Linguistics lecturer Mitchell named playwright-in-residence

Linguistics lecturer Mitchell named playwright-in-residence
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BY ELLEN CHANG
Rice News Staff

Fueled by a strong
need to express his thoughts in an orderly yet humorous
fashion, Douglas Mitchell turned to playwriting as a way
to keep his sanity.

After 13 years
of writing plays, the Rice University linguist has become
a well-known playwright. Recently he was appointed by President
Malcolm Gillis to be Rice’s playwright-in-residence
after a recommendation from Gale Stokes, dean of the School
of Humanities.

“Over the
past decade he has successfully turned his attention to
writing one-act plays that have been performed here and
in Europe,” Stokes said. “Now Mitchell also teaches
playwriting at Rice. For these reasons, we thought it appropriate
to recognize this new aspect of his career.”

Mitchell’s
work has garnered international attention and has been produced
in many American cities and several European countries.
He has directed his plays with Pulitzer prize-winning playwright
Edward Albee and was named playwright-in-residence for Stages
Repertory Theatre.

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

Mitchell did
not begin writing plays until he was 60. He said his plays
are “little more than discussions with himself from
different perspectives of recurring thoughts and issues.”

He said his
compulsive need to write plays is vital to maintaining his
sanity. “It keeps me from going nuts,” he said.

Playbills of
Mitchell’s plays will also mention Rice, increasing
the visibility and stature of the university.

Mitchell, who
is teaching Greek and Roman drama, Old English and Sanskrit
this semester, said his plays are external expressions of
his way of thinking about dealing with internal confrontations.
In simple, clear language, his plays focus on how he grapples
with confrontations and often result in what he calls “irrational
plots.”

“You have
to bring the characters into life through their languages,”
he said. “They have to have individual voices. Otherwise,
they sound like me.”

Writing a play
is similar to composing a string quartet, Mitchell said.

“Each instrument
is distinct, yet each instrument merges with the others
to produce the conflicts and resolutions of the quartet,”
he said.

He tells his
students to listen to different kinds of music so that they
can learn to recognize and externalize their thoughts.

“Each real
character is finally never more than an aspect of the writer,”
he said.

His first play,
“Shatter the Golden Vessel,” won first prize at
the Texas Playwriting Festival after a friend entered it
in the contest unbeknownst to Mitchell. The play is about
a man who is soon to be executed for an unknown crime. The
audience does not know if he is guilty. Over a drink in
a posh chamber next to the cells, the executioner meets
the incarcerated man and in a gentlemanly and very polite
fashion inquires by what method the man would like to die,
Mitchell said. The play was performed again in New York
City in 2001.

That play set
the tone for the other 41 plays Mitchell has written. The
central theme of all of the plays is death — portrayed
in an exaggerated, light and quirky fashion.

Mitchell said
his fascination with death started when he was a young boy
and watched his Cherokee grandfather hang a bank robber
from a street lamp in his hometown of Owasso, Okla.

To come up with
ideas for his plays, Mitchell obsessively watches people
and notes how they converse and interact. He is aided by
his good memory for language and conversational intonation.

Most of Mitchell’s
plays are composed of just one act because he dislikes how
intermissions disrupt the flow. One-act plays are more dramatic
and pleasing because of their shorter lengths, he noted.

He said he likes
to write plays about “what we’re really like and
what we pretend to be.”

One of his latest
plays, “Of Objective Value,” takes place in a
concentration camp in 1943 Nazi Germany. A woman at the
camp who is about to be shot wants an object to be smuggled
out of the camp because of its intrinsic human value. She
believes it will surpass the conflict between the Nazis
and the rest of the world.

Another recent
play, “Flores Para Una Muerta” (“Flowers
for a Dead Woman”) shows that what is beautiful in
us can never be tarnishable either by time or our own actions.

Mitchell has
been a member of the Rice faculty for 21 years, teaching
classes in Sanskrit and Old English, Gothic, the history
of linguistics, the history of the English language and
playwriting. He knows about 30 languages. Mitchell first
taught at Rice from 1960 to 1962 after studying at the University
of Vienna on a Fulbright Scholarship.

Mitchell received
a bachelor of arts in Greek, philosophy and Latin from Baylor
University. For his graduate work, he continued the study
of Indo-European languages, which includes those languages
related to Sanskrit, Greek, German, Italian and Celtic.
He studied in Norway at the University of Oslo and later
at The University of Texas, where he earned his doctorate
in linguistics.

A public reading
of Mitchell’s “Of Objective Value” will take
place 7 p.m. Sept. 16 at Theater LaB, 1706 Alamo St. The
reading is free and open to the public, and a discussion
of the play is to follow the reading. “Of Objective
Value” and “Flores Para Una Muerta” will
be performed Feb. 26-March 15 at Theater LaB. For tickets
and more information visit <www.theaterlabhouston.com>
or call the box office at (713) 868-7516.