OKAY, HERE'S the pitch: A plucky East German transvestite survives not one but two repressive regimes on the way to amassing one of her country's most impressive private furniture collections.

Settle down -- you can call for tickets in a moment. And if by chance you're still skeptical, consider this: One of the brains behind "I Am My Own Wife" is director Moises Kaufman, aka a rising star in American theater, aka the King of the Unlikely Premise. In other words, if anybody can make us care about furniture-collecting East German transvestites, it's this guy.

"We started with a question: Can theater play a role in the national dialogue?" says Kaufman, referring to Tectonic Theater Project, the company he created in the mid-'90s. And if their answer -- yes -- was not unexpected (these were serious theater types, after all), their method of achieving it certainly was.

"We've made work that is very rigorous and very thorough and very committed," he says. "And yet it has become very popular in the best use of the word, or should I say 'populist'?"

Call it what you like, the man's on a roll. Eight years after he took off-Broadway by storm with "Gross Indecency," a play with the temerity to suggest that an evening of theater might be constructed out of the transcripts of Oscar Wilde's sodomy trials, and five years after "The Laramie Project," a play with the temerity to suggest that the murder of a gay Wyoming college student, Matthew Shepard, was a watershed moment for the country -- Kaufman is back, temerity at the ready.

The play? Doug Wright's "I Am My Own Wife," which Kaufman is directing at the National Theatre, about the life of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, a plucky . . . well, you know.

You've no doubt also heard about the Tony Award-winning, pearls-wearing, dress-clad actor who drives the drama, Jefferson Mays, and whose accolades, according to Kaufman, are richly deserved. ("This is a virtuosic performer. It's like working with Yo-Yo Ma. He has such a well-honed instrument that every subtlety of thought can be conveyed in some way.")

But if it were merely an acting tour de force, "I Am My Own Wife" would likely not have merited a Tony for best play or the Pulitzer Prize for drama. In part, Wright's work owes its success to, as Kaufman puts it, a fantastic story and a fantastic character. There can't have been many openly cross-dressing Germans who survived mistreatment by both the Nazis and communists; and even if there were, you get the sense that Charlotte was singularly indomitable.

But there is another facet to the play, one that connects Charlotte with Matthew and Oscar, and therefore much of Kaufman's work: an enigmatic central figure whose real-life status only adds to the mystery of who he or she is.

"Only bad fiction is simple -- life is more complicated than that," he says of Charlotte, whose complexities initially proved too much for Wright. He "met her and fell madly in love with her," Kaufman jokes, a love that turned to writer's block when Wright discovered that Charlotte, who died in 2002, might have been less than forthcoming about her past. Compelling evidence suggested that Charlotte had been an informant for the East German secret police -- the Stasi -- and Wright was heartbroken.

"The more he learned, the more he became paralyzed. . . . He didn't want to write a play that condemned his object of affection."

Of course, objects of affection that aroused mixed feelings were Kaufman's specialty, so when he was invited to conduct a three-week workshop of the play at the Sundance Theater Lab in 2000, he knew what to do.

"I said, 'We'll spend three weeks here not writing a play,' " -- one of the techniques he'd used successfully during the creation of "Gross Indecency" -- "We started by doing some theatrical exercises about what he loved about her. . . . That was safe territory."

The result of the unusual collaboration was a play that ran on Broadway for nearly a year. For Kaufman, whose Venezuelan childhood included regular attendance at the plays of Jerzy Grotowski and Peter Brook, "Wife" is further confirmation of a mainstream audience's willingness to embrace unusual stories, not to mention unusual ways of creating and staging them.

"We have had a national impact, and I think that's partially because the subject matter is so interesting, but also formally it's very different," he says. "It's very difficult to talk about new ideas with old forms."