On "I Am My Own Wife"

Mark Nelson plays Charlotte von Mahlsdorf

By Diane S. Frank

I think I’ve got egg on my face... again. As much as I write, and I write a lot, I’ve been reminded yet again that I’m not really very good at it. Today in the Sunday, November 06, 2005 edition of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Zachary Lewis wrote up a story of his interview with Mark Nelson, the actor who plays Charlotte von Mahlsdorf in I Am My Own Wife, which officially opens at the Cleveland Play House on November 9th.

I look over my patchwork of notes, my prepared questions, and the intermittent sounds on the voice recorder that managed to drop out when people weren’t shouting. What have I got? I’ve got a little here and there that Mr. Lewis didn’t get. I do have two advantages over him. I wear skirts and makeup with great frequency and I have neither an arbitrary deadline nor size limit on what I write. What you dear reader will read is something I can only speculate on.

The main points are the same. Charlotte von Mahlsdorf was born Lothar Bersfelde in Germany 1928. A homosexual, a transvestite with a beloved lesbian aunt, and a brutal father, Lothar survived the Second World War, the communist rule of East Germany and lived until 2002. In the 1970’s Lothar adopted the identity of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf permanently. Shortly after the fall of the Berlin wall, Charlotte was honored by the unified German state for her efforts at cultural conservation, preservation of artifacts from the Grunderzeit era (the first unified cultural period of Germany from 1854-1910 under Kaiser Wilhelm II) and the rescue and reconstruction of a East Berlin gay bar called the Mulack-Ritze. Then it was discovered that she was listed in the files of the East German secret police as an informant. How much of what Charlotte said about herself could be believed? What do we want and need to believe? That is the essence of Douglas Wright’s Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winning play.

Mr. Nelson was originally was supposed to direct the play, but couldn’t find an actor he really trusted for the role. He finally decided that he wanted the part for himself. It was and is a huge challenge to play so many different characters with different accents and body language. At the time of the interviews Charlotte was still coming to life in Nelson. Like Douglas Wright, the play’s author, and despite the shadows on a difficult life, Nelson has acquired a bias in Charlotte’s favor. From watching a movie biography of Charlotte, reading her autobiography and listening to selected interview tapes (Charlotte spoke excellent nearly unaccented English) Charlotte is to Nelson a person of graciousness and quiet pride in her being. If she had to make compromises to live, perhaps we comfortable Americans should forgo judgment.

Of course, I did go after a few questions that the Plain Dealer reporter missed, coming naturally as a friend of Charlotte’s. After all as the Canadian sexologist Ray Blanchard has said, (in paraphrase) you can’t understand one unless you are one.

One of the things that struck me about Charlotte was her plainness of dress. When we think of homosexual crossdressers we think of drag queens who are rather flamboyant, and even with heterosexual crossdressers there is a tendency to be more glamorous. Charlotte with her starkly plain black dresses and single string of pearls doesn’t fit our expectations. Nelson’s thoughts on this relate to both Lothar’s deep attachment to his mother and her role in life and to knowing early exactly who Charlotte was - a person of a 3rd sex in Magnus Hirschfeld’s taxonomy. In the play, when Charlotte utters the title line of “I am my own wife” it is not in the context of having a lover, but of having a woman to take care of domestic chores. Throughout the play Charlotte makes repeated references to her housekeeping. Charlotte’s deep identification with feminine ideals of domesticity might raise questions of her transsexuality. Charlotte was aware of the desire of some people for a physical transformation but it didn’t interest her.

The battlefields and lines of demarcation that are so hard fought in the various segments of the American transgendered communities did not exist for Charlotte and perhaps they didn’t exist in East Germany at all. With everyone so oppressed, being the subject of that oppression could override the differences we seem to take so seriously here. Still, just like in “Soldiers Girl” where there were protests at calling the romance between the transsexual Calpernia Addams and the murdered marine Barry Winchell a gay love affair, there may be objections to shoe-horning Charlotte into the mold of gay hero, when her identification was clearly 3rd sex, and in modern terms more likely trans. In an era when gay personal ads all emphasize “straight looking and acting, no femmes” it is disconcerting to think of those same people embracing Charlotte whose demeanor as noted in the author’s introduction to the play is “so sweetly self-effacing, so coyly feminine, and so full of modest charm that even the hard-core locals forgave the fact that she was hiding a man’s body beneath her pleats.”

