CityPaper.com – By Geoffrey Himes
Through Feb. 22 at Everyman Theatre.
Doug Wright is a character in his own play, I Am My Own Wife. He is the New York playwright who travels to Berlin to interview Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, the real-life legendary transvestite who survived both the Nazis and the Stalinists “in high heels,” as Wright puts it. For most of the first act, Wright is clearly enthralled with this sixtysomething man in a plain black dress, a black head scarf, and a double strand of pearls. Believing he has found the gay hero he never had growing up in Texas, Wright eagerly tapes Charlotte’s colorful stories about attacking her Nazi father with a rolling pin and selling black-market cuckoo clocks in Communist East Berlin.