I Am My Own Wife
Zachary Scott Theatre Center Whisenhunt Arena Stage, through Aug. 27
Running Time: 1 hr, 45 min
“Art survives.” It’s just a bit of graffiti glimpsed by Doug Wright as he rides through Berlin in 1992, but it turns out to be a portent, a signpost for the journey that the young playwright is about to take. He is on his way to Charlotte von Mahlsdorf’s Gründerzeit Museum, a collection of late-19th- and early-20th-century artifacts: antique furniture, clocks, phonographs, early recordings, and the like, but below that also sit the furnishings of a cabaret for gays and lesbians rescued from destruction by the East Germans in 1952. The place is a testament to art’s ability to survive, even through two world wars and the four-decade twilight of communism. Oppressive regimes come and go; walls rise and fall, but these expressions of human creativity endure.
So too does Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, who is in a sense a work of art herself. As she tells it, she was born Lothar Berfelde, a boy, but the day she discovered a closet of her aunt’s clothing and tried some on, she understood her true nature. Encouraged by that aunt – herself a lesbian – Lothar put on a dress, and Charlotte was born. She fashioned this new persona as a sculptor might a lump of clay and so shaped a new life for herself, despite a violently abusive father, despite imprisonment for his murder, despite harassment by the Stasi, East Germany’s secret police. That a transvestite – particularly one living so openly – should survive two regimes as brutal as the Third Reich and the GDR almost defies belief. She should not exist.
And yet she does, which breeds in Wright a fascination with Charlotte, a desire to learn her history, to learn how art survives. I Am My Own Wife is his search, a theatrical investigation in which a single actor portrays Charlotte, Wright, and three dozen other figures from their lives. The play requires a skillful shape-shifter, capable of playing elderly Teutonic antique dealers, young Yankee soldiers, butch Weimar lesbians, and gushy reunification-era chat-show hosts (and of switching among them in a blink), but this is Charlotte’s show, as made clear by the plain black scarf and shift and simple strand of pearls worn by the lone performer throughout. She commands the stage, spinning her stories, and what astonishing stories they are: of the liberating encouragement by her Tante Luise, of killing her father with a rolling pin, of eluding death by Nazis, of a friend’s midnight sacrifice before a Stasi arrest, of confronting a skinhead. They’re so ripe with drama, so nearly miraculous, they seem too good to be true.
And they might be. Wright discovers Charlotte’s versions of certain events to be at odds with those detailed in Stasi files, leading him to question her veracity. Naturally we do the same, but if the Charlotte before us is persuasive, as the woman herself apparently was, we find ourselves, like Wright, torn between wanting to know what truly happened and wanting her stories to be true. In the Zachary Scott Theatre Center production, we’re rent by that tension. In the cozy Whisenhunt Arena Stage, director Dave Steakley brings us as close to Charlotte as Wright was, close enough to be caught by her gaze, caressed by her voice. And set designer Michael Raiford represents the Gründerzeit Museum as a dollhouse, its contents rendered in delicate miniatures. This heightens our sense of intimacy, making it easier for Charlotte to seduce us. Not that actor Glenn Peters plays the coquette; on the contrary, his is a marvelously clean performance, as unadorned and free of ostentation as Charlotte’s dress. But in his direct, precise delivery and movements, in his graceful handling of these precious artifacts, he draws us to his side and catches us in this mystery man-woman’s spell. We question, but we want to believe.
Wright never resolved that tension in his own mind, which made it difficult for him to resolve the play. His solution was to write this as his journey, casting himself as audience surrogate and as a mirror Charlotte, preserving her past as she preserved the past, only he hasn’t developed himself enough as a character to make that resonate. Besides, he’s done his work too well in bringing Charlotte to the stage. It’s her we want, to see and question ourselves. Perhaps she embellished her history; perhaps she lied. One does what one has to in the lion’s den, with predators on either side. So Charlotte did, and so the art of her museum, and her life, survives.
This article appears in August 25 • 2006.