One point that Mr. Nelson makes in the interview, and that shows up in the introduction to the play itself is absent from the program notes. Charlotte did make mistakes in translating German to English. One mistake in particular involved the word acquire, bekommen, which Charlotte mistranslated “become”. Thus there is a scene where Charlotte lists item after item that she has acquired, but rather become. This mis-translation seemingly innocent and charming is important in that it reveals the depths of Charlotte’s commitment to her mission of preservation. It also reveals something about the playwright. In his obsession with Charlotte, he doesn’t just acquire her history, he does in ways become her.

With a person as obviously eccentric as Charlotte, it is natural to wonder about her lovers. According to Mr. Nelson, Charlotte did not have a major romance in her life. When asked about it she replied, “I never found the love of my life, but no flower blooms in vain.” Her lovers were mostly older men.

Perhaps though, most revealing about the stage that Mr. Nelson was at in creating Charlotte was the following remark - this one the digital voice recorder did pick up:

“It’s hard enough for me to walk down the hall in a dress, and I can’t imagine the guts it takes to live your life…”

And I responded that for him the dress subverted his sense of self - his identity as man. Whereas for me, dressed in red velvet from my boots up for the interview, I was not subverting my image but finding another means for its expression.

Thinking about it, I hope that particular exchange might have given Mr. Nelson some insight as to how far he had yet to go to fully inhabit Charlotte as a character. For Charlotte and I - despite differences in era, country and sexuality - had that much in common. Our choice of clothing allowed us to be seen as we wished to known, and as we felt about ourselves.

I AM MY OWN WIFE

A Laudatory Review and Literary Criticism

By Diane S. Frank

WHEN you live beyond the pale, lies are expected. If you’re a crossdresser, if you’re gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered or whatever, it’s expected that you’ll have a secret to keep and that you will lie to keep that secret. You expect others to lie to you as well. The stories we tell about ourselves are suspect. If we accept ourselves, our own nature, we may still tell stories to deflect attention. We can be our own Peters, denying not Jesus, but ourselves far more than three times before the cock crows, day after day, year after year. And if we don’t accept ourselves, the lies get even worse, as we can lie to ourselves, to the face in the mirror with the same desperate need we lie to those around us.

So what to make of a play by a homosexual, albeit one living in our liberated and tolerant times, about Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, a transvestite and homosexual living in the most repressive, conformist regimes known. What should you, the reader make of a review/dramatic criticism by someone who you can for all practical purposes call a "friend of Charlotte’s" or in the parlance of the 1950’s call a "fellow traveler"? Plays are not literal truth; the actors are not the actual historical characters. Everything has layer after layer of interpretive haze telling us what history really was, what really was important, who to believe and why. Reviewers bring their own agendas. What is the real story and how do we tell it?

The story of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, "Germany’s most controversial transvestite - Berlin’s own Trannie Granny", brings us face to face with that problem. I Am My Own Wife by playwright Doug Wright won Tony Awards and a Pulitzer Prize in its first run in NYC. Now this one-man show with 30+ characters has come to Cleveland in the entirely able hands of veteran actor and director Mark Nelson. It’s a knockout production, acting, sets, the drama itself.

Mark Nelson is near flawless in shifting from character to character. His performance is a piece of accomplished technical mastery. He embodies the main character, playwright Douglas Wright perfectly, and Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, the secondary character only a little less so. He recreates characters from across Germany and the US - male and female with shifts of voice and posture. Without exception they convince and engage from the most forceful to the most ephemeral appearances.

A special word about the scenic design. Hugh Landwehr’s set is a thing of such apparent simplicity and yet layered and layered with images that advance and recede. The dingy, utilitarian grays of East Berlin, the flash of the west, the war zone, the almost kitschy comfort of the Charlotte’s home are realized in ways that always support the drama without overwhelming it.

As a piece of dramaturgy, this is a show where you get to the end of the first act and ask why do they need a second act, and then you see the second act and you wonder how you could have asked that question. This is a show where you can be laughing one second, and wiping away a tear the next. If you’re one of the few non-GLBT people reading this review, you’ll be perhaps surprised by how the story grabs you. You’ll see how a person who swims openly against the heterosexual current that you unconsciously swim with can remind you about what it is to be a human being with strengths and yes, weaknesses as well. If you’re one of Charlotte’s many friends you’ll find a piece of your own life, somewhere on the stage. And if you’re the impatient type, you can stop here and order your tickets. I’ll wait.

Are you back? Good. I hope you got good seats, although there really aren’t any bad seats in the theatre.

