T. Charles Erickson Photos
The Gründerzeit Museum in Berlin houses transgender survivor of Nazi Germany and East Germany Charlotte von Mahlsdorf’s collection of manufactured objects from the “founder’s period” of Germany — the 1870s through the start of World War I. Set in a “memory space” inside the museum, Long Wharf Theatre’s revival of I Am My Own Wife, the Tony and Pulitzer-winning one-person show by Doug Wright, creates an eerie space that is both inside and outside.
The play runs through March 1.
In Britton Mauk’s set an impressive stone portal with double doors dominates the stage, featuring spacious stairs leading up from the street, while all about it sprout flowering phono horns. Charlotte, a tall, thin figure played by Mason Alexander Park, impresses us with her elegance even in a housedress and flowing white hair. In a heavy German accent, she introduces us to some of her treasures, including both a gramophone and a graphophone — one using recorded discs, the other recorded cylinders. The horns around the door seem ears that strain to hear what Charlotte will reveal of her unique life.
In the downstage area is a writing desk. When Park sits there they often enact Doug — the playwright as a character who, in the 1990s, set about enlisting Charlotte’s participation in a play based on her life. Wright used correspondence and recorded interviews with Charlotte, and his play shares its title with von Mahlsdorf’s memoir, published in 1992 (von Mahlsdorf died in 2002 at the age of 74). As a character, Doug is almost wholly celebratory toward Charlotte, a transgender woman whose life he finds inspiring. He sees Charlotte’s survival of both Nazi Germany and the GDR as a kind of miracle, a feat even more formidable than his life as a gay man in the Bible Belt. To that end, he would like to present Charlotte as an emblematic heroine. However, Wright’s play — tellingly — portrays an intriguing and enigmatic figure whose life is both inspiring and troubling.
Much of Charlotte’s story, as told by her in her mannered, accented English, has a matter-of-fact candor that almost works against a dramatic or entertaining presentation. Some laughs are provided by Park’s version of Americans speaking German badly, but that’s a minor comic aspect at best. What commands attention is the finely tuned nuance of Park’s performance. Their portrayal makes Charlotte more unknowable the more we know about her, and everyone else — there are about 30 characters in this one-actor play — attendants to her way of being both in and out of history.
The story of Charlotte — born Lothar Befelde — works best as theater when she recounts key moments in her life. In Act One, for instance, there’s the moment when, at the home of an aunt who dressed always in boots and jodhpurs, Lothar discovers a trunk of women’s clothing. After dressing as a girl, Lothar is surprised by his aunt, who says nature played a trick on them, as they would clearly prefer being, respectively, their opposite genders. Later, after the end of World War II and the fall of the Third Reich, Befelde takes the name of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf and lives as a woman.
Another dramatic moment in Act One involves the death of Charlotte’s father, a Nazi who was physically abusive to his wife and children. The story is violent and shocking, and yet, as told, feels detached from Charlotte — not only by the amount of time that has passed, but by a certain passivity toward her own agency. Then there are the dramatic moments in which Doug tries, with Park registering his forthright insistence, to fashion a Charlotte he can applaud.
Toward the end of Act One, a friend of Doug’s brings to his attention some documents about Charlotte’s cooperation with the Stasi, the East German secret police. In Act Two, Charlotte’s tale of Alfred, a friend and fellow collector whom she helped and then, at his insistence, betrayed to the police strains plausibility, perhaps, but then that too suits her passive agency. For Doug, who proclaims he doesn’t want to judge, Charlotte did what she had to do. Wright the playwright cannily plays with that overt perception, making us wonder about the relationship between Charlotte and the man she betrayed. Park’s portrayal of Alfred, in prison, finds him writing letters in a flowery style that seem deliberately penned to belittle the harshness of his fate. Then there’s the story of how Charlotte’s museum housed in its basement an underground club as a gathering place for those deemed sexually deviant. It sounds like the kind of story Doug wants desperately to believe in. Is the play simply Doug’s wish fulfillment?
What resonates best from Charlotte’s story, in this play, is that the act of survival — particularly for those persecuted for their own natures — is a negotiation with power and, as such, implies ambiguous circumstances. The dead gain virtue through their ends; survivors are always to some extent suspect. Wright’s play teases us with the implications of Charlotte’s existence: raised by a Nazi, an informer for the Stasi, awarded by reunified Germany, a parricide, a collector, an enabler of sexual freedoms, a man dressed as a woman or a woman mislabeled a man, or an emblem for a nonbinary transgender identity. At one point, Charlotte’s aunt tells her that they are living in the lion’s den. At the close of the play, the idea of life with the lions comes back in an eloquent image of Charlotte as a child, each arm around a lion cub that might easily kill her.
Very deliberately paced, I Am My Own Wife keeps us interested with its surface story of dramatic events in the surprising life of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf while gently urging upon us a deeper story — of how a playwright named Doug found in his subject an occasion to reflect upon our ambiguous complicity with social codes and historical situations we refuse to let define us.
I Am My Own Wife runs at Long Wharf Theatre, 222 Sargent Dr., through March 1. Visit the theater’s website for tickets and more information.