One-woman show.

Ellenzweig, Allen

I am my own wife A new play by Doug Wright Directed by Moises Kaufman

IN GENERAL I don't like drag, yet there are times when a man in a dress does something transformative: he comes to embody something other than a camp cliche. Such is the case with the one-man production written by Doug Wright, I am my own wife, currently on the boards at New York City's Playwrights Horizons. Here we have a man in a severe black dress presenting the extraordinary figure of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, a male-to-female transvestite who survived the Nazi regime as a teenager only to live nearly all her adult life under the repressive Communist boot of East Germany.

Wright is the author of Quills, a play about the Marquis de Sade that he adapted for the screen in a much lauded film starring Geoffrey Rush. With I am my own wife, the playwright has had good fortune in his collaborators. Wife is directed by Moises Kaufman, whose previous credits include Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde and The Laramie Project. Both of those productions relied heavily upon an architecture made of documents--court records, contemporaneous newspaper accounts, taped interviews--to build a coherent historical text in which the drama took place. The source materials for I am my own wife, which Kaufman has helped to shape along with Wright, include the playwright's interviews with Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, letters the two exchanged over ten years, newspaper accounts of her life, and her East German Stasi file.

None of this would have amounted to much had Wright and Kaufman not had Jefferson Mays to play Charlotte and all the other characters in the piece--including representations of the playwright himself and assorted Nazi and East German Stasi police, American soldiers, heartless homo-hustlers, an antiques-dealing conman, and Charlotte's lesbian aunt. What Mays does is nothing less than to "channel" Charlotte in her declining years and bring her to us whole: the cadences of her speech and German accent; her manner of walking and physical gesture. She is not a caricature, though she is a character. She's not a lovable old tranny, but we are cast under her spell nonetheless. All this Mays achieves with an economy of means in a performance that is at once controlled and spirited. He can go in a flash from Charlotte describing in piquant timbre the antique phonograph machines she collects, some from as far back as Thomas Edison, to assuming the innocence of a Midwestern GI on duty in Cold War Germany or the bullying presence of Char lotte's abusive father. And all this in the same black dress, with pearls.

While there are many characters in this one-person play, all of them acted by Jefferson Mays in quick incisive strokes, it is his embodiment of Charlotte von Mahlsdorff--born Lothar Berfelde--that holds us in thrall. As the owner of an antique furniture "museum" in East Berlin, Charlotte's collection of cylinders and discs from a bygone era, together with her well-stuffed and well-crafted chaises and chairs, are her witnesses to the history that fate has condemned her to survive. An early, brutal transgression committed in self-defense has forced Lothar into youth detention until a lucky escape. A lesbian aunt, conversant in the sexology theories of Magnus Hirschfeld, hands Lothar a study on transvestitism and commands him to make it his bible. A gay antiques dealer, a fellow obsessive of early Edison cylinders, enlists Charlotte in a get-rich-quick scheme involving young American soldiers eager to send elegant kitsch back home. The East German Stasi police discover his export violation and enlist Charlotte as an informer. All the while, Charlotte herself has made her basement a clandestine re-creation of a Weimar-era nightclub, a venue for gay and lesbian trysts.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Charlotte is lauded as a national German heroine until her Stasi connections are made public. In a country where informing on one's neighbors was widespread, if not universal, the aging transvestite is now roasted over the coals in the media.

By having "Doug Wright" enter the narrative as a character, the play explores the dramatist's evolving relations with Charlotte and becomes an inquiry about truth and fiction--how much of what she has told him about her past, and therefore told the audience, is verifiable? For example, we have witnessed a scene in which her dealer friend has given her permission to inform on him--as a way of saving herself. Larger questions of reality and illusion are at play here, for is not Charlotte's entire life a deeply committed performance? Is she not at all times the biological Lothar embedded in the female-gendered Charlotte?

I am my own wife uses all the stagecraft at its command--kudos to its scenic and lighting design, and to its sound engineers--to awaken from a simple stage the moral complexities of one man's life intersecting with the 20th century's two worst totalitarian scourges. Wright, Kaufman, and Mays have collaborated to (re)create a compromised hero/heroine whose life was both a beacon and a shadow.