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Identity May Be Fluid, But Wife's Quality is Unmistakable by Michael Feingold December 10 - 16, 2003
Treading serenely through Moisés Kaufman's subtle production, clad in Charlotte's orthopedic shoes, shabby black dress, and pearl necklace, Mays becomes not only the enigma herself but her friends, colleagues, oppressors, detractors, and interviewers, including the playwright. His hypnotic presence reaffirms, immaculately, the play's vision of human personality as simultaneously fluid and individual. # # # # # |
he most impressive ensemble cast
currently on Broadway is wrapped up in the riveting person of Jefferson Mays,
who embodies the host of contentious characters challenging each other's notions
of history and identity in Doug Wright's saucy, sagacious, entirely fascinating
solo play, I Am My Own Wife. Mays's performance has, if anything, gained
in clarity and authority since the piece moved from Playwrights Horizons to the
Lyceum, where the wider but shallower space puts the audience into closer
confrontation with Wright's perplexing hero(ine). He/she actually existed:
Lothar Berfelde, the elderly German transvestite who, calling himself "Charlotte
von Mahlsdorf," managed to survive both adolescence under the Nazis and
adulthood in Honecker's East Berlin, plus a firestorm of 1990s debate about
what, exactly, he/she did to elude those two repellent regimes. 
