Lothar Berfelde, the German boy who reinvented himself as transvestite Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, managed the astounding feat of living openly as a cross-dresser through two of the world's most repressive regimes -- the Nazis and the Communists. "It seems to me you're an impossibility. You shouldn't even exist," playwright Doug Wright wrote her in seeking her cooperation for doing a play about her. That now-famous play, I Am My Own Wife, which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the 2004 Tony Award, is receiving an arresting production at Actors Theater of Louisville.
The man playing Charlotte in this one-woman show is Todd Almond, who also brings to fascinating life Wright himself and 33 other characters orbiting his extraordinary heroine. Wearing a string of pearls with a simple black dress, a black kerchief, sensible black shoes and no makeup, he's mesmerizing. Charlotte, who collected and preserved antiques and curios including salvaged furnishings from a venerable gay cabaret in the basement of her stone mansion in East Berlin, published an autobiography called "I Am My Own Woman" in 1992, eight years before Doug Wright began to write his play. She died of a heart attack at age 74 in 2002, a year before the play opened in New York.
Paradox, mystery, and unanswered or unanswerable questions continue to follow her, however, particularly her involvement with the dreaded East German secret police, the Stasi. The playwright effectively presents these dilemmas. "I am large, I contain multitudes," Walt Whitman wrote. Charlotte could say that, too, along with the rest of Whitman's quote: "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself."
