I AM MY OWN WIFE

[November 15th, 2006] This summer, a week before the opening of Artist Repertory Theater's dry but still stunning production of Metamorphoses, its director, Randall Stuart, told me he'd made a promise to himself in 2003 to only do "important" theater.

He was referring to his work on the Lysistrata Project, a national movement to produce Aristophanes' antiwar comedy just prior to the invasion of Iraq, but could just as well have been talking about Doug Wright's I Am My Own Wife.

What makes a play "important" is not political relevance, cultural controversy or a wheelbarrow full of awards; it is merely the power to make viewers see something—be it their culture (Look Back in Anger), themselves (Hamlet) or their peers (The Laramie Project)—in a new way. And My Own Wife is a very important play.

Why? Because it opens up to American audiences a little-known and very personal history of East Germany during the Cold War, a lifetime of loss and perseverance told through the voices of dozens of Nazis, communists, queers, freaks, manic record collectors, U.S. servicemen and one furniture-obsessed transvestite, Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, all played with astonishing energy and compassion by Wade McCollum under the direction of Seattleite Victor Pappas.

In a black dress and scarf, McCollum becomes Mahlsdorf (born Lothar Berfelde), a woman who "navigated a path between the two most repressive regimes the Western world has ever known—the Nazis and the communists—in a pair of heels," tottering about the stage singing the praises of gramophones and credenzas, spinning back and forth between her narration and the voices of those who loved and tormented her.

It's a powerful, moving performance, among McCollum's finest. But what leaves audiences changed is not his juggling of personalities, or even Wright's conflicted relationship with his subject; it's the unaffected humanity of Mahlsdorf's story, the struggle for survival that caused her to sacrifice friends and lovers to save a house full of old knickknacks.

Mahlsdorf is an ambiguous protagonist, whose actions may seem indefensible to some viewers. But the exploration of the choices she made, like Insight Out's recent examination of Leni Riefenstahl, brings us closer to understanding the nature of history, of oppression and of ourselves. If you see just one major production this year, I would urge you to make it this one.