Sex and the Saidye

>> Brett Christopher plays all the parts
in the true story of a 65-year-old East
German transvestite, I Am My Own Wife

ONE-MAN MARVEL: Christopher

by Amy Barratt

S&M at the Segal! How’s that for an unlikely opener? Well, I Am My Own Wife is a fairly unlikely play for the Saidye Bronfman Centre’s venerable subscription house. Which in turn is fitting, since the play is inspired by a most unlikely character, one Charlotte von Mahlsdorf. The Pulitzer, Tony and Drama Desk Award-winner by Doug Wright is the true story of the playwright’s encounter with a 65-year-old East German antique-collecting transvestite.

As Doug writes in his first communication with Charlotte, “The Nazis, and then the Communists? It seems to me you’re an impossibility. You shouldn’t even exist.” He goes on to ask to interview her for the purpose of creating a play about her life. All of this is reenacted in the play he finally produced, which is as much about the gay playwright from the American Bible Belt as it is about the man/woman he sees as a living gay history icon. One more thing: Doug, Charlotte and a few dozen other characters are all played by one actor. In the Segal production, that actor is Brett Christopher.

“There’s something inherently thrilling about seeing an actor transform from one part to another before your eyes,” says director Chris Abraham. “And I mean childhood-type thrilling.”

“For us,” says Christopher, a Toronto-based actor, “the play is a love story between a young gay man and an icon of gay history.”

It is also about what happens when icons turn out to be perhaps not as admirable as we had hoped.

At first, Doug is simply overjoyed to discover this figure who began dressing as a woman in her teens and maintained her identity through two of the most repressive regimes of the 20th century. Gradually, though, he comes across sources that suggest Charlotte may have collaborated with the authorities in order to save her precious collection, which included a whole Weimar-era cabaret saved from the Russians by dismantling it, and lovingly reassembling it in the cellar of her mansion; she even ran it as a gay bar under a Communist regime which denied the existence of homosexuals.

Apart from the script itself, the production team at the Segal has had access to source materials including a memoir written in German, which was published around the same time that Wright was conducting his interviews. There’s also a film about Charlotte made in the early ’80s, which is reportedly quite campy and quite preoccupied with Charlotte’s sexual tastes, which run to spanking and whipping. The play doesn’t shy away from this aspect of the character, but it suggests that ultimately sex and love take a back seat in Charlotte’s life to her phonographs and grandfather clocks. “Museum. Furniture. Men,” she says in the play. “This is the order in which I have lived my life.”

“When you see her on film, there’s definitely something up with her,” says Abraham, well-known to Segal audiences for directing such classics as Hedda Gabler and The Glass Menagerie. “The facts of her story contradict each other,” says Abraham. “One’s left with a feeling.”

“I think everybody will walk away with some kind of decision about Charlotte,” he adds. Just not necessarily the same decision as their neighbour. I Am My Own Wife is one of those plays that’s bound to be much discussed in the theatre lobby and all the way home.

24-HOUR PARTY PEOPLE

This weekend, yours truly is participating in The 24-Hour Plays at Théâtre Ste-Catherine (264 Ste-Catherine E). I will be one of several “playwrights” starting work Friday evening and writing through the night. By morning, each of us must somehow have a short play ready to hand to a director and actors. They, in turn, will work through the day and the plays will be performed before an audience Saturday night. The show starts at 7:30 p.m. March 17. Tickets are $12 and it’s a fundraiser for the TSC. See you there!

I AM MY OWN WIFE RUNS UNTIL
MARCH 25 AT THE SAIDYE
(5170 CÔTE-STE-CATHERINE), (514) 739-2301