CityPages.com – Quinton Skinner
The stubborn thing about stories is their tendency to disobey their maker. Doug Wright’s I Am My Own Wife is a work whose peculiar narrative truths shifted wildly during the process of its creation. A hit on Broadway two seasons ago, the work began during a trip to Germany in the early ’90s, where Wright chanced upon a museum of antiques fussily overseen by the elderly Charlotte von Mahlsdorf. Charlotte was, in no particular order: a survivor of the Nazis as well as the communist East German regime, an inveterate storyteller, and a lover of clocks and old Edison phonographs. She was also a man who had been born Lothar Berfelde in 1928.
Bradley Greenwald plays Charlotte, as well as more than 30 other characters in this one-man show. In the early going, Greenwald offers up a weirdly compelling depiction, while the story revolves around Wright’s real-life attempts to scrape together enough dough for trips to Germany to get Charlotte’s life story down on tape. Wright also tips his hand as an opportunist: While he writes of his growing affection for Charlotte, he also allows that this story of an elderly transvestite Holocaust survivor is a potential gold mine, not least with the arts foundations that pony up grant money.
Charlotte’s yarns are amazing indeed. Greenwald, in a black dress and pearls, plays her as a demure lady increasingly smitten by the sound of her own voice as well as her distinctive biography. Greenwald shifts into a lesbian aunt who advises young Lothar to dress the part he’s born to play, then becomes Charlotte’s Nazi father issuing murderous threats against the wife and kids. The script requires its single actor to change characters in mid-scene, and to craft distinctive voices for each. For a time, Greenwald pulls it off.