Labyrinth Theater Company Names Mimi O’Donnell Artistic Director

Andrew Gombert/European Pressphoto Agency Ms. O’Donnell attending the Academy Awards in 2008.

Labyrinth Theater Company, a downtown ensemble devoted to producing new plays with multiracial casts, announced on Monday that the costume designer Mimi O’Donnell will be its new artistic director - an appointment aimed at stabilizing the company after three years of uneven output.

During that period, which included critical disappointments like “Radiance” and “The Atmosphere of Memory,” Ms. O’Donnell had been one of Labyrinth’s three artistic directors - along with the playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis and the actor Yul Vazquez. They served on a volunteer basis and juggled Labyrinth along with their own projects: Mr. Guirgis, for instance, made his Broadway debut in 2011 with “The ___________ With the Hat,” which earned a Tony nomination for best play.

The Labyrinth board chairman, Jeffrey A. Horwitz, said in an interview that the old leadership model of a part-time triumvirate did not align with the troupe’s ambitions.

“We thought having three artistic directors would keep the leadership well-connected to our entire company,” Mr. Horwitz said, referring to Labyrinth’s membership of roughly 135 actors, writers, designers, and other artists. “But we decided that this needs to be somebody’s full-time job - that for Labyrinth to do consistently strong work, it needed someone who would bring their full attention to it beyond Danny Feldman,” the company’s managing director.

Ms. O’Donnell said by telephone that she was putting aside most of her design work to concentrate on eventually producing three plays a year at Labyrinth’s home, the Bank Street Theater in the West Village, as well as continuing its free Barn Series readings of plays in development. Labyrinth has been staging two plays a year recently, and planning for them has been haphazard at times, she acknowledged; reviews for several of those plays have described them as needing more work.

“Under the old system, when one of the three of us got a job, Labyrinth work would stall and we’d have to wait until we all had enough time to get together,” Ms. O’Donnell said. “I want us to make sure that great artistic experiences keep happening on a consistent basis. Now that we have our own theater at Bank Street, we have the ability to do so much more programming. It just needs an artistic director who is there.”

The 21-year-old ensemble had an informal and consensus-driven leadership style for many years, yet found success under two actors who shared the job of artistic director in the 2000s, John Ortiz and the Academy Award-winner Philip Seymour Hoffman. The troupe also boomed with admired plays by Mr. Guirgis (“Our Lady of 121st Street”), Bob Glaudini (“Jack Goes Boating”) and others.

Ms. O’Donnell - who is Mr. Hoffman’s partner and has three children with him - said that Labyrinth’s leadership change had stirred “some fiery feelings and some freak-outs” among some company members who were worried that a conventional leadership structure - one full-time, salaried artistic director - might be hidebound, less inclusive, and not artistically daring. Labyrinth would not disclose Ms. O’Donnell’s salary; she would only say that she had a standard three-year contract that could be renewed.

“I think we’re growing and growing up as a company, and some people have a desire to hold onto the past and the way we used to do things in the past,” she said. “Labyrinth’s culture used to be, Stephen writes a play, let’s raise money and put it on, and never much thinking beyond that current season. But we have such great artists who deserve to be doing work that is sustainable.”

Mr. Guirgis and Mr. Vazquez released statements praising Ms. O’Donnell and saying they were joining Mr. Hoffman and Mr. Ortiz in an advisory capacity at Labyrinth.