[From New York Press, July 22, 2003]
What a piece of work is I Am My Own Wife, Doug Wright’s one-hander about the German collector and transvestite Charlotte von Mahlsdorf. And what a piece of work was its subject, who survived Nazism and Communism—two of the most repressive regimes in modern history—and managed to keep faith with her chosen lifestyle while vastly improving her standard of living.
Between 1942 and her death last year, von Mahlsdorf—born Lothar Berfelde—amassed a small fortune’s worth of late-19th-century furniture and bric-a-brac, parlaying it into a private museum collection that she housed in the twenty-three-room, 18th-century manor house near East Berlin that she lived in for almost thirty years. There she ran a clandestine gay nightclub in the basement and with the fall of the Berlin Wall became a heroine of the newly resurgent gay community. Ultimately, she received the Order of Merit in recognition of her efforts and achievements in the field of furniture preservation.
Wright’s play is a bit of a puzzlement. The opening moments, in which we first glimpse Charlotte (as embodied by the actor Jefferson Mays) are riveting. Mays enters from stage left, a slim, sedate figure wearing a drab black housecoat and apron. Opening a door upstage, she appears to be walking into an empty room, but a step or two in, she stops and registers the presence of the audience. Her face lights up, and a self-conscious hand strays up to the strand of pearls at her neck. She opens her mouth to say something to us, then thinks better of it, turns on her heel, and goes back out the way she came. In a matter of seconds, Mays has managed to suggest a personality who is only ever really alive when holding court and a secret life that has to be got at indirectly, presumably by the play itself.
Unfortunately, I Am My Own Wife is less an examination of von Mahlsdorf’s life or character than an account of Wright’s attempts to gather material for a play about her. Von Mahlsdorf was no obscure figure by 1992, when Wright first learned of her existence from a journalist friend based in Berlin and contacted her with the idea of writing a play about her.
Wright traveled to Germany and visited the funiture museum, taping his thoughts, and getting the lay of the land. Back home, he wrote von Mahlsdorf a wide-eyed and effusive letter commending her on her furniture collection:
I must confess I was no less impressed by the mere fact of your survival. I grew up in the Bible Belt; I can only begin to imagine what it must have been like during the Third Reich. The Nazis, and then the Communists? It seems to me, you’re an impossibility. You shouldn’t even exist.
Wright proposed that he “continue to study” von Mahlsdorf’s life, pointing out that with her cooperation he might be able to secure funding for a play. (“As far as grant applications go,” he quipped, “forgive me, but from where I sit, you’re a slam dunk.”)
The trouble is not that Wright has included this in the play, but that it is the play. Cued by lighting changes, Mays shifts among personae as he recites the letters exchanged between Wright and his foreign correspondent pal, performs excerpts from the tapes Wright made of his observations, and impersonates Charlotte on her guided tours through the museum as well as in the taped interviews in which recounted to Wright the story of her life.
We hear about Lothar’s brutal Nazi of a father, who beat Lothar’s mother; we hear about how in 1943 Lothar went to stay with his Tante Luise, who raised horses on an estate in East Prussia and dressed like a man. We hear about how Tante Luise surprised him one day in the act of trying on a closet full of girls’ clothes, and how she gave him a copy of Magnus Hirschfeld’s Die Transvestiten along with her blessing.
We hear about Lothar’s narrow escape from death at the hands of an SS officer, and about Tante Luise whipping out a gun and chasing his father off the property when he showed up unexpectedly. We hear how at fifteen Lothar killed his father, beating his head in with a rolling pin; how at his sentencing he and his mother locked eyes in mutual understanding; and how his prison term was miraculously cut short by the Allied invasion. It is all absurdly swashbuckling, sentimental, and inconsistent.
We also hear about how in 1963, when a venerable gay bar dating from the time of Wilhelm II was to be closed down by the Communists and demolished, Charlotte thought to herself, “That is not good,” and bought the furnishings and reconstructed the bar in the basement of her museum.
And then came the wall. And for us here in Eastern Berlin, it was finished, gay life. The bars, closed. Personal advertisements in the newspaper, cancelled. No place to meet but the tramway stations and the public toilets…
So I thought to give homosexual women and men community in this house. Yes. It was a museum for all people, but I thought, “Why not for homosexuals?”… And there was over the bar an attic. When a boy or girl met a man, and wanted to go upstairs, they could. Two men, two girls, a boy and a girl—it did not matter….
And anyone with an interest in Sado-Masochism—whether it was two or four or six—could have the room to themselves for a few hours. Whips and things to beat on the behind.
