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Jefferson Mays captivating in 'I Am My Own Wife'Tony Award-winning actor gives mesmerizing performance as notorious German
cross-dresser who survived Nazis and Soviets. Doug Wright's 2004 Tony Award-winning one-person drama, "I Am My Own Wife," Berfelde survived the rise and fall of the Nazis and the occupation of East Germany by the Soviets as Charlotte von Mahlsdorf: an antique-collecting, cabaret-managing, openly gay, cross-dressing transvestite. The play, which opened on Broadway on May 27, 2003, arrived Wednesday at the Wadsworth Theatre in Brentwood. And while the theater's vast confines may not be ideally suited to a play which at times is as intimate and subtle as the twitch of an eyebrow, it is unquestionably a tour de force theatrical experience. During the course of the play, Mays takes on the personas of some 40 characters, shifting (with the aid of Moisés Kaufman's insightful direction) from one to another in a manner that is both captivating and convincing. The play's plot and dialogue are drawn directly from the extensive interviews Wright conducted with the notorious transvestite, who became a European cult figure whose life is also the subject of a book and a documentary film. When Wright first met von Mahlsdorf, the latter was 65. At that time he had adopted the rather severe, and ironic, look of a nun -- dressing totally in black, accented by a single strand of pearls. This is the garb that Mays adopts throughout the performance, even as he shifts from character to character. By employing an extensive vocabulary of body language and diverse accents, Mays becomes a biography's-worth of characters: from the abusive father that von Mahlsdorf claims to have murdered, to his lesbian cross-dressing aunt, an S.S. colonel, a showboating German television host and the playwright himself. When Wright first met von Mahlsdorf, he was giving tours of the East German home that served as a museum repository for his vast collection of antique furniture and clocks (all of which are included in Derek McLane's atmospheric set design). It was only after the writer gained his confidence, that Charlotte revealed to him the house's deeper secret: a vast basement that served for years as one of Berlin's most notorious gay cabarets. Justifiably, von Mahlsdorf fascinated the young playwright. As Wright says through his character, "I grew up gay in the Bible Belt. I can only imagine what it must have been like during the Third Reich. The Nazis and then the Communists? It seems to me you're an impossibility. You shouldn't exist." The myriad stories that von Mahlsdorf told Wright during several years of get-togethers and correspondence make up the heart and soul of the play. In von Mahlsdorf, Wright says, he felt he'd found "a true inconoclastic gay hero." The conundrum that keeps "I Am My Own Wife" from becoming a totally successful drama, however, is that in the end, both subject and playwright have feet of clay. Von Mahlsdorf (along with many others) apparently survived under the Soviet regime by becoming a willing collaborate and informer, who not only condemned others, but profited from their demise. For his part, to avoid casting his "hero" in a bad light, Wright avoids going into any detail about the more reportedly excessive aspects of von Mahlsdorf's sexual behavior, including a penchant for cruising public toilets and a taste for sado-masochistic, rubber-clad sex. Whatever its shortcomings as a historic document of fact, though, "I Am My Own Wife," with its mesmerizing performance by Mays, represents one of the most original and enthralling pieces of new theater to come our way in quite some time. # # # # # |
