Langdon Elwyn Mitchell

Langdon Elwyn Mitchell (February 17, 1862 – October 21, 1935) was an American playwright who was popular on Broadway during the early twentieth century.

Langdon Elwyn Mitchell
Born(1862-02-17)February 17, 1862
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
DiedOctober 21, 1935(1935-10-21) (aged 73)
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Alma materHarvard University
Columbia Law School
Parent(s)S. Weir Mitchell
Mary Middleton Elwyn
RelativesJohn Kearsley Mitchell (grandfather)

Early life

Mitchell was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on February 17, 1862. He was the son of a noted writer and neurologist, S. Weir Mitchell (inventor of the "rest cure"), and, his first wife, Mary Middleton Elwyn, a daughter of Dr. Elwyn of Philadelphia. His elder brother was John Kearsley Mitchell, a neurologist who married Anne Keppele Williams.[1][2] After his mother died in 1862, his father married Mary Cadwalader.

His paternal grandfather was writer and physician John Kearsley Mitchell. Mitchell studied in Dresden and Paris, attended the Harvard and Columbia law schools, and was admitted to the New York bar in 1886.

Career

A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he wrote plays under his own name and poetry under the pen name "John Philip Varley." Along with Clyde Fitch, William Vaughn Moody, Percy MacKaye, Ned Sheldon and Rachel Crothers, Langdon Mitchell was regarded as one of the more serious American dramatists in an era (c. 1900-1910) not notable for weighty plays. He was considered a solid craftsman whose plays provided good parts for talented actors and actresses.

Mitchell enjoyed an especially productive relationship with one of the most prominent actresses of his time, Mrs. Minnie Maddern Fiske, who was one of the first actresses to play Nora in Ibsen's A Doll's House on the New York stage and was renowned for her Hedda Gabler. Mrs. Fiske acted one of her most lauded roles, the conniving Becky Sharp, in 1899 in Mitchell's dramatization of Thackeray's Vanity Fair, and she starred seven years later in his most famous work, The New York Idea, a play which had been written for her. (The New York Idea is the only play by Mitchell to have survived his era and is occasionally performed in regional theaters. It was revived off-Broadway in New York in 1977, in a production starring Blythe Danner, and again in 2011, in an adaptation by David Auburn, the author of Proof.)

Theater critic and historian Brooks Atkinson wrote in 1970 of The New York Idea, a tart comedy about divorce, that "the dialogue is still lively and the idiocies of the character are still pertinent," securely placing it in the long tradition of drawing-room comedy.[3] Some reviewers at the time sanctimoniously took issue with the idea of a comedy about a socially questionable topic such as divorce, but others praised Mitchell for writing in the spirit of British playwrights Arthur Wing Pinero and Henry Arthur Jones.[4]

Mitchell taught playwriting at the University of Pennsylvania from 1928 to 1930.[5]

Personal life

In 1891, Mitchell married Marion Lea (1861–1944), an actress who was on the London stage at the time of their marriage. She was a daughter of Joseph Lea and Susanna (née Massey) Lea.[6] Together, they were the parents of:

  • Weir Mitchell (1892–1988), an executive with the Borden Milk Company of New York; he married Annette Beckon.
  • Ms. Mitchell, who married architect Kenneth Mackenzie Day.[7]
  • Susanna Valentine Mitchell (1896–1979),[8] an author and poet who married William Gammell IV in 1925.[9] They later divorced.[8]

After suffering from nephritis, Mitchell died at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital on October 21, 1935.[10] His widow died at Doctors Hospital in New York in June 1944.[6]

Major Plays
  • In the Season (1893)
  • Becky Sharp (1899): a dramatization of Thackeray's Vanity Fair
  • A Kentucky Belle
  • Step by Step
  • The New York Idea (1907)
  • The Kreutzer Sonata (1907), adapted from the Yiddish of Jacob Gordin.
  • The New Marriage (1911)

Other Writings
  • Sylvian and Other Poems (1884)
  • Poems (1894)
  • Love in the Backwoods (1896)
  • Understanding America (1927)

References
Sources
  1. "Dr. John K. Mitchell". The New York Times. 11 April 1917. Retrieved 15 June 2023.
  2. Andrews, Charles McLean (1907). The Ancestors and Descendants of Ezekiel Williams of Wethersfield 1608-1907. Case, Lockwood & Brainard Company Print] priv. print. p. 48. Retrieved 15 June 2023.
  3. Atkinson, p. 36.
  4. Atkinson, p. 69.
  5. Atkinson, Brooks. Broadway. New York: Atheneum, 1970.
  6. "MRS. L. E. MITCHELL, FORMER ACTRESS, 83; Widow of Playwright, Poet Is Dead--Played With Langtry". The New York Times. 9 June 1944. Retrieved 15 June 2023.
  7. "Day, Kenneth Mackenzie | Weitzman". www.design.upenn.edu. University of Pennsylvania. Retrieved 18 July 2023.
  8. "S. Valentine Mitchell, 82, Is Dead; A Novelist, Poet and Playwright". The New York Times. 13 April 1979. Retrieved 18 July 2023.
  9. "MISS MITCHELL WED TO W. GAMMELL JR.; Ceremony is Performed. by Dr. Stires in the Chantry at St. Thomas's Church. FATHER GIVES AWAY BRIDE". The New York Times. 25 February 1925. Retrieved 18 July 2023.
  10. YORK TIMES, Special to THE NEW (22 October 1935). "L. E. MITCHELL, 75, PLAYWRIGHT, DIES; He Dramatized 'Vanity Fair' Under the Name of 'Becky Sharp' for Mrs. Fiske". The New York Times. Retrieved 15 June 2023.
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