“We Love to See Power Subverted” an interview by Saviana Stanescu

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2006.50.3.100 by guest on 28 September 2021 Based on a true story and interviews conducted during the 1990s, by Doug Wright tells the intriguing story of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, an East German collector—especially of antique clocks and gramophones—and a transvestite who managed to survive the Nazi era as well as the subsequent Communist regime. The one-man show starred Obie Award winner as over 40 characters, includ- ing von Mahlsdorf and Wright. Both the 2003 off-Broadway (at Playwrights Horizons) and the Broadway (at Lyceum Theatre) productions were directed by Moisés Kaufman, well known for his own documentary approach to playwriting. The Broadway production completed its sched- uled run of 26 previews and 361 performances in November 2004. It also ran in English with Polish supertitles at the Stary Theatre in Krakow in April 2005, and in London at the Duke of York Theatre, 2005/06. I Am My Own Wife won many prestigious awards, including a 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, a Tony Award for Best Play, a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play, a Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Solo Show, an Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Broadway Play, a Drama League Award for Distinguished Production of a Play, and an Obie Award for Performance. In 1995 Wright won an Obie Award for outstanding achievement in playwriting and the Kesselring Award for Best New American Play from the National Arts Club for his play Quills. He wrote the screenplay adaptation, marking his film debut. Quills was named Best Picture by the National Board of Review and was nominated for three Academy Awards. His screenplay was nominated for a Golden Globe Award and received the Paul Selvin Award from the Writers Guild of America. Wright’s plays have been widely produced at major theatres including New York Theatre Workshop, Lincoln Center, Woolly Mammoth, the McCarter Theatre, and La Jolla Playhouse. The following interview took place on 15 March 2005 at Doug Wright’s apartment in Chelsea, New York.

SAVIANA STANESCU: I Am My Own Wife covers a difficult period of European history: Nazis, Communists, the fall of the Wall, West and in a newly found effort toward reconciliation. What does it mean for an American playwright to write this European story? Is it the “sharp eye” from outside, from across the ocean? Why do you think the subject of your play is so resonant in the present-day U.S.?

DOUG WRIGHT: I didn’t make a conscious decision to write this somewhat European play from an American perspective; I had no choice! It is, after all, my heritage. But it yielded a happy dividend; I think it made the subject more broachable for American audiences. I become their tour guide through Charlotte’s foreign and occasionally exotic world. As for the play’s resonance…I’m relieved that people connect to it! Charlotte’s story is—at the end of the day—another one of those remarkable tales about an avowed outsider who trumps the establishment in some way… and these kinds of stories have enduring appeal in every culture. We love to see power subverted.

1. (facing page) In one of his many roles in I Am My Own Wife, Jefferson Mays performs as East German transvestite Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, an avid collector of gramophones. Written and directed by Doug Wright, 2003. Staged at the Lyceum Theatre, New York City. (Photo by Joan Marcus; courtesy of Richard Kornberg & Associates)

Saviana Stanescu is a Romanian-born writer working in New York City. She has an MA in Performance Studies and an MFA in Dramatic Writing from Tisch School of the Arts/NYU, where she studied playwriting with Doug Wright, among others. She is the author of The Inflatable Apocalypse (The Best Play of the Year Doug WrightDoug 2000 in Romania), Final Countdown (Antoine Vitez Center Award, Paris), Waxing West (2003), and Lenin’s Shoe (2004), and coauthor of YokastaS (with Richard Schechner). Most recently she dramatized Paul Auster’s novel Timbuktu for East Coast Artists. With Carol Martin she is coeditor of Global Foreigners (forthcoming, Seagull Press). TDR: The Drama Review 50:3 (T191) Fall 2006. © 2006 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 101

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2006.50.3.100 by guest on 28 September 2021 STANESCU: The critics hailed I Am My Own Wife as a kind of theatrical essay and a remark- able piece of political theatre. But how do define your play? Did you intend to write a political text? Political in what way?

WRIGHT: I’d call my play a “portrait of an enigma.” I was tantalized by the prospect of trying to craft a character study of someone so slippery, someone who, to a great degree, invented herself. How do you dramatize contradiction in a way that adds up to some singular, ineffable truth? That, I think, was my task. Nevertheless, I do agree that the play is politi- cal. I didn’t necessarily write it that way; it was always inherent in my subject. Charlotte von Mahlsdorf lived openly as a cross-dresser under the two most repressive regimes 20th-century European history produced: the Nazis and the Communists. To simply tell her tale becomes a political act.

