I Am My Own Wife

I wrote this a while ago, when I saw this play on Broadway and I saw it again at Georger Street Playhouse last weekend and thought it was just as riveting then, so I wanted to share this:

A man in a dress seems hardly the sort a serious drama would take place around. If this thought is present, expel it before you experience “I Am My Own Wife.” Jefferson Mays, the man who is this show, enters for the first time in a long black dress and a string of pearls. No one laughs. He holds himself regally and in a perfectly affected German accent explains about Charlotte von Mahlsdorf’s phonograph collection. Mr. Mays portrays over forty characters in this play, but the central figure is Charlotte, a transvestite who survived both the Nazis and the Communists in East Germany, without giving up her identity.

The play begins as Doug, the playwright as a character, discovers and becomes enamored with Charlotte and her life. He decides to write a play about her life and visit her several times. Charlotte obliges with tales of her younger days, all set in her home which she made into a museum. Her museum is comprised of furniture pieces that Charlotte has obsessively collected during her life. The set suggests the furniture collection through shelves of old fashioned furniture on the upstage wall and through miniatures that Charlotte sets up as she gives Doug his first glimpse into her life. Much of the first act is dedicated to stories Charlotte relates to Doug regarding her survival.

It is not until the second act when Doug hears that Charlotte might have been a willing informant for the Communists that Doug and the audience has any reason to doubt Charlotte. We see one of her friends in jail but we do not dream it was she who helped him get there until Doug starts having his doubts. The image the audience is left with at the end is Charlotte as a young boy, sitting symbolically between two tigers. One, the Nazis. The other, the Communists. The boy sits in the middle smiling and safe.

Mr. Mays’ performance is nothing short of brilliant. In playing scenes with himself, all he has to do is change his physicality slightly and the audience knows that this is a different character. Perhaps the best example of this is a scene in the second act when Charlotte appears on a talk show and as Charlotte; Mr. Mays sits up straight with his hands folded and as the male talk show host, leans over with his legs on either side of the chair. It almost makes it seem as though there are two different actors onstage. But there are not. There is only one. And he wears a dress.