In 'I Am My Own Wife,' transgender Charlotte survives Nazis, Stalinists

During Nazi Germany’s darkest days, the child born in 1928 as Lothar Berfelde was already identifying as Charlotte von Mahlsdorf. Dressed as the woman she felt herself to be, she lived most of her adult life in East Germany. 

It’s hard enough being gender fluid in Trump’s America. That Charlotte survived the Nazis and the Stalinists — living through the fall of the Berlin Wall and into the early 21st century — seems impossible. 

“You shouldn’t even exist,” writes a character named Doug, stand-in for playwright Doug Wright in his Pulitzer-winning “I Am My Own Wife.” With actor Michael Stebbins playing Charlotte, Doug and 33 other characters, it’s now on stage in a just-opened Theatre Gigante production being directed by Isabelle Kralj. 

Those characters include Charlotte’s loving lesbian aunt and abusive Nazi father; the SS commander who contemplates shooting Charlotte; officials from East Germany’s Gestapo-like Stasi who interrogate her; and Doug — who, gay and from the Bible Belt, has many reasons for identifying with someone like Charlotte.  

There’s no quick-change costuming; with one significant exception, every character is presented through a 60-something, makeup-free version of Charlotte herself, wearing pearls but dressed in austere black, from her kerchiefed head to her orthopedic black shoes.  

This costuming boldly suggests that it’s the transgender person who is the norm — and who plays at being other characters much as each of us constructs identities featuring normative notions of gender.

“I wear your clothes and you wear mine,” Charlotte says at one point to Doug.  

Using one actor to impersonate all 35 characters underscores how Charlotte’s continual shape-shifting was integral to her survival. Her bobbing and weaving included four years in the 1970s as a Stasi informant; as Charlotte tells a questioning Doug, “never forget that you are living in the lion’s den. Sometimes you must howl with the wolves.” 

It’s a good line. But as channeled by Stebbins, it’s one of many moments that doesn’t fully capture Charlotte’s theatricality, complexity, conflict and emotional range — this Charlotte is a bit too saintly.

Stebbins credibly embodies Charlotte’s hard-won equanimity. But he doesn’t always dig deep enough to register the psychic cost of her various dodges and betrayals.   

Much of Charlotte’s peace and stability came through the beautiful objects she acquired, from old clocks, phonographs and furniture to an entire Weimar cabaret, lovingly recreated in her basement.  People might betray Charlotte; objects never did.  

Stebbins describes some of those objects as he presents them through beautifully crafted doll-house miniatures; he also shares scratchy recordings from a bygone era.  “The music would pour through the horn and make things better,” Charlotte dreamily tells us.

And so it does — proving, as this remarkable survivor continually did, that imagination can sometimes transcend history. 

“I Am My Own Wife” continues through Oct. 7 at UWM Kenilworth Studio 508, 1925 E. Kenilworth Place. For tickets, visit theatregigante.org. Read more about this production at TapMilwaukee.com.

PROGRAM NOTES 

The backstory: As we learn early in the first act of this two-hour play, Wright conducted a series of interviews with Charlotte in the early 1990s, within the mansion that she’d converted into a museum to house her objects. He was in his early 30s; Charlotte was in her mid-60s. There’s an element of hero worship in the way this Dallas-born gay man, living in the long shadow of AIDS in a much more repressive era, looks up to an icon who’d managed to survive under even more trying circumstances.  

One of the many impressive things in this well-wrought script is Wright’s willingness to admit his compulsive need to believe in the sometimes fictionalized version of Charlotte she presents to the world — her excuses for being a Stasi informant very much included.  

“I Didn’t Lie in My Heart”: The line belongs to Blanche DuBois; it might as well apply to Charlotte, who has conjured the ghost of Tennessee Williams for me on each of my viewings of “I Am My Own Wife” (including one with Jefferson Mays, who won a Tony as Charlotte, and Michael Gotch’s Charlotte in the excellent 2008 production at the Milwaukee Repertory Theater). Like Williams’ great heroines, Charlotte uses the imagination to set herself free; her lies are made in the service of a greater truth regarding who she is. Or as Williams put it so well in “The Glass Menagerie,” “I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.” 

Naming names: I don’t mean this as a defense of Charlotte’s role as a Stasi informant. But I do mean to suggest that the choices we make and why we make them are more complicated than moralistic, armchair do-gooders would like to think. To stick with the Williams analogy, it’s no accident that when director Elia Kazan was shunned after naming names during his second appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee — listing as Communist sympathizers eight members of the Group Theatre whose names HUAC probably already had — it was Williams whom Kazan described as “the most loyal and understanding friend I had.” Onetime close friend Arthur Miller abandoned Kazan — tacitly admitting much later in his autobiography that he’d been wrong. One of the most shameful moments in Hollywood history involves the many actors who, because of the HUAC testimony, refused to applaud when an 89-year-old Kazan received his justly deserved award for lifetime achievement at the 1999 Oscars.   

A living museum: “When families died, I became this furniture,” Charlotte tells us. "When the Jews were deported in the Second World War, I became it. When citizens were burned out of their homes by the Communists, I became it.” It’s a striking way of putting things, derived from the way Charlotte translated the past tense of the German verb “to receive” — bekam — into English when speaking with Wright. Charlotte truly did both receive and become the objects she inherited, channeling them and their history as fully as her recordings preserved the music of another age. Preserving objects from the past — even when bruised and broken — became Charlotte’s way of remembering the many unique histories giving each of those objects an aura. It was her way of keeping the past alive, and Stebbins’ awareness of what this means and why it matters is what’s best in this production. 

In praise of Doug Wright: In addition to Charlotte in “I Am My Own Wife,” Wright’s plays commemorate characters like the Marquis de Sade (“Quills”) and Marcel Duchamp (“Interrogating the Nude”). He’s written the book for musicals including “Grey Gardens” (about eccentrics Big and Little Edie Beale), “War Paint” (about cosmetics titans and rivals Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubinstein) and “The Little Mermaid.”  

“Mostly I’m compelled by outsiders,” Wright said in an interview. “People who were marginalized in their own cultural moment. … I adore characters who are unapologetically ‘different’; they teach us so much about ourselves.” Like Charlotte, most of the characters featured in these and other Wright scripts are messy and conflicted; as Wright candidly admitted with regard to Charlotte’s Stasi period, its inclusion in his play rescued Charlotte from being a benign “Trannie Granny.” She’s a person, warts and all — proving, as Wright has continually done throughout his distinguished career, that just because people are different doesn’t mean that they’re either simple or singly dimensioned. Charlotte is flawed. It makes one love her all the more.