans on Broadway come work with young people. Omaha natives Stephanie Kurtzuba and Q. Smith share their Broadway skill set and experience with Academy participants. Kevyn Morrow and Ray Mercer do the same through OPA-NHSTA.
“Omaha’s such an amazing, nurturing breeding ground for young talent,” Orduña said. “I think a lot of it has to do with the importance of show choirs here at high schools. It’s a really special thing. The arts are treated with a reverence, educationally speaking, that encourages people to participate.”
Academy veteran Mekhi Payne, who like VJ and Matt Orduña chose theater over athletics, was recently back in Omaha as a swing in the Broadway touring production of “The Outsiders.” He’s one of several young Nebraskans who’ve recently made the move to New York and found Broadway or touring Broadway success.
France echoes many others in applauding OCP’s decision to have Orduña lead its artistic team.
“It makes so much sense,” France said. “He’s a gifted director and very effective motivator of actors. He has family roots in the Omaha theater. He is a talented teacher who shapes young potential. His selection and his perspective will send a strong message of inclusivity to the community. I know that he will bring new energy and excitement to OCP and the Omaha Metro. I’m looking forward to his tenure.”
Many stage venues Orduña grew up with are gone (the Firehouse, Upstairs, Westroads and Dundee Dinner Theatres) but they’ve been succeeded by a new generation of companies (Blue Barn, Shelterbelt, SNAP!, Anastasis, Great Plains Theatre Commons).
“I’ve been really impressed. I would say dynamic is a great word for it and dare I say, diverse. which is also really great because I think nationally people don’t know that about Omaha.”
These discoveries, he said, made for a nice homecoming.
“I started thinking about home differently,” he said. “So much of my formative life is tied to Omaha, including my introduction to theater in a very unexpected way at Central High. The drama and choir teachers were incredibly progressive in their thinking. My first year, we did ‘The Sound of Music’ Extraordinary at the time, the casting was done without regard to race. Maria, the Mother Abbess, was played by my sister. Max Detweiler was played by me. Two of the featured nuns were people of color as well. That kind of representation is still fairly uncommon today, but back then it was world-changing for me. That was the beginning of many opportunities at Central.”
Wherever he’s been. east coast-west coast, he’s bragged on the talent that comes out of Nebraska.
“I always felt like the people I saw perform or performed with here in show choirs, with the training we got, are phenomenally talented people,” he said.
As his career progressed, he saw how well the training he received here set him up for success.
“I realized the foundations I got in Omaha and the people I worked with and I got to see perform had this incredible caliber of talent that matched anyone else. Being recognized and famous can be as much about where you are located as what you bring to the table. You have to sort of go where the work is and one of the things I love about Omaha is that so many talented people who could be on the national stage choose to stay here or choose to come back because it’s home for them.”
When Noble became OCP executive director, she reached out to Orduña in 2024 to join the leadership team there, hiring him last January. He’s brought a theater aesthetic and philosophy rooted in curiosity.
“What’s always attracted me to theater specifically is I’ve always been fascinated by what makes people interact with each other the way they do – what makes them tick – and the storytelling aspect of theater,” Orduña said. “With singing you get to tell stories. But there’s something really special about taking people’s lives, stepping inside them, and exploring why in a given situation people behave the way they do. That’s what pulled me to the theater. I think because my brain has always worked that way directing, is what pulled me. Acting is great because you get to tell an individual’s story, but with directing you get to create an entire world and look at all these interactions.”
His classical training in New York took him deeper into his craft than he’d ever gone before.
“It was incredibly impactful because it was the first time in my education where we really focused on theater as an art form, specifically text and the science of creating character. So often when you do theater and you have some talent and empathy people are like, great, you can read a line, you can sing, go do the thing. But even as an undergrad I thought, there might be a science to this. The nice thing about classical training is that it focuses on the fundamental science of what theater performance is. There’s a lot of work on text, storytelling, character building and physical work. It was really foundational.”
With its facilities and resources, he feels OCP can do certain things other area theaters cannot.
“One of the things unique about the Playhouse is that we are the largest community theater in the country and that’s not just hyperbole.”
He said a recent national community theater conference not only confirmed OCP’s leadership position but demonstrated “it’s not even by a small margin – but by a huge margin we are the largest.”
That confirmation, he said, came in tandem with affirmation theater organizations like it are bound to serve their communities “and the Playhouse is in a unique position to do that.”
“There’s a lot of theater and a lot of different levels of theater in Omaha,” he said, but none have quite the mission or the means to accomplish the mission as OCP.
He and associate artistic director Brandon Box-Higdem, a fellow Nebraska native and Playhouse alum, are introducing themed seasons and their inaugural theme has community at its core.
“I said in my interview I’d love to see us focus on the ‘C’ in Omaha Community Playhouse,” said Orduña. “There are many who come here and think we’re a regional theater or a professional house because of the quality, but what we are is a community theater.”
He and Box-Higdem are interrogating what community means in the context of these times when theater struggles to find and retain new audiences and to make its experience of storytelling safe, accessible and representative of the communities that make up a metropolitan area like Omaha. Orduña feels that more than ever theater can be a bridge that connects and unites in a time of division, which is why the OCP theme for the 2025-2026 season is community, family and home.
In a nod to community and diversity, Orduña’s directing August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson,” which opens Jan. 16 in the Hawks Mainstage and runs through Feb. 8. The Pulitzer Prize-winning work is the fourth in Wilson’s American Century Cycle of plays and the latest example of OCP staging more African American themed productions in this DEI era.
“As our national political climate has changed, there is an intensity and ugliness with how people interact,” Orduña said. “Neighbors can’t talk to each other anymore because of political discourse and disagreement. But there remains truth in this idea that we need each other and family is important. Both Brandon and I have recently lost our mothers. Losing a parent has a way of galvanizing you and reminding you of what’s important.
“Not to be all ‘Wizard of Oz’ about it but there’s something really nice about being able to come home. People leave home or stay away from home for all sorts of reasons but knowing there’s a place to come back to, as Brandon and I have, is important. So we’re going to work on themes and that one resonates so well with both of us.”
Orduña and Box-Higdem, who have theater education backgrounds, are taking a hard look at how OCP’s robust education programming may need to evolve to better serve the community.
“That’s an ongoing conversation,” Orduña said. “We’re still trying to figure that out. Part of being a part of the community is finding what we can offer that others can’t because we don’t want to be in competition per se. One of the things I think is great about the Playhouse is our volunteer base of actors and crew. These adults from all walks of life love theater and want to be involved, so we’re going to be looking at how we can enhance our adult education.”
OCP is also reviewing how it can serve high schools if secondary arts education funding takes a hit.
“I think we’re going to see a shift in what gets supported even at the school level, the district level, and we’re looking at where we can step into the gap if that does happen,” Orduña said.
Collaboration is another expression of community.
“One of the assets we have is this incredible building,” he said. “We also have an enormous amount of expertise. And our community isn’t just our patrons or the people who see our shows, it’s also our fellow arts organizations. So I’m definitely open and hoping to seek several collaborations.”
As OCP navigates a new era of more diverse stories and ways of telling them, he said, he’s encouraged by the interest surrounding where it goes from here and what his hire means in the scheme of things.
“It’s great that people are asking questions and that they’re interested,” he said. “I feel so blessed to have an opportunity to be a part of the conversations.”