“When the wall falls,” Mays tells us in Doug’s voice, “Charlotte tells me she had the only surviving Weimar Cabaret in all of eastern Germany.” (The stage directions in Wright’s script call for the actor playing Doug to speak “reverently—in hushed tones” at this point.)
Did Charlotte ever think to herself, “That is not good,” about any of the other things going on under “the two most repressive regimes the Western World has ever known”—the suppression of intellectual freedoms, the disappearance of the families and individuals whose heirlooms she somehow managed to acquire for her “museum,” the ruined lives of which those possessions were only the outward expression? Did Wright ever question her about such things? If so, he keeps remarkably quiet about it.
Shortly before the act break, Wright discovers what anyone with half a brain and a rudimentary knowledge of history will have assumed all along: that Charlotte’s much-vaunted “survival” was contingent on her having sold other people out—chiefly other homosexuals and, in one nauseating instance, an old friend and rival collector, who was, as it happens, a truly steadfast and courageous man.
Doug is devastated, though not in quite the right way or for quite the right reason. “So—at the end of the day what have I got?” he expostulates bitterly, seeing his play slip away. When his friend suggests that he go with the truth, he whines, “But I need to believe in her stories as much as she does! I need to believe that…Lothar Berfelde navigated a path between…the Nazis and the Communists—in a pair of heels.”
Putting aside the fact that Charlotte does not wear heels—that she never wore anything other than the drab uniform of a 1930s hausfrau—what kind of naif would believe there was no more to it than that? What kind of artist would not wish for there to be more? And what kind of moral idiot would equate an inability to post personals ads with people getting rounded up and shot or imprisoned?
Wright’s problem was not his lack of material but his own vacuousness, his pin-spot focus on identity politics to the exclusion of everything else. He seems perfectly content to make Charlotte the moral arbiter of her own story, buying into the notion that whatever she did, the mere fact of her having been a cross-dresser makes her admirable. Nowhere does he acknowledge that Charlotte did what she did out of self-preservation, not moral integrity—and to collect furniture.
Moisés Kaufman, who directed the play, specializes in this sort of reality-based theater. The two plays he is best known for, Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde and The Laramie Project, about the murder of Matthew Shepard, were similarly constructed from real-life sources: transcripts, conversations, interviews.
For a while I asked myself whether Wright’s play would have been any less offensive if he had actually put any work into it, if he had done anything more than apply for a grant, do a bit of traveling, and conduct a few superficial interviews, or if Kaufman had been able to help him shape a dramatic piece out of this material. I honestly don’t think it would. This is the story of a woman who thinks furniture, not people, worth saving, whose most profound relationships are with inanimate objects. Wright doesn’t see this, or if he does, it doesn’t strike him as worthy of comment.
Charlotte remains a cipher, as much in Mays’ performance as in Wright’s script. After those first moments, he does nothing to probe her pathological narcissism or her flights of self-invention, and nothing to suggest why Wright might have been so easily snowed by her. As for the score or two of other characters he plays, with one exception—the man Charlotte betrays—they are all fairly heavy-handed stereotypes. The only truly authentic aspects of the production are its surface elements—the decor (by Derek McLane) and effects. (There’s some nifty sound design by Andre J. Pluess and Benn Sussman that evokes echoes of music and weather and battles long past.)
Toward the end of the play, Wright has Doug describe a photograph that von Mahlsdorf sent him shortly before her death:
Lothar Berfelde at ten years old. He’s at the zoo in Berlin. He’s wearing a sailor suit, with a blue collar and matching cuffs… He’s on a bench. Sitting on either side of him, two tigers. Cubs, sure, but they’re still as big as he is. And they’re not fond of posing either. Their eyes are dangerously alert. At any moment they might revolt: they might scratch or bite. But Lothar has one arm around each tiger, and they’re resting their forepaws on his knees.
Wright has Doug pound home the allegorical meaning he detects in the snapshot: brave, fragile creature toughing it out between two bestial regimes. Amazingly, a blow-up of the photograph is on display in the theater lobby as the audience files out after the play; and almost everything in Wright’s description is either false or inaccurate. The little boy clearly loves having his picture taken. There’s no knowing what color his collar and cuffs are; it’s a sepia print. Wright doesn’t even get the animals right. They’re not tigers at all. I thought they looked like lion cubs, but whatever they are, they’re plainly used to being photographed with children. You never saw such relaxed, contented-looking creatures. They look positively sedated.