Michael Mitnick
Michael Mitnick is a playwright and songwriter. Theatre works include Scotland, PA (New York Times Critics’ Pick, The Roundabout Theatre Company), Fly By Night (Drama Desk-nominated Best Musical, Playwrights Horizons), Mysterious Circumstances (The Geffen Playhouse), and Sex Lives of Our Parents (Second Stage). His music and lyrics have been sung on Broadway, at Lincoln Center, The Guggenheim, Joe’s Pub, 54 Below, and on HBO. Films include The Current War (dir. Alfonso Gomez-Rejon), The Giver (dir. Phillip Noyce), The Staggering Girl (Cannes Film Festival Selection) and O Night Divine (both dir. Luca Guadagnino). Michael has an MFA in Playwriting from The Yale School of Drama. He was raised in Pittsburgh and lives in Brooklyn.
Selection from the play MYSTERIOUS CIRCUMSTANCES
RICHARD LANCELYN GREEN:
I believe some physical objects have, for lack of a better word, “souls.”
And I don’t mean “significance” – we can agree a chair is just a chair but it skyrockets in value if it were the chair Churchill sat in at Yalta. No, I mean something entirely different. Emotion that lurks in the inanimate – in wood or in paper – forming a connection from a thing… to us. Do you still have a baby blanket? Or, say, your father’s glasses? If your house were to catch fire and you were the only person home, what would grab before breaking out the door – a computer? A piece of expensive jewelry? Or maybe a wooden box.
But why the box?
Perhaps it contains 21 letters – each written by your mother who, at the time of your birth, knew that in a matter of months, she were fated to die. In the face of this devastating news, she sat down and wrote 21 letters, asking your father to give you one on each of your birthdays until your twenty-first year. The mother you never knew, sending back love from the beyond.
You’re older than 21 now. Since the last delivery, you’ve scanned all of them. You’ve memorized them and most consist only of different ways to say, “I love you and will always be with you.” But on those original letters is your mother’s handwriting. She held that paper in her fingers. She brought the envelope to her mouth and her breath touched the seal.
When the fire blazes, you grab the box, but the reason isn’t nostalgia, obsession, or sentimentality. It’s love. The very same love two people share. Some of us can feel a full, emotional connection… to a thing without a heart, without blood or bone, to something without a… life. And it’s precisely that connection which gives us the reason to live our own.