PAT CRAIG: ONE HAND CLAPPING

'Wife' plays on theatricality of transvestite's life

More than a decade ago, when author Doug Wright traveled to Germany for his first meeting with legendary East German transvestite Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, the theatricality was immediately evident.

"It was pretty remarkable; we were driving through East Germany, through neighborhoods riddled with skinheads, when we turned and the headlights focused on this little old woman in a black dress," Wright says. "Looking at her, framed in the headlights, it was like she was already onstage."

While his introduction to von Mahlsdorf was pretty dramatic, what was to become the Pulitzer Prize-winning play based on the transvestite's life, "I Am My Own Wife" -- which opens Wednesday at San Francisco's Curran Theatre -- took much longer to create than Wright originally expected. He hadn't planned to become obsessed with the man who lived under both the Communist and Nazi regimes in Germany.

Before he began writing, or even had an idea of how he would assemble the play, Wright had become another "young acolyte, in a line of sycophants," hanging on von Mahlsdorf's every word.

"She put you at ease; the very cadence of her storytelling was almost like spending time with grandmother," he says. "She has an incredible personality, a low-key almost kind of calming effect. I felt like I was sitting at knee of a mentor."

He also amassed more than 500 pages of transcripts of the taped interviews he'd done during a series of long visits over two years.

"Really, Charlotte's life encompasses much of European history, under the Nazis and Communists," he says. "It wouldn't be right to write about her life in isolation, but how it fit into a broader context. I read a lot of books about time between the two world wars, homosexuals in Europe and recent European history, but I'm not a historian, I'm a dramatist."

So, in addition to his massive transcript, Wright had a wealth of additional information when he was invited to the Sundance theater festival to give shape to his work.

"They knew I hadn't written a play yet, but they invited me to bring a director and actor to work on it," he says. "So I called Moises (Kaufman) and Jefferson (Mays), and they agreed to do it."

Kaufman, best known for "Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde" and "The Laramie Project," is an old friend of Wright's, and the author went to college with Mays. Both men eagerly joined the project, and worked to wrangle the enormous amount of material into a play.

Wright had always planned to tailor the role of von Mahlsdorf for Mays (who plays nearly 40 characters in the one-man show).

"Moises was initially involved in sharpening the text -- he works so much with raw transcripts. The most generous thing he did was take a few portions of the transcript and stage them as if they were part of a play. That made the words much less precious to me."

The play immediately began to take shape, and Mays began working the project onstage. In the end, it won the Pulitzer and two Tonys, one for best actor and one for best play.

Von Mahlsdorf, who was born Lothar Berfelde, has become something of an icon to the European gay and lesbian communities. He was also the operator of a museum containing an assortment of Victrolas and other trappings of the past.

"If you told me that one day Charlotte would be on Broadway, I would have believed you," Wright says. "But I was surprised more by the play being something that crossed over to Broadway audiences who found a lot of universal truth in the story."

"I Am My Own Wife," plays Tuesday through May 29 at the Curran Theatre, 445 Geary St., S.F. Tickets, at $40-$72, may be reserved by calling 415-512-7770 or at www.ticketmaster.com.

BEBE AND KURT: It seems a little silly to say that Bebe Neuwirth was looking for a show -- she was plenty busy with her Broadway career and her "Law & Order" spinoff series -- but she was. She wanted something of her own.

"I guess it was about four years ago or so. I kept getting asked to sing places, but I didn't have any material," she says. "I didn't want to do anything like 'Bebe and Her Boys,' or some kind of cabaret revue, and I wasn't comfortable talking to the audience. I prefer to have a character in a world set by the conceit of a theater piece."

She and musical director Leslie Stifelman had already focused on the work of Kurt Weill, a composer Neuwirth is crazy about, and decided to run the idea by friends. In Neuwirth's case, the friends included director Roger Rees and choreographer Ann Reinking, and they liked the idea, which eventually became "Here Lies Jenny," which opens Sunday at San Francisco's Post Street Theatre.

Jenny is Weill's Everywoman, a name the composer used for many of his female characters. So it seemed natural to make the name part of the title (in fact, Neuwirth was her six years ago, playing Jenny Diver in ACT's production of "Threepenny Opera").

But for Neuwirth, Weill goes well beyond "Mack the Knife." "There is a beautiful duality in his songs, a beautiful irony, a joyful irony of real life," she says. "You just don't find too many other composers who can do that -- at least, if there are, they don't do it for me. There is just an honesty to the songs, a raw and fearless honesty, with no artifice."

In her show, Neuwirth plays a women who visits a waterfront bar, where she relives moments of her life through the songs, and seems to re-energize her life.

"Here Lies Jenny" plays Sunday through May 25 at the Post Street Theatre, 450 Post St., S.F. Tickets, at $35-$55, may be reserved by calling 415-771-6900 or at www.ticketmaster.com.

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Pat Craig is the Times theater critic. Reach him at 925-945-4736 or pcraig@cctimes.com.

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