The life of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf is an incredibly fascinating story – or at least how she tells it.
Charlotte’s life is the subject of famed American playwright Doug Wright’s award-winning work ‘I Am My Own Wife’, which local Director Joe Lui and Black Swan State Theatre Company will bring to life for Perth audiences.
Based on a true story, Charlotte is an antiquarian and transgender woman who survived both Nazi Germany and Eastern Bloc Russia. In a post-modern touch, the play follows Doug Wright as he travels to Germany to meet Charlotte and interview her for a new work.
“The play travels through the process of this writer meeting her for the first time, finding out about her, and getting excited about writing this play about her. It’s through that journey we learn more about her life,” Joe explains.
While the initial blurb for the play sets up a story of a hero triumphing over evil, ‘I Am My Own Wife’, however, digs deeper as Doug interviews Charlotte, as well as having episodes from her story acted out, to reveal a bigger picture. “When we read the story in the blurb, we’re on her side and find her fascinating and in our heads we’ve made this hero. But over the course of the play a couple of things about the hero mythology get questioned.”
“The blurring of truths really attracted me to this play,” he says. “The play deals a lot with the nature of self-image and truth-telling and storytelling as a way of healing and understanding and surviving one’s self. The nature of setting it within this context of the playwright writing the play really fits the theme of never knowing what is objectively true, or whether there is an objective truth to know.”
If the structure of the play and the big questions about good and bad weren’t enough, it also stars only actor Brendan Hanson, who will play 30 different characters across the play. “I think for any actor it’s a huge challenge. The play is over an hour long and is a lot of words. On a basic level, an actor’s job is to learn words, but there are so many words, and, on top of that, there are so many characters from all over the world. On a purely technical level, it is such a challenge. But I also think it’s the kind of challenge that a good actor relishes and spend careers looking for.”
Everything about the play is challenging. But while Joe enjoys a challenge, one of the things about the play which really speak to him is the way it shows human nature to be complicated in a truthful way. “I think ‘I Am My Own Wife’ is really brilliant because it takes a bunch of incredibly sympathetic characters and shows them as being human in a way that is still sympathetic, but isn’t pandering or caricature. It shows that even the best of us or those of us who have gone through the worst things, we’re still sinners – we’re not monsters or angels, we’re just humans.”
