Since the beginning of his multifaceted and prolific career as a playwright, novelist, short-story writer, teacher, editor, actor, and critic, Mitchell's major contributions to Canadian writing have been in drama. Mitchell has continuously experimented with dramatic form and his plays have often explored the ambiguous characteristics of the modern hero in one of his many guises as rebel, cartoon figure, politician, every-man, madman, or martyr. At the center of many of Mitchell's best plays stands a complex figure with an extraordinary vision who is either revered by a whole culture--like Bethune in Gone the Burning Sun--or cast out by his community--like Jaanus in The Shipbuilder. Mitchell's protagonists are at once attractive by virtue of their common touch--Nicholas Davin's blarney in Davin: The Politician, the verve of Johnny Roychuck, Ukrainian truck driver, hard-drinking lover, and latter-day Othello in Cruel Tears--and, despite their raw energy, flawed characters, prey...