Porn mogul’s daughter confronts family’s pain in 1-woman show
Take Our Daughters to Work Day didn’t exist when Liberty Bradford Mitchell was a kid. But she’d spent enough time around her father’s place of business by the time she was 6 or 7 to know that she wasn’t comfortable there.
“When you see a parade of G-strings going past you at 10 in the morning, it doesn’t feel like the right place to be. I knew it wasn’t appropriate for me,” says Mitchell, a Los Angeles playwright and performer whose father was Artie Mitchell, the sybaritic San Francisco pornographer who owned and operated the Mitchell Brothers’ famous X-rated O’Farrell Theatre with his older brother, Jim, who shot and killed him in 1991.
After a Lafayette gradeschool teacher made a withering remark about her father’s profession, “I kept it secret from most people. I was rather shy by nature, and it was very hard for me to deal with,” Mitchell says. She delves into those feelings — as well as the sensational fratricide and murder trial that ruptured her family — in “The Pornographer’s Daughter,” a onewoman, multicharacter show she began writing years ago as a theater student at the Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle. She performs its premiere Jan. 17-Feb. 16 at San Francisco’s Z Below, accompanied by a San Francisco rock band named the Fluffers.
For those unfamiliar with the term, a fluffer is the person on the set of a porno film who erotically preps the performers before the lights blast on and the director shouts “Action!” These Fluffers play music that summons the time and place — “sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll are a big part of the story,” says the playwright — providing interludes that let the piece breathe.
“It’s an intense story, and the audience needs a psychic break now and then,” says Mitchell, 43, on the phone from Los Angeles’ Venice neighborhood, where she lives with her two kids (she’s divorced). Her father and her mother, attorney Meredith Bradford, divorced when she was 6 but remained on friendly terms. Liberty Mitchell, the oldest of Artie’s six kids, was close with her father, a good-natured guy with a bad alcohol problem.
“He was a real character, in some ways more like a crazy uncle than a father figure,” Mitchell says. “He was a flawed human being, as we all are. He had a really good heart and always had the ability to say he was sorry.”
She can’t say the same for her uncle Jim, whom a Marin County jury found guilty of voluntary manslaughter, not murder, and who was paroled halfway through a six-year sentence at San Quentin. He died of a heart attack in 2007.
“He wasn’t nice to us after what happened, and he never sought forgiveness,” says Mitchell, who attributes her father’s killing to a complex combination of “mental illness, guns, power, drugs. There is no easy answer. A huge part of my journey was realizing that.”
A story of brother killing brother always has a biblical resonance, whether the crime takes place in an ancient wilderness or in the suburban tract house of a porn king. Mitchell sees her father in the context of Greek tragedy, and she even had a Greek chorus in an early draft she wrote in college.
“It was really helpful for a long time to look at my family members as characters. It gave me some distance and objectivity,” says Mitchell, whose show is directed by Michael T.
Weiss, best known as an actor featured in the TV series “The Pretender.” He signed on after seeing Mitchell workshop the piece in Venice last spring.
“Living in L.A., there’s a lot of baggage when you say you’re an actor,” says Mitchell, who has produced theater shows and worked for several years as an aide to Maria Shriver and the Women’s Conference. She spent five months working with Weiss, streamlining the script and shaping the performance.
“I can actually say I’m doing some real acting work,” Mitchell says with a laugh. “It’s exciting.”
For more information, go to www.zspace.org.
Ethnic dance auditions
About 75 dance troupes from across Northern California pour into Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall this Friday, Saturday and Sunday to audition for this spring’s annual San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival. As usual, the shows, which cost only $10 for adults and are free to kids younger than 13, give you a chance to check out a vast range of artists and terpsichorean traditions, from Egyptian belly dancers to Appalachian cloggers and Balinese, Hawaiian, Mexican, Indian, Native American, Polish and Senegalese dancers. They’ll be in full regalia, and many will be accompanied by live music. The event is designed so that you can enter and leave the theater every 10 minutes or so, a boon for fidgety people of all ages.
For more information, visit www.worldartswest.org.
American Indian images
The images in East Bay photographer Sue Reynolds’ new book, “Still Here: Not Living in Tipis” — a collection of portraits of American Indians throughout the West and their tribal celebrations — are on view through Sunday at PhotoCentral in Hayward. Reynolds, whose photographs are paired with poems written for this collaborative book project with Salish Indian writer Victor Charlo, will talk about the work at 2 p.m. Sunday.
For more information, go to www.photocentral.org.