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Into a German transvestite's
reality In a Broadway season of standout performances, one of the most remarkable is being given at the Lyceum Theater, where the one-person show "I Am My Own Wife" opened Wednesday night. A young actor named Jefferson Mays is playing a 65-year-old German transvestite named Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, as well as a wide-ranging gallery of other characters, including the play's self-described gay Midwestern author, Doug Wright. Wearing a black dress, pearls, clunky shoes, and a black kerchief, and shifting easily between English and German, Mays, without feminine or aging makeup, uncannily becomes Von Mahlsdorf.
He creates an indelible portrait of a wry, precise, quite odd woman who self-assuredly inhabited an alternate world. A passionate collector of clocks, gramophones, and curios, which she exhibited in her own museum, the real-life Von Mahlsdorf - who was born Lothar Berfelde - somehow managed to survive both the Nazis and the Communists. Wearing the same outfit in all but one scene, Mays employs a variety of extremely artful accents, intonations, and gestures to present an obtuse TV show host interviewing Von Mahlsdorf, a gruff German homosexual, and an American speaking German with a hilarious twang, among other distinctive portraits. Author Wright, who has made himself a prominent character, trying to relate his struggle to assert his identity with Von Mahlsdorf's will to survive, has written a smart and amusing play. And director Moises Kaufman has woven everything together into an assured and very theatrical evening. If the result is fascinating rather than emotionally involving, maybe that's partly due to a Broadway theater lacking the intimacy of the off-Broadway space where the show originally was a hit. But it's also a result, I think, of Wright's refusal to tidily summarize Von Mahlsdorf's existence. After his interviews with her 10 years ago (she died in 2002), information became public that indicated she was a spy for the East German Communist regime. Additionally, questions were raised about the accuracy of her recollections of her life during the Nazi regime, including her story of having killed her brutal father. Wright doesn't attempt to uncover the facts. He leaves us not with a clearly outlined picture of a human being, motivations neatly included, but with a sense of the elusive, shifting reality of Von Mahlsdorf's self-created life. In the second act, which has a lengthy digression into the plight of an acquaintance who rivaled Von Mahlsdorf as a collector, the play flags a bit. But Kaufman brings it to a vivid conclusion with a couple of wonderful touches. One is a recording of the actual Von Mahlsdorf, as taped by Wright (which provides a sense of the brilliance of Mays' vocal imitation). The other, visible as we leave the theater, is a blown-up photograph of Von Mahlsdorf as a 10-year-old boy, sitting on a bench at the Berlin Zoo, with each arm encircling a lion cub. E-mail: feldberg@northjersey.com
Copyright © 2003 North Jersey Media Group Inc.
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