STANESCU: You helped Charlotte to get her [Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, Ministry for State Security] file and found out she had been an informer. In the play you don’t judge her for that; rather you present the complexity/ambiguity of the character. Can you describe your negotiation process of employing that fact in a dramatic/personal manner?

WRIGHT: I was an outsider in Charlotte’s world; an American playwright who grew up in the plushy suburbs of Dallas, Texas. I didn’t think I had the requisite moral or historical cred- ibility to judge her; and simply rendering judgment on a character rarely makes for interesting drama. I thought it was critical to simply present the evidence swirling around Charlotte’s Stasi involvement and let the audience draw its own conclusions. Charlotte was delighted when she found out that I could help her obtain the file; as a private citizen, she had to petition for it, then wait years as the request wound its way through a very complex and overloaded bureaucracy. As a foreign researcher, I had priority and could get it sooner. I did so, with the proviso that she would let me read it. She was surprisingly cavalier about its disclosures; she had either an amusing anecdote or staunch defense for each of its allegations. She was titillated when she read it, and even giggled on occasion. Apparently, she gave a few of those Stasi officers a real run for their money. I was reluctant to disclose much of the Stasi information in the play; I feared that it would be a betrayal of sorts, and I didn’t want to hurt her. Still, I knew it was the most volatile, dramatic information in the piece. Her death [in 2000] was a profound personal loss, but a writer’s liberation. I finally felt like I could tell the whole story, unvarnished. I Am My Own Wife tells of author Doug Wright’s fascination with the life of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, a German transvestite caught up in the great European dramas of the 20th century. Unlike many contemporaries, von Mahlsdorf survived the Nazi regime and its replacement in East Germany, the Soviet-dominated Communist dictatorship.

STANESCU: How did you meet Charlotte, how did you start the process of working on I Am My Own Wife?

WRIGHT: I was initially notified of her existence by a friend of mine named John Marks; at that time, he was a journalist in Berlin working as a correspondent for an American news magazine. He’d read about her in the paper. He’d also noticed that there was a documentary film about her playing in Berlin; he knew I had an interest in gay and transgender issues, so he called me and said, “She’s an intriguing person; you should meet her!” Charlotte von Mahlsdorf—John said—born Lothar Berfelde in 1928, had long considered herself a member of the “third sex”: a female spirit trapped in a male body. Hence her preference for female pronouns even before it became the politically correct mode of address for the transgendered. Her quiet heroism—maintaining an unwavering sense of herself during such repressive times— could be a boon to gay men and women everywhere. She was a bona fide gay hero. Saviana Stanescu

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2006.50.3.100 by guest on 28 September 2021 STANESCU: In the documentary about Charlotte’s life [by gay filmmaker ] there are many characters, a whole world swirling around Charlotte. Why did you choose to write the play as a one-character play?

WRIGHT: Charlotte adopted many guises in order to survive; how appropriate that one actor adopts many guises to tell her tale! The play has a very central tenet: that one person can embody a host of contradictions. Furthermore, I loved the idea that our fearless actor Jefferson Mays would inevitably be costumed in Charlotte’s customary black dress and pearls, so every other character he played would, by default, also be wearing a little black dress. In our produc- tion, transvestism would be the norm, not the exception. Everyone from the callow playwright (me) to the fiercest Nazi officer would wear a skirt. How very democratic! I Am My Own Wife is a one-woman show, performed by a man.

STANESCU: What else about Charlotte attracted you besides the gender-related issues— particularly her being a gay hero?

WRIGHT: Charlotte was a compulsive collector. In her stone mansion, she housed a one-of- a-kind museum of curios, antiques, and bric-a-brac from the late 19th century. And maybe the most astonishing fact: hidden in her basement she had preserved the only surviving Weimar cabaret in Eastern Germany—an old tavern from the Scheunenviertel [part of the Mitte district in Berlin], known as the Mulack-Ritze. For this effort she received the Bundesverdienstkreuz, the Order of Merit, from the Cultural Ministry following reunification. I traveled to Berlin and John called her out of the blue and arranged for us to have a coffee together at her museum, one Tuesday evening at 10 o’clock at night, as she always liked the night better than the day. So we drove out to eastern Berlin on a Tuesday night in April of 1993, when I met her for the first time. Almost immediately, I became obsessed with her story.

