American writer, director, actor. Mitchell, the son of a U.S. Army general and a Scottish mother, grew up on various army bases, including Berlin; later the family lived in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where he attended a Catholic school. Since the mid-1980s, he has worked as a theatre actor and director in New York City and played small roles in television and film productions. Among other things, he directed a play by Tennessee Williams. From 1991, he appeared in the original Broadway production of Marsha Norman and Lucy Simon's musical adaptation of The Secret Garden, which won several Tony Awards. In the early 1990s, together with musician Stephen Trask, he developed the character of Hedwig, a transgender rock musician who grew up in East Berlin, for performances in the New York drag bar Squeezebox. This led to the successful Off-Br...