@dramatistsguild

Playwright Arwen Mitchell moved to Cleveland in 2013 and hit the ground running. Armed with Masters degrees in Theater History and Playwriting, she soon found places to both teach and get her work done. A year after her arrival, Cleveland Public Theatre tapped her for a Nord Playwriting Fellowship – offering a stipend, staff support, and production of a new play. Her responses to questions about her life and career appear below, with the joy that characterizes her work. Readers may fill in the questions.

I have spent most of my life in Illinois, so I consider myself a hardcore Midwesterner. I grew up an hour south of Chicago. That does things to a person. Good things.

When I was little, my dad bought the Styx album “Paradise Theater” and I studied it for years. It about sums up my formative creative experiences: music, culture, energy, the mysteriousness of decaying and/or lost history, storytelling.

I’ve been a writer since early high school, when I started writing really bad poetry. My first experience with theatre was when I wrote some farces with a group of junior highers, which was insanely fun. I then forgot about theatre until my early 20s, when I stumbled into playwriting. I don’t write poetry anymore, which is a gift to humanity.

My education was a haphazard progression that has somehow turned out to be a fantastic combo. I’ve been able to study the foundations of drama and also practice it. A Masters in Theatre History and Dramatic Criticism has made me the playwright I am. And my MFA was a great practicum that built on the other degree’s rigors. With both, I’ve been trained to match my curiosity and creativity with craft, history and theory. I think there’s a thread of instinctive fear of craft in the playwriting (or even theatre) community, which baffles me. Nothing has been more freeing than playing with all the different modes of theatrecraft that have come before.

What kind of stuff do I write? I tend to enjoy messing with American history and culture (especially pop and beauty/female culture) and the story idea usually dictates the form. I also love messing with humanity’s bad ideas, and oppression. Meaning I’m not for either, but want to explore it, preferably redemptively. I write feminist, humanist stuff. …I love plays that live with people – aren’t just fleeting experiences.

Career highlights include Snake Oil, my first real play. I wanted to celebrate vaudeville and old-school American entertainments. It’s about a traveling medicine show duo who are lovers, but might also be …siblings. RPM (Revolutions Per Minute) is my love letter to Peter, Paul & Mary, but it’s not about them. I wanted to write about this “feel” I had for the 60s. It’s a play where the form is the story.

(Style Is) The Answer to Everything is about the female experience, good and bad, across about six decades of the 20th century. It had a workshop production at Cleveland Public Theatre and was featured at this year’s Great Plains Theatre Conference.

When I moved to Cleveland, I was “taking one for the team,” for family reasons. Little did I know. I reached out to the Ohio City Theatre Project (OCTP) – and this is the recurring theme of my time here – they reached right back. I got involved with Cleveland Public Theatre, which led to my getting the Nord fellowship. A Giant Leap, my play about a man and the moon, came out of Peter Roth’s Manhattan Project [profiled in The Dramatist Nov-Dec 2014]. And there are lots of other great things brewing, like OCTP producing Snake Oil this summer.

There’s no place like Cleveland. It has that dogged, ambitious way of a Midwestern city, but at the same time, is totally egalitarian and nonplussed by snobbery, pretention and fixed modes of creativity. There is an amazing variety of theatre, theatres and artists. If you want to create theatre, come here. You will get to do it. You won’t have to spend years trying to get a foot in the door. If you show up, have passion, and care about this city and the people here, there will be things to do. There are so many small companies doing new work.

Finding those opportunities requires networking. “Networking” sounds like a weird corporate word, but it’s such an important thing. Theatre, ideally, is collaborative, yes? So getting out there, finding out about who’s doing what – that’s really important. Giving as well as getting.

I don’t think any connection is too small. Just don’t wait for things to come to you. Do things you might not feel totally comfortable doing. Just do it – and make yourself do it well.

Be known for who you are, specifically. I suppose this is called “branding” – another fun corporate word, but I think in the world of arts, selfhood is definitely important (though narcissism isn’t!) So instead of trying to find a niche, try to create a niche. And enjoy every good thing, small or large. Celebrate the people around you, and their art.

fsholiton@dramatistsguild.com

Arwen Mitchell