STANESCU: A dramatic obsession, a personal one?

WRIGHT: When you’re growing up as a gay child, you rarely have strong role models. Although this is changing, straight parents raise almost every gay child, so in a funny way your parents are never fully equipped to educate you about the challenges that life will pose for you. Charlotte felt—in many ways—like a parent I never had. I thought she’d be able to impart to me an aspect of my own history that I’d previously been denied. She might even teach me a productive way to navigate a strenuous world. I was deeply moved by this possibility.

STANESCU: So first it was a sort of personal exploration with autobiographic resonance. How did the transition from “role model” to “character” come about? When did you decide to write a play about her?

WRIGHT: The very first night I met her, embarrassingly enough. When John initially called me, he said that she would be a wonderful subject for a play. So when I met her, I was predis- posed to look for a dramatic arc in her tale. I left the very first meeting convinced that I should write the script. There were many synchronicities: Charlotte was an avowed antique collector like my father. She was a homosexual person, as I am. She also had a grandmotherly quality that reminded me of my own grandma. Soon I was flying in and out of Tegel regularly. I’d take the U-Bahn ride out to Mahlsdorf with my cassette recorder in hand, with my translator Jeffrey Schneider at my side, and a list of questions scrawled on a yellow legal pad.

STANESCU: What was the “ritual” of your interviewing sessions?

WRIGHT: Charlotte would usually eat raspberry yogurt and I’d have tea, and we would talk.

I had a tape recorder and a notebook. So I wanted to give the audiences the same experience I WrightDoug had sitting across an old wooden table from her, in her basement bar. I hope that my journey in the play is mirrored by the audience’s journey. I am the narrator who leads them through the play but we make our discoveries about Charlotte’s life together.

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Excerpted from I Am My Own Wife (Faber and Faber, Inc., 2004). Vaterland CHARLOTTE: When I was a baby and then a little child— DOUG: Can I interrupt you for a moment, and play that back? I’m not sure— the batteries— CHARLOTTE: Hmm. Yes, of course. (DOUG futzes with the tape recorder.) TAPE RECORDING: (the voice of CHARLOTTE) “When I was a baby and then a little child—” DOUG: We’re good. Go ahead. CHARLOTTE: My father was a Nazi. (DOUG reacts.) And he was brutal. And was for militarism. And the years of marriage for my mother were a moratorium. My mother, she wanted to sich scheiden lassen. Get a divorce. And my aunt said one day to me: TANTE LUISE: If your father beats your mother once more, she could die. CHARLOTTE: And it was luck for us that in 1943 in Berlin the government decreed the evacuation of mothers with children, because of the air raids. And so my mother took the children to East Prussia, to the house of my aunt. And at that time we became good friends. Because my aunt was a lesbian, and I was the same. And one day I was cleaning the furniture, and I looked through the window and it was snowing, and there was coming in the snow a man with a hat and a bag and I became horribly scared because I realized this was my father. And my aunt and my father had a very heart discussion. And my aunt said: TANTE LUISE: Your wife really wants a divorce from you. CHARLOTTE: And suddenly my father pulled out a revolver, and pointed it at my aunt. And he said: HERR BERFELDE: One more word and I’ll shoot you. CHARLOTTE: But my aunt took her revolver from the desk and said: TANTE LUISE: I’ll count to three, and then you better be out the door! Otherwise, I’ll shoot. CHARLOTTE: And she said: TANTE LUISE: …three! CHARLOTTE: Und die Kugel durchschlug das Holz und blieb in der gegenüberliegenden Tür stecken—the bullet went through one door and into the next, where it lodged, and my father returned to Berlin. And then I asked my aunt, and she said: TANTE LUISE: Yes, of course. It’s a shame I didn’t kill him. CHARLOTTE: Then, on the 26th of January 1945, my mother got a letter saying the gov- ernment was taking over our house for Berliners who had lost their homes in the bombing. And so I went with the train to Berlin because I had to rearrange the furniture. To make room for the refugees. (CHARLOTTE seats herself at the table of antique models; it now suggests the house of her child-

Saviana Stanescu hood, rendered in miniature. The scene seems to play out—doll-sized—in front of her.)

