| Leonardo/ISASTwith Arizona State University

Rick Mitchell

Professorat California State University, Northridge
Los Angeles,
United States
Focus area: Art Theory, Critical Theory, Cultural Practices, Social Practice, Ecology, Environment, Performance Art, Theater Studies, Writing, Literature, Poetry

Rick Mitchell is an award-winning dramatist, performance scholar, and performer whose books include Disaster Capitalism; or Money Can't Buy You Love: Three Plays; Brecht in L.A., and The Composition of Herman Melville. Mitchell also regularly publishes scholarly research and his work's been seen at numerous venues, including Highways Performance Space (Santa Monica, CA); Actors' Theatre of Louisville (KY); Metropolitan Playhouse (New York, NY); the Orlando Shakespeare Festival (FL); the Great Plains Theatre Festival (Omaha, NE); the Blank Theatre (Hollywood, CA); the Samuel Beckett Festival (Las Vegas, NV); and Brecht-Haus (Berlin, Germany). A professor of English, playwriting, and performance at Cal State Northridge, Mitchell was a City of Los Angeles, Department of Cultural Affairs Artist-in-Resident, and he's participated in NEH Summer Seminars for U.S. Professors in Buenos Aires and San Juan. Presently, he's working on a series of post-pandemic performance pieces and his related article, "Epic Cruelty: On Post-Pandemic Performance," from the May 2021 issue of New Theatre Quarterly, can be accessed by clicking the following link:
 
https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/449A78B796042EFF252907769566AA09/S0266464X21000026a.pdf/div-class-title-epic-cruelty-on-post-pandemic-performance-div.pdf
Select Press Quotes:
"Funny! Provocative! Stunningly poignant! Rick Mitchell is a great American Playwright."
—Edward James Olmos (blurb from cover of book, Disaster Capitalism).
"Rick Mitchell's provocative, surrealistic play exemplifies the best of EdgeFest... an outstanding ensemble takes the play to dizzying heights... Ventriloquist Sex offers a stinging critique of capitalism, but the comedy is so funny that the audience never feels harangued."  From a review of Ventriloquist Sex, by Sandra Ross, LA Weekly. (Note: the Hollywood production was designated a theatre "Pick of the Week" in the LA Weekly.)
"throughout the volume, he provides an all-encompassing theatrical experience; he authoritatively orchestrates pathos, comedy, tension and the element of the unexpected using all the tools at his disposal – dialogue, imagery, music and song. Too often, theatre that engages with the socio-political zeitgeist sacrifices form to argument and fails to engage its audience as a piece of drama. Rick Mitchell avoids this pitfall; he proves that, just like Brecht, his ‘primary concern ... [is] to create powerful theater’ (17) and he presents us with a trilogy that is in turn funny and heart-rending, but always unabashedly political." From book review of Disaster Capitalism; or Money Can’t Buy You Love: Three Plays, by Melina Theocharidou, in Platform, Vol. 6, No. 2.
"[T]he play is a delight to read." From review of book Brecht in L.A., by Andrea Dahlberg, Leonardo Reviews.

Journal Articles:
Leonardo Reviews

The Puppet and the Dwarf: the Perverse Core of Christianity

October 2004