Liberty Bradford Mitchell spent a good deal of her youth concealing the fact that she was one of those Mitchells. Her father was Artie Mitchell of the Mitchell Brothers, San Francisco’s infamous pornography pioneers, the founders of the O’Farrell Theatre strip club and makers of Behind the Green Door, the 1972 skin flick hailed as the start of the “Golden Age of Porn.” Still more infamously, her uncle Jim Mitchell shot her father dead in 1991, and Liberty’s testimony in the subsequent trial was one of the factors that got him convicted of voluntary manslaughter rather than murder. Clearly she has a lot to talk about, and that’s what she’s doing in her one-woman show The Pornographer’s Daughter, which is having its world premiere run now at Z Below, the venue formerly known as Traveling Jewish Theatre.
“One-woman show” is a little misleading. There are actually three guys up there on stage with her: a backing band, aptly named the Fluffers, who only play every once in a while to usher in a new chapter of the story. They play a hodgepodge of instantly recognizable instrumental riffs and intros to hits by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Grandmaster Melle Mel, Billy Idol, Duran Duran, Nirvana, Blondie and others. The play is far from a musical, but Bradford Mitchell does sing one grimly appropriate song, a haunting rendition of Cher’s “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)” in the style of the Nancy Sinatra cover used in the Tarantino flick Kill Bill. The guys don’t play parts — Bradford Mitchell takes on appropriate voices for all the characters in her story — but bassist Keith Stater doubles as a sleazy announcer who pops up occasionally to give a sense of the milieu in which Bradford Mitchell grew up.
Liberty Bradford Mitchell and backing band the Fluffers in The Pornographer’s Daughter
The show is essentially and entirely an answer to the question, “What was it like to grow up as the daughter of one of the Mitchell Brothers?” Bradford Mitchell gives us the story of how her parents met in the 1960s (Meredith Bradford from a posh New England family and Artie “from a long line of charismatic Okie grifters”), and how the brothers got into porn half as a money-making scheme and half because “they truly believed they were pioneering the next wave of avant-garde cinema.”
She deftly goes back and forth between what she later learned was going on in her parents’ lives and the effects these activities had on her: staring in disturbed incomprehension at the close-ups of colliding genitals at the O’Farrell when she was four years old, and worrying at six that she’d be arrested for visiting her dad at the adults-only establishment. She talks about her parents’ divorce and the bad-influence advice her father gave her growing up. She explains that “business trips” were the euphemism for Artie and Jim going to jail, which Artie did 187 times. For Jim, it was 188. Knowing what this difference means when she says it is chilling. Uncle Jim is understandably depicted as a ticking time bomb. Even before the days of cocaine-fueled paranoia, Bradford Mitchell keeps coming back to an “unwritten rule: Don’t f— with Uncle Jim.”
