What ‘Ohio State Murders’ Means to Lizan Mitchell

Date: December 9, 2022

—

In a career spanning five decades, Mitchell has performed in scores of plays around New York and beyond, and acted occasionally in films and on TV. She’s found herself particularly busy post-shutdown: Over the past 12 months, she’s starred in cullud wattah at The Public Theater, On Sugarland at New York Theatre Workshop and Clubbed Thumb’s Bodies They Ritual, all new plays written by Black women.

Growing up during the Civil Rights Movement, Mitchell worshipped the Black actors who animated New York’s stages in the 1960s. “I had this huge poster in my bedroom of James Earl Jones, Cicely Tyson and Louis Gossett doing The Blacks, the Jean Genet play,” she says, referring to the . “In the South, we hadn’t come to the point where we could manifest a theatre company like that. The preponderance of talent and the level of performance! That’s what I was looking at.”

Although the production’s New York run was brief, it changed the trajectory of Mitchell’s life. “I didn’t intend to stay—I really didn’t, because it was so alien to me,” she recalls. “I could not understand how people lived with all this concrete.” But she started to see the Big Apple’s appeal. “It’s such a vibrant city and it’s right on the edge of everything. It’s just irresistible for anybody in the arts.”

Prophetically, Mitchell was asked to read from Ohio State Murders (which premiered in 1992) at that event. “What struck me is how she says so much in such a lean way; there’s no extra anything. And it’s a huge story on so many levels but, I think, accessible to the public because it’s a familiar kind of path,” Mitchell says. “Leaving your hometown, going to college… I think that makes it relatable, so that people can kind of sit back and say, well, I know about this—but you don’t really.”

As a graduate of an integrated but largely unwelcoming Catholic high school in Greensboro, North Carolina (a city particularly roiled by the upheavals of the Civil Rights Movement), Mitchell identifies strongly with Ohio State Murders‘ protagonist (played by McDonald), who is one of just a handful of Black students on a racially hostile college campus. “She’s stepping out of a bubble into this other environment where there is no one to help,” says Mitchell. “And I remember that feeling, because one of the nuns in my school said, ‘Eeny, meeny, miny, moe, catch a'” and then she uses a racial epithet before completing the rhyme. “At the same time, we were demonstrating—I went to jail maybe three or four times. They arrested almost my whole town. So many people got arrested that they had to book us in a place the size of the Javits Center. I’m serious! It was 19 of us in a cell meant for two.”

—

TDF MEMBERS: At press time, discount tickets were available for Ohio State Murders. Go here to browse all theatre, dance and music offers.

Regina Robbins is a writer, director, native New Yorker and Jeopardy! champion. She has worked with several NYC-based theatre companies and is currently a Core Company Member with Everyday Inferno Theatre.

Top image: Lizan Mitchell.