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2006.50.3.100 by guest on 28 September 2021 And so I was coming into our house, and my father was living there, of course. And one evening, maybe it was the second or third day. No, I think it was a week—it was in the first week of February 1945—and one evening my father said to me: HERR BERFELDE: This is the hour I ask you, Are you for me or your mother? Do you stand beside her or me? CHARLOTTE: I was 15 years old. And I asked him, “Aren’t you ashamed of the way you’ve treated my mother?” And he said: HERR BERFELDE: I’ll shoot you down like a dog, and then I’ll go to East Prussia and shoot your mother and your sister and your brother. CHARLOTTE: And I thought of the words of my aunt. And I knew that my father would do this. He locked me in the bedroom by turning the key. Because it was war, I could hear the Allied bombs coming in the night. And then under the bed I saw a large wooden utensil used to mix cake—wie sagt man—a rolling pin. And I thought, I can take this as a weapon. I wanted to sneak out the door, but it was tightly locked. But even then I had in my pocket…keys. So I very carefully opened the door, and I was going in the next room. It was very dark, except for a little moonlight which was shining. And I saw my father. He was lying on the sofa in the dining room, and his gun lay on the chair next to him. And I saw the chair. I saw the pistol. And, in that moment, the clock—we had a Westminster clock—and the clock was chiming, and I saw my father’s hand; he was reaching for his weapon. And in this moment I began beating him. (She says with sudden ferocity): Eins! Zwei! Drei! Vier! Fünf! (A pause. She dissociates herself for a moment, becoming oddly contemplative.) Hmm. Yes. And the next day the Criminal Police came. And they asked me for the motive. And I told them. And when I was arrested they brought me before the Youth Justice. And I was sen- tenced to the Youth Prison in Tegel. Four years’ detention. And when they took me to the jail my mother was there. And we looked at each other in the eyes, and we knew that we were finally free from the monster. (CHARLOTTE bolts up from the table and becomes DOUG, frantically scribing a letter.)

Auf Deutsch DOUG: Oh John! I’m in way over my head. To kill: “töten, tötete, hat getötet.” Christ, this language doesn’t make any sense. I’m still winding my way through Die Transvestiten. Sigh. In some sentences I can barely discern the verb. And the vocabulary I’m learning is…well…so specific. Yesterday in German class I made an ass of myself. The teacher told us to make “small talk.” I froze, couldn’t remember a single phrase. So I blurted out a few new words I’d translated the night before: “Hi, ich bin Doug, und ich trage schwarze Spitzenunterwäsche.” “Hi, my name’s Doug, and I’m wearing black lace panties!” The whole class just stared at me. Except for this one guy named Morris, who offered to take me shopping. Maybe I should try reading something else? Doug WrightDoug Love, Doug

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2006.50.3.100 by guest on 28 September 2021 STANESCU: You had tapes and transcripts at the beginning. How did they become a play? Can you describe the process of working on the dramatic text?

WRIGHT: Yes, it was a ten-year journey. First I just met her for a period of two years and interviewed her for several hours a night and I got about 500 pages of transcript. My origi- nal intention was to take that research and write a very dramaturgically conventional play. I thought I would set it on the day she receives the Bundesverdienstkreuz that the German government eventually gave her. I would set it in real time, and I would follow all those Aristotelian unities of good playwriting. I started attempting to do that and I fell awfully short. The play felt static and it felt artificial. In my heart, I knew I had no authoritative knowledge about Eastern European history or Nazis and World War II; all those seminal aspects of her life were completely outside my experience, and that draft wasn’t working. We had a reading of the first act with a cast that included Kathleen Chalfant and Lola Pashalinski—amazing, inven- tive actors—but the script simply wasn’t good. I was pounding my head against the wall. Then I realized that the body of the play might be the transcripts themselves and that the journey of the play might actually be the journey I took with her. That’s when I put myself as a character in the play, and the show began to write itself.

STANESCU: You worked on I Am My Own Wife with Moisés Kaufman and Jefferson Mays at the Sundance Lab. Was that an important step in developing the play?

