I Am My Own Wife Tickets

About I Am My Own Wife

It's the right time of year for miracles, and this is a great one. Jefferson Mays, the sole performer in Doug Wright's play I Am My Own Wife, now at the Lyceum after a successful spring run at Playwrights Horizons, has managed to transform the show from an intelligent curiosity to a full-sized Broadway show with energy and life to spare.

Mays, Wright, and director Moisés Kaufman have achieved this monumentally difficult feat in one of the most uncertain Broadway seasons in recent memory not by making any perceptible changes to the text used Off-Broadway, but by fitting the pieces of this intricate puzzle of a play together more snugly than before. Off-Broadway, the story of Wright's life-altering interactions with German transvestite Charlotte von Mahlsdorf was not quite fully formed, flagging in the second act as Mays struggled to establish and make relevant emotional connections between events in Germany both before and after Unification.

But no longer. The passage of time and additional performances have allowed Mays to more efficiently find the rhythms and transitions of the three dozen or so characters he portrays over the course of the play. Though he still hardly changes costume and generally limits his movements and breadth of facial expression, there's a completeness and sense of musical phrasing present now that his earlier performance lacked. This all has combined to make I Am My Own Wife sharper, more focused, and more moving, less coldly informed by its subtitle ("Studies for a Play About the Life of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf") than by the dramatic necessity of bringing von Mahlsdorf's story to life.

Those facts add up to a rich portrait of Mahlsdorf, the real-life transvestite who managed to survive the regimes of both the Third Reich and the East German Communists. Much of the play's material comes from interviews that Mahlsdorf, the curator of her own museum of antiques, gave to playwright Doug Wright (whose character also appears in the play), and the stories she tells - about a teenage boy discovering an affinity for women's clothes, about evading death at the hands of the Nazis, about her desperate murder of her abusive father - are so tough, dignified and inspiring that they begin, eventually, to test credulity.

And that, it turns out, is part of the point. In the 1990s, an uncovered Stasi file revealed that Mahlsdorf may have been a willing informant for East Germany's repressive secret police, and it cast shadows of doubt over many of the events Mahlsdorf repeated as the story of her life. Wright has written his own ambivalence into the play, offering an array of information about Charlotte without offering answers. We're left, as he is, compelled, fascinated and torn between admiration and suspicion.

Doug the character is the script's least successful risk, the guy who unnecessarily articulates his subject matter's troubling questions. But Wright's impressively economical storytelling has a confident sense of timing that, at its best, endows the play with the feel of a developing mystery.