In 'My Own Wife,' Jefferson Mays is cross-dressed for success
(Correction: Because of reporting errors, the assumed name and given name of a character played by actor Jefferson Mays in the play ''I Am My Own Wife" were misspelled in a story about Mays in Sunday's Arts & Entertainment section. The character is Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, born Lothar Berfelde.)
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- On the cover of the playbill for ''I Am My Own Wife," a strand of pearls flashes an alternating pattern of Nazi swastikas and communist hammer-and-sickles. The symbols represent the two oppressive regimes endured by Charlotte von Mahldsdorf, the East German heroine of Doug Wright's 2004 Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning drama. Inside actor Jefferson Mays's dressing room at the National Theatre, an 18-inch strand is laid out by the mirror, waiting for him.
Mays is dressed in street clothes: a tweed suit and beret, a startlingly debonair contrast to the drab black stockings, smock, and head scarf that make up his costume for eight solo performances a week. His Charlotte (pronounced ''Sharlotta") takes the stage with a minimum of makeup and nothing that might be called traditional drag. Mays also plays some three dozen other characters in the play, including SS officers, East German Stasi agents, neo-Nazi skinheads, Charlotte's brutal father, and Wright himself. This bizarre menagerie, having already conquered off-Broadway and Broadway stages, shows up at the Wilbur Theatre Tuesday as part of a national tour.
To this famously collaborative project -- which had its gestation with Mays, Wright (''Quills"), and director Moises Kaufman (''The Laramie Project," ''Gross Indecency") at the Sundance Theatre Laboratory in 2000 -- audiences have responded most directly to the man onstage rather than to the political issues the play raises.
Sitting upright in a chair, Mays speaks with formal precision as he describes how his early participation helped him create his spellbinding character.
''Being involved in this process before words had been put down on paper -- it's like having a bespoke suit tailor-made to my strengths and skirting my weaknesses," he says. ''No pun intended."
The actor, 40, has become a celebrated theatrical chameleon, one whose performance was strong enough to beat out theater bigwigs Kevin Kline, Simon Russell Beale, Frank Langella, and Christopher Plummer for the Tony.
Mays says, however, that he ''walked into it blind."
''Doug called me out of the blue. I had just finished a show in New York, and he said, 'Do you want to come out to Utah and see the Sundance Festival and be in a play that hasn't been written?' I said, 'Sure, what's it about?' and [Wright answered], 'A 65-year-old German transvestite.' "
Based loosely on a series of Wright's interviews with the real Charlotte between 1992 and 1994, correspondence between the two that continued until her death in 2002, as well as Charlotte's Stasi files, ''I Am My Own Wife" uses a series of interwoven sketches to explore the public and private lives of a person who was almost always hiding something.
''She's as much an enigma to me as she is to the audience," says Mays. ''That's why she's continually fascinating to come back to."
Born Lothar Berfedle, Charlotte became a cross-dresser in her late teens. She also became the curator of a unique East Berlin museum that housed phonographs, antique clocks from ''the gay '90s," and even a cabaret. In her own way, she was an embodiment of homosexual culture from the Weimar era to the fall of the Berlin Wall -- if not the flawless icon of gay history that Wright had first hoped.
''Doug said that talking to her was like putting a coin into one of her music machines," Mays relates. ''You'd ask her something, and she would look off into space and then come back and tell this beautifully crafted story, and then maybe he'd ask a follow-up question, and she'd look into space and then she'd tell part of the beautifully crafted story over again. She had her spiel."
She also had her dark side. When Wright learned she might have betrayed a close friend to the Stasi, he had to negotiate this discovery and weave it into the play.
Of Mays's accomplishment in portraying Charlotte, Wright says, ''I think audiences are drawn to him the same way that tourists in Berlin were drawn to Charlotte. They'd stand in line outside her museum for hours, just to gain an audience with her."
For Mays, the main challenge was to find a voice for Charlotte, something made easier by the hours of recorded interviews.
''It's odd, when you are imitating another voice, it makes your body change," he explains. ''You hold yourself in a different way to make those resonating chambers work." In the process, Mays says, he even duplicated Charlotte's physical mannerisms, according to people who knew her.
As for Wright's voice, he says, the key to capturing it came from a school friend who said Wright ''had a voice like a ripe avocado."
Mays grew up in Clinton, Conn., and studied classics and art at Yale. He didn't create a career in the theater for himself until he was in his early 20s. He does, indeed, have his own wife, Australian actress Susan Lyons, who is the associate director for the tour.
Mays attended the graduate acting program at the University of California at San Diego, where he studied the Suzuki Method, a highly stylized, Kabuki-influenced form of acting created by Japanese director Tadashi Suzuki. ''That was the first time I saw actors who were superhuman. I was amazed not by their athleticism but their rigor," he says. ''That was a marvelous education, so removed from American realism."
Before signing on with ''Wife," Mays was in a production of ''Alice's Adventures" produced by avant-garde director Anne Bogart and her New York performance group SITI. An actress played Alice, and Mays played Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) and all the other characters in Wonderland.
In addition to giving him a taste of playing multiple characters, ''Alice's Adventures" showed him how to play them without changing costumes. ''I just had this suit as Charles Dodgson," he recalls -- then, in a startling transformation, demonstrates how he became the caterpillar with a sinister weaving about from the waist and hands held like insect claws. ''It was just physically defined without a lot of elaborate hoo-hah," he says.
''Wife" is not the first show in women's clothing for Mays. He wore heels in Christopher Durang's ''Identity Crisis" and played what he calls ''a Diane Vreeland-ish character" in a SITI production called ''Culture of Desire," again wearing a little black dress with high heels.
Mays won't be taking off Charlotte's sensible black oxfords for some time, as the play is on tour through at least 2006. When he does, though, what would he like to be doing?
''I'd like to wear pants. I'd like a play where I dress well and sit on furniture and say witty things," he says.
Noel Coward?
''Exactly. I could do 'Private Lives' with my wife." 