WRIGHT: Robert Blacker was very brave and invited me to Sundance when I hadn’t written a single word. He said: “Just bring the research, and bring an actor that you love and a direc- tor that you trust, and we’ll play. We’ll take the transcript, we’ll read it, we’ll stage some of it, you’ll write scenes, and you’ll rehearse those. You don’t have to create a play in two weeks; you just have to make a little theatrical mischief.” It was such an unthreatening invitation I just had to accept it! Under Moisés Kaufman’s direction, we started doing a week of theatre games inspired by the life of Charlotte. He gave us all homework: that evening, we had to create small, two-minute sketches inspired by the transcripts we read. The next day, like school chil- dren at show-and-tell, we performed our pieces for each other. Moisés went first. He draped a dress over a metal folding chair and then, silently, slowly, he doffed his clothes. Then I stood up and announced the title of my performance piece: “Charlotte Goes West.” I cracked open a popular gay German guidebook called Berlin von Hinten and read descriptions of various clubs and bars Charlotte had visited after the fall of Berlin Wall. Jefferson performed last. He placed a shoebox on the table in the center of the room. He plucked out a stunning homemade gramophone and set it on the table. Next he pulled out a tiny couch with felt cushions, then a grandfather clock. He had stayed up the night before and crafted paper repro- ductions of Charlotte’s beloved museum furniture. Soon the entire room was arrayed before us like a dollhouse. My sense of theatrical possibility exploded. The next day—with almost volca- nic force—the play started to pour out of me. I left Sundance with the show’s first act, which dealt with Charlotte’s life during World War II. As we worked with Jefferson, we realized that the play would operate on two levels: on a nar- rative level, it would be a story about Charlotte, but on a performance level, it would be about virtuosity. Jefferson is an amazing actor. When he first read the role of Doug Wright, he was very conscious of my presence. I told him to lampoon me, to go over the top, to overreach until he found it, and of course he did. The following summer, Jefferson and I traveled to the La Jolla Playhouse near San Diego to further workshop the play. Moisés was directing a movie for HBO. Jefferson and I worked feverishly and by the end of July 2001, I’d roughly shaped the entire play. The three of us continued to travel across the country, from theatre to theatre, honing the text in a series of workshops. At the New York Theatre Workshop, the first act flew, but the second sagged. Performance after performance, I would add new scenes and characters. Saviana Stanescu

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2006.50.3.100 by guest on 28 September 2021 STANESCU: Do you think of the play as a documentary theatre piece or rather a fictionalized one?

WRIGHT: I realized that it would rely on transcripts; that I was starting to follow established models like Moisés Kaufman’s The Laramie Project [2000] or Emily Mann’s Execution of Justice [1985]. But I have to quickly separate my piece from those, because I think they are quite scrupulous in using exact transcripts. I did not invent the events of Charlotte’s life, but some of the scenes that occur—the connective tissue, and the amusing little scenes between us in her house—are really the product of memory and writer’s inspiration. I allowed myself poetic license. I think I was really influenced by documentary theatre. I was always reluctant to call a play a piece of documentary theatre, but it certainly follows that model and it takes that form.

STANESCU: Did you have any previous experience with that form?

WRIGHT: Not really. I’ve written about historical figures before. I’ve written a play about Marcel Duchamp called Interrogating the Nude [1996] and, of course, I’ve written about Marquis de Sade in Quills. But in those plays, I borrowed my protagonists from history, and then plunked them down in the middle of invented narratives that attempted to capture the spirit, the essence of their lives—not to substitute for a good solid academic biography. But because Charlotte was less well known than those figures, I felt that I couldn’t do a purely metaphoric take on her life. I really needed to introduce audiences in a more honest, factual way to the rudimentary truths about her life. She didn’t have iconic stature; I needed to estab- lish her in an accurate way. So I didn’t take as many liberties in telling her story.

STANESCU: Quills was also a very successful movie. Is I Am My Own Wife going to be a film too?

WRIGHT: I am highly ambivalent about that. I Am My Own Wife was written as a play; I hope that there’s something profoundly theatrical about it. When I take time off from writing movies to write a new play, I feel the responsibility to make it as uniquely theatrical as possible. Jefferson Mays re-creates an entire century onstage. That’s theatre’s magic. But never say “never.” Doug WrightDoug

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