[2013060] I Am My Own Wife
Charles Mayer @ Bakehouse Theatre – Studio
9:00pm, Mon 25 Feb 2013
I’ve previously remarked that my father is German by birth, having emigrated out here in the early 50s to find work; while his parents were still alive, he’d regularly return to the country to visit them, on several occasions taking the rest of his Australian family. On one occasion, I got to visit the country, too; as a seven-year-old, it was a pretty big adventure, visiting my Oma and Opa for (what turned out to be) the only time. The only time I’d ever see my Opa… wow. That just came out all stream-of-consciousness-y, and now I’m a little bit sad.
But that’s all beside the point. What I was trying to establish is this: in my German grandparents’ flat, in a little town an hour outside Munich, they had a very homely dining room. That’s where the telly was, where my brother and I would watch The Muppets in a foreign language (whilst marvelling that Kermit sounded the same); and that’s where all their beautiful antique-looking furniture was – stained woods and ornate bevels and curves.
And that’s what the set for I Am My Own Wife looked like… but without the telly, of course.
The play is a solo performance; Charles Mayer, dressed all in black with a flat androgynous presentation (and, most noticeably, a long black skirt), initially adopts the voice of playwright Doug Wright (who won a Pulitzer for the play). Wright’s chance discovery of a museum of everyday antiquities – most significantly, a gramophone record collection – led him to meet their curator, Charlotte von Mahlsdorf. Mahlsdorf, born male in 1928, began living as a woman after the fall of the Third Reich in East Germany; her museum and underground bars became secret havens for the closeted homosexuals on the other side of the Berlin Wall. Amazed by her life, Wright interviewed her at length, many times; the interviews became the core of his script.
Mayer spends much of the play as the transgender Charlotte, imbuing her with a sense of refined nobility; he typically swaps between characters with a minor physical flourish, and the interview scenes which bounce between Wright and Mahlsdorf are a delight: Mayer slowly circles a chair as the playwright, sliding onto the chair to become Charlotte. And Mayer’s physical mannerisms of Charlotte were sublime: there’s so much elegance when she handles the small models of furniture (a brilliant bit of direction).
Charlotte’s story covers her conflicted youth, with some incredibly dark moments with an abusive father; after self-identifying her gender, and discovering the joys of collecting her precious gramophone records, she recounts the establishment of her museum… and then came the secret clubs, the perilous encounters with the SS and Stasi, and the morally dubious late-life decisions. That the script also leaves room for a hint of darkness and suspicion in Charlotte’s character is a surprise, and adds a great deal of weight to proceedings; Wright’s investigations of Charlotte’s Stasi files calls into question her coy expressions of innocence.
When I first jotted down some thoughts about this performance, I couldn’t help but reflect that – a decade ago – multi-character solo performances were common-as-muck in the Fringe; the two that linger with me are The Entire Contents of the Refrigerator and Virtual Solitaire (both in 2000). But, as much as I enjoyed both of those pieces, neither comes close to providing the coherency between characters that I Am My Own Wife Provides; but that’s not really a fair comparison to all concerned. Wife‘s narrative is far stronger, and there are only a handful of characters that get any significant stage-time; Charlotte dominates, of course, but Doug and his friend also appear often… other characters only have comparatively fleeting lines, and the purported count of forty-three distinct voices seems a little hard to believe.
But none of that takes anything away from the strength of Mayer’s performance, nor of Craig Behenna’s direction: both were near faultless, and the compassion that was imbued in this improbable storyline is absolutely compelling. I Am My Own Wife was absolutely wonderful theatre, professionally delivered.