'I Am My Own Wife'

Spend a couple of hours with a skilled raconteur and you’re sure to have an engaging experience; spend a couple of hours with a transvestite virtuoso who has survived both the Nazi and the Communist occupations of Berlin, and the experience is elevated to enthralling. This will happen if you see “I Am My Own Wife” at The National Theatre.

The play was conceived by playwright Doug Wright after lengthy interviews with Charlotte von Mahlsdorf (nee Lothar Bernfelde), and was brought to life when Wright, director Moises Kaufman, and actor Jefferson Mays brainstormed at the Sundance Theater Labs, and fine-tuned the interviews and correspondences Wright had with the cross dressing, antique collecting, “tranny-granny”. Wright had reached an impasse with his project when he discovered that Mahlsdorf was not only an amazing survivor of two oppressive regimes, but that he was implicated as an informant by his own Stasi file. His ambivalence toward his subject is written into the play, and we are allowed to make our own judgments about whether to admire or admonish Mahlsdorf.

If your first impression of a transvestite in Berlin brings to mind a glamorous cross dresser with a costume embellished by sequins and boas, you’ll have to readjust that picture. Jefferson Mays wears a simple black dress festooned with a single strand of pearls; and from the top of his scarved head down to his sensible orthopedic shoes, his appearance is more nunlike than debauched. His obsession was not with the female clothing he preferred to wear, but rather his collection of furniture and curios from the 1890’s. He actually turned his home into a museum, and as its creator and curator gives voice to all the antiques he has amassed. Not incidentally, he also gives voice to more than thirty other characters required to tell his life story. As he shifts effortlessly from one character to another with subtle yet distinctive facial expressions and intonations, he relates his early experiences with his own family members; a brutish father, an indulgent mother, and a capricious aunt. He is both interviewer and interviewee; oppressor and the oppressed; and ultimately convincing and intriguing as each character he inhabits.

If you closed your eyes, slumped back in your chair and only listened to May’s performance, you could have a satisfying experience at this play. Open your eyes and visualize a walking tour through the museum and the experience rises to sublime. Charlotte expresses a wish to place a phonograph needle into the wood grain of an old table, and let it play its own song. This is obviously not possible, but as she pats and displays her prized collection of miniatures, you’ll believe that she is channeling their spirits. A lace wall divides her personal living space from the museum cubicles she has crammed with furniture and chandeliers and clocks and gramophones. Derek McLane’s set design and David Lander’s lighting almost succeeds in giving these collectibles a stature and voice of their own. When the bells of the gramophones are spotlighted, I could almost imagine them morphing into a chorus of singing morning glories. Of course they remain silent and wisely allow Mays to do the talking for them. Dressed in the quintessential costume by Janice Pytel, he/she is an iconic everyman/everything.

While Mays owns the stage in his remarkable performance, you’ll imagine yourself up there alongside him; reading excerpts from the guide to Berlin’s risqué nightspots, breathing in the musty fragrance of his beloved museum of artifacts, and recalling memories of the life of an extraordinary transvestite with uncompromised dignity.

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