I Am My Own Wife
Presented by Charleston Stage
Nov. 7-9, 15-16, 8 p.m. Nov. 10, 6 and 9 p.m.
Nov. 17, 6 p.m.
American Theatre
446 King St.
(843) 577-7183
www.charlestonstage.com
Mark Chambers is a chameleon, a shape-shifter, a gender-bender. The actor is able to change personalities, gaits, and psyches as ably as the main character of Doug Wright’s I Am My Own Wife, currently running at the American Theatre.
That character is Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, the cross-dressing alter-ego of the real-life Lothar Berfelde, who as a young boy took to wearing women’s clothes. Encouraged by an aunt, who was equally ambiguous about her gender, Lothar created his persona, and for the rest of his life played that role: a transvestite living in Berlin, surviving the twin tides of 20th-century brutality, Hitler’s genocidal madness before and during the war and Stalin’s draconian repression after the Berlin Wall went up.
That’s just the beginning of Chambers’ chore. As the sole actor in I Am My Own Wife, Chambers must convey 35 other characters, including that of Wright, the playwright. Directed by Marybeth Clark, Chambers astounds as Charlotte, capturing her reedy accented voice, her old-lady shuffle, arthritic hands, her coquettish sense of humor, and her still-steamy libido. Making you believe a full-grown man is an elderly German woman is no small challenge. In this way, Chambers’ achievement is superlative.
Unfortunately, minor characters were not as fully realized. Chambers lapsed into caricature, not human character, at a crucial moment, diminishing the doubt and ambiguity, and the looming shadow of identity and truth, that is central to this complicated play.
Wright wrote himself into I Am My Own Wife as a vehicle for telling the story: He discovered Charlotte in 1993 in Berlin just after the wall came down. She was living in an old mansion packed with antiques. She was simply dressed, charming, polite. Wright was blown away by the irony of her existence. Told amid clocks and lamps, phonographs and furniture on stage (thanks to some ingenious set design by Stefanie Christensen), her life story comes off like a gay political thriller.
We learn she killed her father, a violent Nazi officer who beat his wife and demoralized his children. She was imprisoned for the crime and later escaped during a bombing raid (kudos to Todd Olson for sound design). We are sympathetic all the way. Those were inhuman times. We are accepting as she tells us about her beleaguered mother and mannish aunt, about collecting furniture, wax cylinders, clocks, and more, and operating a social club for East Berlin’s homosexual underground.
Our sympathies are tested, though, when details of Charlotte’s past come to light. Wright (and the audience) begins to have doubts. As a gay man, he says, he wants to believe this story can be true.
Alas, there’s the rub.
Is Charlotte a pioneer of gay culture, an unsung hero who defied the most brutal totalitarian regimes in human history for the right to be herself? Or is Charlotte something less noble, a snitch willing to sell out her friends to save her own skin? Or is she something else: a sad old man dressed in women’s clothes, who is perhaps mildly autistic, and who has invented a matrix of narratives to divine order from chaos?
It’s hard to tell, which surely goes a long way in explaining why I Am My Own Wife won a Tony and Pulitzer Prize in 2004. It moves you without being didactic.
The gravity of that doubt was weakened during a scene in which Charlotte is questioned by an international corps of reporters. Chambers slipped into cultural stereotypes when embodying these characters, making us laughs but also distracting us from Charlotte’s growing cloud of suspicion. It was a moment of lost drama, less affecting than intended.
Charlotte, though, is Chambers’ showpiece. Wearing nothing but a black frock, orthopedic shoes, a kerchief on his head and a string of pearls around his collared neck, Chambers ingratiates Charlotte to the audience, easily winning over our emotions with her charm and impish smile, with her love of old things and the memories held within, with her wistful reminiscences of friends and times now gone. These are only a few of the details Chambers gets just right, all hallmarks of memorable acting.
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