Now stop again, and ask yourself why you read reviews. Most people I know read them to help decide where to spend their entertainment dollar. So, if you don’t believe me, or perhaps think my voice is too queer jump over to the Plain Dealer and read Tony Brown’s review. He gets the point of the play all wrong...it’s not about human dignity, at least as the main point. But he says all the right things about the quality of the production and the thrill of being in the theatre for it. But some people read reviews to try to get a deeper or alternative understanding of subject.

So, one last chance. Go see the play first, see it with an open mind and heart and then come back for what I have to say. Or continue reading and see the play with different eyes.

I’m not giving anything away by saying that the dramatic focus of the play is the question of whether a homosexual transvestite antique dealer, a lover of antique gramophones, in Communist East Berlin survived because she became an agent for the East German Secret Police (the Stasi). Do we believe the muddled records in the police files or the equally muddled memories of Charlotte? Do we believe the play at all? How much of the drama is real, and how much have we been played? What would be the drama, where would the story be if there were no apparent stains on Charlotte’s life?

I Am My Own Wife chronicles in an edited and theatrical form the life of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf. Born Lothar Bersfelde in 1928, he discovers discarded feminine clothing after the Nazis evacuated families from East Berlin in 1943. He puts on that clothing and from that moment onward knows that he is supposed to be Charlotte. He is in turn discovered by his mannish, lesbian aunt, who says that Nature played them a terrible trick, as Lothar should have been born a girl and the aunt should have been born a boy. She gives him a copy of Magnus Hirschfeld’s "Die transvestiten", as terrible and prophetic a present as one could ever imagine and tells him it will be his Bible.

While Hirschfeld’s book would certainly affirm to Lothar that he was not alone, at the same time it was a rather comprehensive introduction to things that might have been better left for him to discover later in life. I can think of no more worrisome present to give a young person confused about gender identity or sexuality than a book that purports in the most scientific terms to describe what the possibilities are. Possibilities are in truth endless. There are times when a guidebook is a good idea, and then there are times when we should strike off and make our own maps in order to become our own people.

The heroism of Charlotte’s life is that she managed to live in East Berlin, openly as a transvestite, openly as a homosexual under the eyes of a brutally repressive, puritanical regime. From a great devotion to the heritage of her mother and Aunt, Charlotte creates a museum to the artifacts of the German Gay Nineties, a small part of a period generally known in Germany as the Grunderzeit. Charlotte rescues the contents of a singular Weimar era cabaret in East Berlin, the Mulack-Ritze, a gay bar with 4 beds upstairs. The beds, she tells us, were always occupied. She reinstalls the Mulack-Ritze in the basement of her Grunderszeit Museum. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany, the German State recognizes Charlotte’s work. In a public ceremony, she is awarded The Order of Merit for her efforts at cultural conservation. Charlotte’s pride in her accomplishment is not only personal. She declares that she has shown also that a transvestite can work. That no matter what you may think of her mode of dress, of her identity as a woman, of her sexuality, that she can create good works in society. For some of us, that was a stand-up-and-cheer moment.

If the play ended here, or drifted off into happily ever after, it wouldn’t really have much dramatic impetus, the author’s protestations on stage to the contrary. The opening of the East German secret police files presented the author and the German public a different possible view of Charlotte. Collaborator, snitch, betrayer. Charlotte can explain much, but not all and some of the explanations seem lame. What has happened to our hero? We, like the author want to believe. But we also want something we call the truth.

Having seen the play twice now, and read through the script, I’m increasingly finding myself on Charlotte’s side, but not for the reasons stated. As presented by the play, Charlotte informed on the economic crimes of people. The man who went to jail and whose jailing may have bought Charlotte her freedom was trading illegally for Western currency. To this day, in a number of countries with currency controls such transactions are illegal. Charlotte is nowhere accused of betraying anyone for political reasons, or for reasons of sexuality. Charlotte was not a finder of homosexuals or dissidents to be turned in.

The Stasi weren’t just a secret police; they had regular police functions as well. In the US we do a lot of legal arm twisting and offer immunity to some criminals in order to convict and punish others. So the largest "crime" or "moral lapse" that the play charges Charlotte with was simply cooperating with a reasonable police activity of an unreasonable government and system. Only the post-wall hysteria over Stasi informants could make this look like a political crime of Charlotte’s, and certainly not the stuff of high drama.

