“It’s exhilarating,” Walker-Webb said. “I feel like I’m joining a league of legends, you know? Like super artists, heroes, who are here to make sure that the theater can survive for generations to come. And that is a really exciting feeling.”

In a period of declining theater attendance and shifts in consumer tastes, the nation’s theater leaders are faced with formidable challenges to traditional programming and funding. It was the energy and inventiveness exhibited by Walker-Webb — who has directed several times at Center Stage, including R. Eric Thomas’s original comedy “The Folks at Home,” last year — that won over a nine-member search committee, said Sandy Liotta, chair of the theater’s board.

“What really captivated us was not only his vision for bringing back the theatergoers who already were familiar with us, but it was his energy and his enthusiasm around what he called a ‘visceral calling,’” Liotta said. “Baltimore was the most exciting place because it centered for him what he wants to do in terms of combining art, community and culture building. I get goose bumps just recalling for you how we felt.”

Liotta said the search committee, led by board vice president Jill Pratt, received 150 applications; nine applicants were invited for interviews. “He received unanimous board approval,” Liotta said. “The main attribute we were looking for was a high level of artistic practice, civic engagement being part of that work. It’s so important these days.

“Obviously, the strategic vision — we wanted him to thrive locally, but with national attention, and then the people skills, the relationship and partnership cultivation, being able to influence people to either come back to the theater or come to theater for the first time. He checked off all the boxes.”

Walker-Webb, who studied political science and social work in college, has had something of a peripatetic journey through American theater. He founded his own company, Jubilee Theatre in Fort Worth, wrote plays and traveled to Madagascar several years ago to stage “King Lear” in the African island nation’s native language, Malagasy. In 2019, he directed Woolly Mammoth Theatre’s raucous, highly praised production of Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Pulitzer Prize-winning comedy, “Fairview.”

And last season, he made his Broadway directorial debut with Jordan E. Cooper’s “Ain’t No Mo’.” The production ran for only six weeks but garnered six Tony nominations, including one for best play and one for Walker-Webb’s direction.

“I’ve been on Broadway. I’ve had all these buckets that are separate, and right now I’m in Boston, I’m teaching at Harvard,” Walker-Webb said. “Like all these different separate buckets of who I am. And for once, I’m going to be able to fuse it together. And that’s the thing that’s exciting.”

Center Stage, like many American theater companies, went through a tumultuously uncertain period during the pandemic shutdowns, but it has begun to stabilize, according to Adam Frank, who took over as the theater’s managing director in December. He said the staff is holding steady now at about 50 positions, with no plans for cuts.

“It’s definitely a challenging time to begin as a leader in the theater,” Frank said. “And you know, Baltimore Center Stage is not going to go away. The next couple of years are going to continue to be challenging for us. But more and more bright things are starting to outnumber the hard things, and that will continue.”

Walker-Webb said he plans to hit the ground running, with a listening tour of the city, in an effort to bring the company to the disparate neighborhoods of Baltimore — and to bring those neighborhoods more vibrantly under Center Stage’s roof on North Calvert Street.

“I think that Baltimore is strategically poised to be the poster child for how a community can deeply engage with the arts,” he said, “and how the art can really be listening to its community.”