NEW YORK STAGE
A Poetic, Well-Acted Portrait
A Unique Survivor Of Nazis, East Berlin
By MALCOLM JOHNSON
SPECIAL TO THE COURANT
December 4 2003
NEW YORK -- "I Am My Own Wife" unfolds in a microcosm of a rich German past, a
world of wax- cylinder players with big brass or wood horns, stately ticking
clocks and ornate, gleaming Biedermeier furniture. The presiding spirit of the
place is a man in a black dress and pearls who calls him/herself Charlotte von
Mahlsdorf.
"Quills" playwright Doug Wright has collaborated with director Moisés Kaufman
("The Laramie Project") and the protean actor Jefferson Mays to present a
fascinating, poetic, often witty dramatic portrait of a transvestite/ homosexual
who survived both Naziism and East Berlin Communism and managed to create a
museum, the Gründerzeit.
Named "for the period in Germany between 1890 and 1900," the museum contains
"petroleum lamps and vases, gramophones, records, matchboxes, telephones,
inkwells, polyphons, pictures, credenzas, bureaus, and, of course, clocks." This
is the way Mays' Charlotte summarizes the contents of the Gründerzeit to a
visitor, the playwright himself, who has come to East Berlin to research a play
about an amazing life endured under the most draconian regimes. The setting by
Derek McLane affords a glimpse of the treasure trove, with crammed boxes
reminiscent of Louise Nevelson's sculptures rising above the plain scrim-walled
room where Charlotte lives.
The celebration of a unique survivor and inveterate collector bears the subtitle
"Studies for a Play About the Life of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf." The play, which
opened Wednesday night at Broadway's venerable Lyceum Theatre (a perfect
setting) after its success last season at the new Playwrights Horizons,
interweaves interviews between the naive and sometimes fumbling Wright and the
austere, ladylike, slow-moving Charlotte, interjecting the voices and styles of
nearly three dozen other characters.
As in two other recent solo performances on Broadway, the successful "Golda"s
Balcony" with Tovah Feldshuh and the defunct "Oldest Living Confederate Widow
Tells All" with Ellen Burstyn, "I Am My Own Wife" uses the pivotal character to
animate others in the story.
But as directed by Kaufman, who also wrote "Gross Indecencies: The Three Trials
of Oscar Wilde," Wright's parade of Americans and Germans feels less showy than
the other plays. Its realism runs deeper, in part because the slight, smallish
Mays has made his career in regional theater and off-Broadway, rather than on
Broadway and in films.
Mays emerges as a true chameleon, using the range of his voice and gestures to
cut, cinematically, from the understated, deliberate Charlotte, with her soft
Prussian accent and carefully closed knees, to a manic, loud, jumpy talk-show
host roasting his guest on the hot seat.
Wright's play covers all the days of Charlotte's life (she died during a trip
back from Sweden to her beloved Grůnderzeit in April 2002), from her discovery
of cross-dressing during a visit to a butch lesbian aunt to a final encounter
with neo-Nazis that drove her from Berlin.
Finally, after the play ends, the production offers a glimpse of Charlotte as a
boy, Lothar Berfelde, a smiling 10-year-old, sitting between two lion cubs at a
zoo. Blow-ups of the surreal snapshot, sent to Wright just before Charlotte's
death, greet departing audiences as they pass through the lobby.
The life chronicles many horrors: the boy's murder of a murderous, wife-beating
father with a rolling pin; the escape from a penal home under attack by the
Russians; a close brush with death during a Nazi roundup; years of scrutiny and
interrogation by East Germany's dreaded Stasi secret police.
Mays generates considerable brutality as the strident, gun-crazy father, and
makes an equally adept transformation to play Alfred Kirschner, the hoarse,
suffering antiques dealer allegedly betrayed to the Stasi by Charlotte.
Throughout, except at the start of Act II, Mays wears the same costume, designed
by Janice Pytel, a black kerchief for the head, a loose blouse and full shirt,
black stockings, sensible black shoes, and the string of pearls.
As the second act begins, after Charlotte is honored by the German government,
then exposed as a collaborator by the tabloids, Mays writhes on the floor in
prison clothes, briefly dressed as a man, Alfred Kirschner.
The questions about Charlotte present an anguishing problem for Wright. While
Act I is mainly awed and admiring, Act II reverberates with doubt. One of the
great quandaries about World War II and the Cold War aftermath - how survivors
came through - confronts the playwright as a pilgrimage becomes a troubling
investigation.
Yet what remains constant in this voyage into the past, hauntingly lighted by
David Lander with suggestions of a ghostly castle, are Charlotte's abiding loves
for her secret gay cabaret, for music and for the instruments to play a hoard of
old cylinders and discs.
At the end of Act I, Lander pinpoints the flowerlike throats of horns. At the
end, in an act titled "Clocks," Charlotte's own voice seems to emanate from her
favorite phonograph, after her death "Alone in a garden of gramophone horns."
Copyright 2003, Hartford Courant
