Tim Babcock has taken on the complex job of switching back and forth between more than 30 characters in Doug Wright’s “I Am My Own Wife,” and he handles it with ease and, often, panache. The one-man, multi-character play tracks the real life story of a German transvestite who survived the Nazis and the Communist regime in East Berlin and turned herself into a cultural icon — the so-called tranny granny — along the way.
Presented by Counter Productions, performances are held at the Provincetown Inn, 1 Commercial St. at 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays and Wednesdays through Aug. 29. Tickets are $28 through capetix.com, or (866) 811-4111 or at the door the night of the performance.
The transvestite, Charlotte (pronounced Sharlotta) von Mahlsdorf, was born Lothar Berfelde in 1928 and became a crossdresser while still in his teens. Unlike drag queens, crossdressers frequently downplay the dramatic in favor of the understated side of femininity. That is what Charlotte did in life and Babcock does on stage, purring through his lines with an effective German accent.
The set is simple, primarily a black box with a table and chairs and a few small props. The Daniel Cleary costuming hinges on the classic high-necked black dress, almost severe, embellished with a strand of pearls. Babcock never camps it up. He always plays Charlotte as restrained and carefully presented, an elegant homage to a bygone era. The audience listened raptly on the night of the review and responded with fierce applause at the play’s end.
Director Susan Grilli, who is also directing “Bingo: The Musical” at the same venue on other nights, manages to take a very dense script and convey it to the stage in ways that hold the audience’s attention despite the lack of the normal amounts of “action” often present in a theatrical production. Grilli has chosen a treasure box of miniature furniture to re-create the illusion of the museum that Charlotte made of her house in East Berlin.
Grilli also chooses to have the only costume change be a male outfit worn by Babcock as Albert, the second most important character, in the opening of the second act, a move that lends gravity to Albert’s role in Charlotte’s life.
Babcock’s Charlotte is subtly acted with each of her stories carrying the tonality of one that has been told and told until the important thing becomes the telling and not the tale. Babcock also bounces rapid-fire between Charlotte and the many other characters that range from the playwright himself, to Charlotte’s father, friends, a television talk show host, Albert and Nazi skinhead youths, among others.
The play won a Tony on Broadway and a Pulitzer for its author.
In life, one could say a persona created from the whole cloth of imagination and desire could be considered a buffer against the potentially unpleasant realities of life. This would certainly be true of Lothar/Charlotte.
The son of an abusive Nazi, born into a time of goose-stepping nationalism, the boy simply shifted over to being a girl. Not that that protected him in many ways. His/her life includes murder, prison, bravery, betrayal and the carefully crafted ability to survive not one but two oppressive political regimes.
Over the years, Charlotte became an obsessive collector of furniture and other bits and pieces that recalled her youth. Her collection became a museum filled with the life she prefers to recall, including an entire Weimar era cabaret that she saved from demolition and installed in her house. A particularly poignant scene has Charlotte telling the audience about rescuing records by Jewish composers and carefully placing paper labels over the offending ones to fool the Nazis and how she quickly removed those false labels at the end of the war.
The play follows the playwright as he hears of Charlotte and begins his two years of interviews with her that eventually are transformed into this play. During the two acts, Babcock takes the audience back and forth in time as he relives the stories that Charlotte told Wright. One can see how Wright was pulled into the compelling orbit of Charlotte’s life and how hard it was for the playwright to reconcile some of the “facts” that later come out about her behavior at some points.
In the delivery of her own stories, Charlotte is telling not just the story of one person but of an explosive part of world history where the personal is always mixed with the political. In telling Charlotte’s story, Wright reminds us that the world is rarely black or white and that every good person has a bit of darkness tucked away and every monster has moments of lightness.
Aug 9th, 2007
