Plays by Mitchell to be presented in Galveston

Plays by Mitchell to be presented in Galveston

BY DAVID
KAPLAN
Rice News Staff

A half-Cherokee
and half-British ancestry is one explanation for Douglas
Mitchell’s uniqueness.

He says he gained
from his Cherokee side a great memory that contributes to
his proficiency in languages. Mitchell, adjunct professor
of linguistics, knows about 30.

His British/Cherokee
background also influences his playwriting. From his British
side, he learned his English and intonation patterns. On
his Cherokee side, he says he learned “the earthy,
erotic basis of everything you can think.” And, Mitchell
says, “Cherokees cannot separate the external world
from the internal world.”

The internal
world of Mitchell is the source of some remarkable playwriting.
Over the past decade he has written about 30 one-act plays.

Two of his most
recent works, “Flores Para Una Muerta” and “Loss
of Interest,” will be presented at Galveston’s
Strand Theatre (2317 Ships Mechanic Row) on the weekends
of Dec. 8-10 and 15-17.

The Friday and
Saturday evening performances are at 8 p.m.; the Sunday
matinees are at 2:30 p.m.

The New York
City-based theatrical company One Arm Red is producing the
Strand Theatre performances. In July, the same company produced
four of Mitchell’s plays and seven staged readings
of his works off-off Broadway.

In the spring
of this year, Houston’s Stages Repertory Theatre presented
a Douglas Mitchell Play Festival over three weekends. Last
year, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Edward Albee directed
Mitchell’s “Old Friends” along with his own
play “The Zoo Story” in Amsterdam. The two plays
later toured in Holland.

Actor/director
William Hardy, the production manager of the Douglas Mitchell
Play Festival, believes that “Flores Para Una Muerta”
may be Mitchell’s best work. “Its treatment of
the classic themes of love, death, youth and aging with
humor, tenderness and a certain poetic fantasy are,”
Hardy says, “mindful of Tennessee Williams.”

“‘Loss
of Interest,’ while wonderfully comedic, also is, like
‘Flores,’ very romantic,” Hardy says.

Albee says of
Mitchell: “He is a very bright man and quite inventive.
He has a very fertile imagination. He knows his way around
the theater. I think he is by nature a playwright.”

Rob Bundy, artistic
director of Stages, once described his first impression
of Mitchell’s work as “like Samuel Beckett meets
Harold Pinter. The writing is very smart.” Mitchell
is playwright-in-residence at Stages.

Mitchell maintains
that “nothing really happens” in his plays. “It’s
all language,” he says. He notes that his characters
tend to look at rational events in an irrational manner
while using rational and terse language.

In “All
Wrapped Up,” for example, a couple receives a package
and grows increasingly terrified of its contents. Eventually,
they decide to burn down their house.

In his one-acts,
Mitchell often plays with language and comes up with an
imaginative and unexpected take on life and death and “our
motivation in life.” Says Mitchell: “I point out
to people that which they have always known but never known.”

Observes Hardy, “You will find it rare that you can predict early on
how his stories will end.”

A native of
Owasso, Okla., Mitchell first taught at Rice from ’60
to ’62 after studying at the University of Vienna on
a Fulbright Scholarship.

He returned
to Rice in ’81 and has been teaching here ever since.
He wrote his first play in ’89. Currently, Mitchell
is teaching Sanskrit and Old English. In the spring he will
for the first time teach Dramatic Writing (English 303)
in the English department.

His artistic
life, meanwhile, is thriving. Theater companies in Holland,
Germany, Philadelphia, Seattle and Phoenix have expressed
interest in producing his plays.

To purchase
tickets for the Strand Theatre performances of Mitchell’s
plays or for more information, call the Strand Theatre toll
free at 1-877-787-2639.