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I Am My Own Wife (review)
- Theatre Journal
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 55, Number 4, December 2003
- pp. 700-702
- 10.1353/tj.2003.0184
- Review
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
Theatre Journal 55.4 (2003) 700-702
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I Am My Own Wife. By Doug Wright. Playwrights Horizons, New York City. 14 June 2003.
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I Am My Own Wife is a two-act documentary play detailing the startling life of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, an East Berlin furniture collector and transvestite who survived both the Nazi and communist [End Page 700] periods. Born Lothar Berfelde to a brutal Nazi father, but supported by a cross-gendered aunt, he lived as a woman from his teens on. Adopting antique furniture, largely from Jews forced from Berlin, Charlotte ran a museum, as well as a clandestine cabaret, through both regimes. Accused at a late age of collaboration with the East German secret police, she spent her last years self-exiled to Sweden, passing away last year.
American playwright Doug Wright (Quills) traveled back and forth to Berlin from the early 1990s through the end of Charlotte's life, accumulating a treasure of interview tapes in her rich, thickly accented voice. Wright recounts the failure of his initial attempts to transform the interviews into a Masterpiece Theatre-style dramatization. However, he subsequently adopted the docu-drama works of Moisés Kaufman as his model. Both Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde and The Laramie Project reenact verbatim interview and press transcripts. While Kaufman's texts feature several actors in multiple roles, Wright set Wife as a one-person show, echoing Anna Deavere Smith's solo docu-dramas as well.
The extraordinarily talented Jefferson Mays (Quills) plays Charlotte, her aunt, her peers, Nazis, DDR secret policemen, U.S. soldiers, reporters, Doug Wright himself, and thirty or so other figures. Apart from costume addition, Mays remained in Charlotte's dress and headscarf, his impersonations faultlessly convincing, and his transitions between characters, genders, and nationalities swift, distinct, and crisp. Mays was lucky, as he relates, in having access to Charlotte tapes. His rendition of Charlotte's voice is deeply moving and lyrical. Wright left intact Charlotte's frequent slips from English back to German. Yet, even for non-German speakers these moments are comprehensible. They reinforce the sense that, while non-mainstream, tortured, and reviled, Charlotte—working to preserve the beauty of her culture's past—is thoroughly, traditionally German. Mays's performance as Doug is compellingly self-deprecating, awkward and naïve, and his more fleeting roles—a talk-show host, a surfer-dude U.S. infantryman, a fey, hair-tossing youth—are spot-on and seamless.
Working to maximum effect, Derek McLane's set is ingenious. The main playing space, Charlotte's museum parlor, is delimited by a scrimmed wall of fussy white lace. Behind, floor to ceiling, are warehouse shelves packed with period bric-a-brac. A house tour is metonymically enacted, within the parlor space, through a dollhouse furniture arrangement. A cabaret scene is suggested when warm-hued table lamps, unseen in the dark warehouse racks, are gradually illuminated. Clocks, the focus of a subplot, similarly emerge when gently lit. Beyond a very slight set alteration between acts, no change takes place. This alchemical design, pleasing in its self-containment, also mirrors this one-actor play's motif of self-transformation.
The gripping first act begins with Charlotte's family background and ends with the Nazi period. The second act, detailing a scandal—late in life, Charlotte was accused of having informed on a friend to the DDR secret police—while compelling, is weaker. Charlotte's own narrative is overwhelmed by depiction of the media circus surrounding her, Wright's disillusion with her, and—above all—a moral dilemma: was Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, queer icon, a bad person?
Kaufman's direction is strong in most instances: a moment where Mays becomes at once a telephone answering machine, its owner, and Doug, [End Page 701] speaking on it, is delightful. Kaufman's choice to include moments of the real tapes themselves at the play's end is breathtaking. However, Kaufman's hand in Wright's text detracts as well. Charlotte, like the Wilde of Gross Indecency,is beset by press conflict; lionized as...