Jefferson Mays in I Am My Own Wife. Photo: Joan Marcus

Although Thanksgiving was last Thursday, I’d like to use this moment to express how thankful I am for New York’s nonprofit theaters. Were it not for them, we might not have works such as Avenue Q, The Violet Hour, and Anna in the Tropics on Broadway. Instead, we might have had a fall filled only with "commercial" ventures such a Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks, The Oldest Living Widow..., and Bobbi Boland on the Great White Way. I now welcome into the former category Douglas Wright’s I Am My Own Wife, which opened last night at the Lyceum Theatre, a transfer to Broadway after a successful summer run at Playwrights Horizons.

Wright’s "Wife" has made the move from off-Broadway to on with great and almost surprising ease. Jefferson Mays’ chameleon-like performance of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, a German transvestite who survives both Nazi and Communist-era Berlin, seems to have grown even richer with extended playing. Dressed in Janice Pytel’s simple black peasant dress, a pair of orthopedic black shoes and a string of pearls, Mays portrays the character as well as nearly 40 others, switched accents and postures with lighting-like rapidity. Mays’ shifts in character are underscored by Moises Kaufman’s gentle direction, which has the actor move at different angles for the play’s vast array of characters.

Mays’ portrayal of Charlotte has grown slightly more prim and haughty during the play’s early moments as the audience meets her at the museum she runs in the newly open-to-the-West Berlin. This demeanor only makes Mays’ transformation into the Southern-accent German mauling report John and the very-much-agog Wright (who has come to visit the woman) even more amusing.

The play moves one through Charlotte’s childhood as a boy where he survived an abusive father through World War II and the cold war (with Mays playing characters that range from Charlotte’s aristocratic aunt who is also a transvestite to order-barking Nazis to oily Communist agents). When the Berlin Wall falls, Charlotte’s efforts to preserve German history are recognized with the presentation of a national medal of honor. This moment is quickly tarnished by the release of Communist files that indicate that she may have been an informant, even as she was preserving and running Berlin’s last gay bar in the basement of her museum.

As Wright allows these details to emerge in the play, one wonders how much of the truth she has told and how much has been invented. Wright, who has subtitled the piece "Studies for a Play About Charlotte von Mahlsdorf", appears to be as shocked as the world that his subject might not have been telling the truth, and indeed inventing details to gain sympathy in the post-Cold War West. Wright’s willingness to allow Charlotte’s true nature to remain ambiguous is just as glorious as the specificity of Mays’ performance.

This dual nature is reflected in Derek McLane’s scenic design – a gray-lavender wallpapered back wall that can become translucent under David Lander’s sensitive lighting design. Behind this wall representing a room in the mansion where Charlotte lives and runs her museum, one initially sees just an inky royal blue that, again, thanks to Lander’s lights, transforms itself in miraculous ways as the story unfolds. As with Mays’ performance, some of the effects that take place far upstage seem to have grown more rich and expansive in this wonderfully successful transfer of this sensitive and engrossing play.

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I Am My Own Wife plays at the Lyceum Theatre (149 West 45th Street) Tuesday through Saturday at 8pm; Wednesday and Saturday at 2pm; and Sunday at 3pm. Tickets are $25-75 and can be purchased by calling 212-239-6200.