Once however, the hounds were baying, every detail of Charlotte’s life was up for scrutiny. I know from personal experience that the records of my ancestors were lost in the Holocaust. Why should I expect that the details of Charlotte’s murder of her father would survive the bombing and Soviet conquest of Berlin? When Charlotte is accused of receiving merchandise from the Stasi, who had in turn stolen it from dispossessed and tortured dissidents, she acknowledges taking it, "as a mother would take an orphan child". I know what she meant. Once I was wandering in West Berlin, before the fall of the wall, and I came across an antique shop. In the window was an old Menorah. Even though I was not observant, not practicing at the time, I could not leave that Menorah there. For all I know, there could be a factory grinding out fake antiques to con Jewish tourists. For all I know, there is invisible Jewish blood on that Menorah. I don’t know. I only know I had to take that Menorah out of Berlin and home with me. I can understand Charlotte taking blood-soaked, tainted artifacts from the Stasi. Someone had to reclaim them, honor them and give them a home.

In one sense the play sets us up, and colludes with an over-wrought period in German history in placing far too harsh a judgment on Charlotte. One in three East Germans cooperated with the Stasi. The author’s introduction to the play, but not the play reveals that the controversy largely abated after 4 years. But such is the effect of art, that no one questions that moment in the play. A lie reveals a larger truth about our need for heroes, our need to build them up, tear them down, and then to resurrect them more in our own image. It is a drama, a fiction. No matter how close, it is still not Charlotte’s life.

The author of play appears as one of the characters, arguably the main character. He worries about the stories. Is his quest for truth; is his quandary over Charlotte’s status merely an economic calculation? How to justify so many years of work, the grants obtained for a figure whose life might not make a viable drama? At this point I wonder how many of the tape recorded conversations were real, and how much of the play’s contents is the recitation of fictionalized versions of them. Or is it really that the confusing stories are a god-send to the dramatist, creating a conflict in play that would otherwise engage only because of the eccentric nature of its star, as a freak-show, not reaching anything universal about the human condition?

There is a startling explanation; exculpation for Charlotte’s flawed stories. A psychiatrist pronounces Charlotte’s tales the stilted, rehearsed repetitions of an adult with autism, saying things that provide comfort against the inner turmoil and outer dangers. Of all the moments in the play, this is one I wish had never been put on the stage. Charlotte is the icon of the questionable narrative, of the story you want to believe but aren’t sure about. Charlotte’s story represents our stories. We are all dismissed, all diminished by having our stories reduced to the by-product of a neurological disorder.

I think that calling Charlotte autistic, in any of its variants is badly wrong. Autism is not only characterized by ritual, it is also a disorder of the theory of the mind, the ability to imagine what other people feel and think, and to perceive the emotions of other people accurately. Charlotte shows no such characteristics to me. She shows sympathy and shared pain with people who suffered when neo-Nazi’s attacked a party at her museum. In moment after moment she shows awareness of the feelings of people around her, towards her. Charlotte is not autistic, and if she is disordered at all, we can look to what she survived rather than her sexuality or her gender identity as the cause.

The playwright portrays himself as haunted by the question of what to present of Charlotte’s life. How should he write the play we have just seen? He finds his answer when he asks Charlotte whether she ever repairs the artifacts she receives or discards things that are too worn or broken. The heart of Charlotte’s answer is this:

Nein. You must save everything. And you must show it auf Englische, we say "as is."

So that’s what Wright does, or at least wants us to think he does. For those of us living beyond the pale, the play offers hope and warning. We must, we are told, tell our stories as is. We must not pretty up the confusion or difficulties of our lives. We can’t expect that we will ever entirely get to the truth or that everyone will agree. We tell our stories, sometimes so often that we too may fall into nuanced cadences that reveal signs of self-medication. We tell them so often that we wonder if the telling of the tale has superseded what really happened. We tell them because we need society at large to know that people who live beyond the pale can work. We tell them because like everyone else in society we are entitled to. We tell them because we must.

But there is a danger too, in becoming the story one tells, of ceasing to live life, and just becoming a repetitive recitation, a human gramophone. We must continue to live, while letting others know. Perhaps that’s why at the end, the author appears as himself, taking off the costume of Charlotte, which is otherwise worn by all but one character in the play. Off with the head scarf, off with the pearls. He is moving forward, leaving Charlotte and her story behind. It’s a grand tradition in drag shows, taking off the wig, revealing the man under the costume.

In a way I wish it hadn’t happened. I wish Wright had kept them on, to show us one last time how Charlotte had become part of his life, that in ways he could not separate himself from her, and thus the audience can't either. Or here’s how I could imagine it. He finishes his final analysis of Charlotte and turns to leave; he pauses, turns again and picks up the pearls, looks at them, holds them up, puts them in his pocket and walks off stage. Maybe it’s a gesture that most of the audience wouldn’t understand. I think those of us who live beyond the pale would, and we’d be glad of it