Who is Douglas Mitchell? At age 70 and only 10 years after he began playwriting, the Rice University linguist will be the subject of One Arm Red's RedFest 2000 at Manhattan Theater Source. Four of his one acts will be fully staged in productions running July 5-29 while six other works will be the subject of a Sunday reading series.

Among the one acts will be Shatter the Golden Vessel, about a young man, sentenced to death, who is offered a selection of ways to die by his executioner; It's Got to Be Something, a place where a woman struggles against a nameless government bureaucracy; All Wrapped Up, in which a mysterious package terrorizes a dull married couple; and How to Sacrifice a Child, the story of a family's bizarre attempts to protect themselves from the outside world.

This is not the first Mitchell retrospective in the U.S. In April and May, Houston's Stages Repertory Theatre staged seven of the playwrights one acts including Golden Vessel, Wrapped Up and Friends. Outside of Texas, Mitchell also received a fall production of his Old Friends alongside Edward Albee's Zoo Story directed by Albee in the Netherlands.

Directing the RedFest pieces are Chesley Krohn and William Hardy. The Redfest actors include Bryan Carroll, Brian Corrigan, Hardy, Tim Kirkpatrick, Mary Elaine Monti, Shaun Powers, Susan Scudder, Michael Linstroth, Martin Shakar, William Westenberg and Shelley Williams.

The plays will be presented in an A and B program setting with Vessel and Something running together in program A and Wrapped and Child in program B. The Sunday reading series, which begins at 5 PM, follows:

July 9: The Throwaways and Flores Para Una Muerta
July 16: The Way Up and the Way Down
July 23: Old Friends and Any Old Passion
July 30: Bold Notions of Fixity

Tickets are $15. The Manhattan Theater Source is located at 177 MacDougal Street. For reservations, call (212) 501-4751. One Arm Red is on the web at http://www.onearmred.com.

-- By Christine Ehren