Maybe the most valuable gift a person had during the 20th was for survival. In the case of Char- lotte von Mahls- dorf, a German transvestite, this was virtually raised into an art form. Charlotte - a larger-than-life but real-life figure - is the subject of a remarkable one-person, multi-faceted play by Doug Wright, I Am My Own Wife, which has opened on Broadway following a successful Off-Broadway run at Playwrights Horizons.
It is a complex, fascinatingly flawed play that holds the interest even when its dramatic machinery becomes clumsily cumbersome. Part of this cumbersomeness is that Wright (the author of the play and movie script Quills) is not just the playwright but also a main character in his own play. And he is played by the same actor, the truly amazing Jefferson Mays, who performs the ambiguous role of Charlotte and 34 other roles in this quietly virtuosic display piece. But I get ahead of myself. It is 1990. The Berlin Wall has fallen and Berlin itself is turning somersaults. Charlotte (or Lothar Berfelde to give her his original name) runs a small, fantastic museum in what had been East Berlin. It is devoted to memorabilia - furniture, clocks, phonographs - of Berlin’s Gay Nineties. The 1890s, that is.
When Mays enters as Charlotte, his impassive face a blank scribble pad for nuanced emotion and his precise, high-pitched voice with a slight sing-song German accent, he starts a lecture about cylinder phonographs and old bric-a-brac that could be a satire on TV’s Antiques Road Show. An American correspondent in Berlin discovers him and writes to his friend, the playwright Doug Wright, suggesting him as a subject for a play. For Charlotte seems to have done the impossible. Born in 1930 he has, as an obvious homosexual, survived the ministrations of both Hitler’s Gestapo and East Germany’s secret police, the Stasi. And now he runs this quaint museum and has even been awarded a Medal of Honour by the new German State.
Wright, his attention piqued, gets a Guggenheim grant to go over to Berlin and tape Charlotte’s astonishing story. And that story - which includes not only a tale of patricide but also running a Weimar-style cabaret club in the basement of his home during the height of the East German regime - unfolds with unflurried dignity. But then the story takes a strange twist. Charlotte worked as a spy/informer for the Stasi. Some playwrights would there and then have washed their hands of the whole enterprise. But Wright uses that twist - not with complete success - to crank up the final reality of this bizarre 20th century saga. Yet those real facts are not quite so interesting as what has proved to be partly fiction and Wright is left with a character far less elusive and fascinating than it first appeared.
We might feel a little cheated. Yet on the whole most will accept, as the playwright himself clearly did, that whether true or false in detail, Charlotte von Mahlsdorf was an extraordinary creature surviving in extraordinary times. Wright is helped by the clever and attractive setting from Derek McLane, adroit neutral costuming by Janice Pytel, the atmospherically crepuscular lighting of David Lander and a staging by Moises Kaufman that manipulates the special interplay of the text with light but firm control. But most praise must go to Mays who has the role of a lifetime and grabs it with sweetly unobtrusive grace. He makes us believe that he really is a stageful of folk and not merely an old geezer talking to himself on a cell-phone like a New York cab-driver. The gradations and colorations of his portrayals are something to be seen, cherished and remembered. Here is one of the performances of the New York season and should eventually be seen in London.
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