By Doug Wright
Directed by Moisés Kaufman
Featuring Jefferson Mays
At Playwrights Horizons, New York City
"The magic of theater" is an overworn phrase that,
like many clichés, retains a core of truth. How else
can I explain that one actor fills a theater with more personalities
than resided inside poor Sybil, using nothing but his own
talents in conjunction with razor-sharp direction, with both
in the service of a weird yet wonderful story?
I Am My Own Wife is a kind of fictional biography of Charlotte
von Mahlsdorf, "Berlin's most famous transvestite."
She/he (I'll refer to the character as she, as the play does)
was a real person, biologically a man named Lothar Berfelde,
who survived and thrived through two of the world's most horrifying
regimes - the Nazis and the East German Communists. Author
Doug Wright met and interviewed her in 1992 and 1993, and
has created the play based on those conversations as well
as newspaper accounts and Charlotte's Stasi secret police
file.
Charlotte's survival strategy, as a cross-dressing gay man
living under governments dedicated either to exterminating
homosexuals or declaring that they simply don't exist, was
to become a collector of things that others might have thrown
aside or considered no more than mere furniture. Her two main
collecting passions - for vintage phonographs dating all the
way back to Edison's talking machine and to clocks of varying
shapes, sizes and types - seem to have been chosen as much
for their symbolic weight as their beauty, utility and monetary
value.
Charlotte's story is fantastic in more ways than one. The
play can be very funny and it's rarely less than compelling.
Wright, whose best-known work is Quills, about the Marquis
de Sade's final days in an authoritarian madhouse (made into
a recent film starring Geoffrey Rush), again chooses a self-dramatizing
monster as the subject of his work. The play's first act is
Wright's infatuation with Charlotte (as a gay icon, a survivor
and a real-life character). The second act pulls back the
veils to reveal that some of Charlotte's stories are just
that, stories, and that many facets of her persona are, on
closer inspection, less than appealing.
More than anything, I Am My Own Wife is a tour de force
for actor Jefferson Mays. Using only one costume change, Mays
creates not only a touching yet mysterious Charlotte but her
key family members (from abusive father to sympathetic lesbian
aunt), those Charlotte loved and those she betrayed (often
the same person), and author Wright himself. With a few key
gestures for each - the return of Charlotte is identified
not only with Mays' vocal and facial changes but the obsessive
twiddling of Charlotte's only piece of jewelry, a simple string
of pearls - Mays fills the stage with crowds of people.
He is aided significantly by director Moisés Kaufman,
who has also had experience creating compelling contemporary
contexts for real-life events, as writer and director of Gross
Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde as well as direction
of The Laramie Project, about the Matthew Shepard murder.
Kaufman and Mays, along with scenic designer Derek McLane
and lighting designer David Lander, turn the basic stage space
of Playwrights Horizons' mainstage theater into Charlotte's
obsessively-kept museum of late-19th-century furniture with
the most basic means. The seeming simplicity of the direction
and design is not only necessary to keep all the characters
straight, but also serves as a nice contrast as we discover
who Charlotte is, and isn't.
Wright's play works as a meditation on how someone creates
a "character" in order to survive rejection, harassment
and persecution. The danger of hiding is, of course, that
one's authentic self gets lost as well. The slight frustration
I felt at play's end is that, while we get some sense of the
true core of Charlotte/Lothar, we've been through so many
fictional, self-serving stories that it's hard to know what
to believe any longer. In fact, it's not clear what Wright
believes, and his point may be that it's impossible to know
Charlotte - impossible for him, for us and maybe even for
her.
I Am My Own Wife is a unique theatrical experience. I can't
imagine another actor bringing the skills and emotional grounding
to it that Mays does. Unfortunately the play is in a limited
run at New York City's Playwrights Horizons, but I have a
feeling this play will live on much the way Charlotte did
- with a combination of showmanship and cunning.
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