Lothar Berfelde murdered his abusive Nazi officer father, adopted the female alter ego of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf as a teen and lived as an open transvestite for 50 years in sexually repressive East Germany.
She also won Germany’s official Order of Merit in 1992 for her work as a preservationist. And she may also have been an informant for the secret police.
Was she a hero who showed courage through decades of personal and police brutality? A pioneer for sexual freedom? Or a grim historic reminder of the Sophie-like choices so many are forced to make to survive horrific and untenable times?
“I find American audiences are much quicker to judge Charlotte than European ones,” said playwright Doug Wright, author of the 2004 Pulitzer and Tony-winning one-man play, “I Am My Own Wife,” based on first-hand interviews with Mahlsdorf before her death in 2002. It opens Curious Theatre Company’s ninth season Saturday with Erik Sandvold portraying Charlotte and three dozen other characters.
“We have a stringent, binary morality that says matters are all right, or all wrong,” Wright wrote in an e-mail from Australia. “In East Germany, residents realized that kind of absolutism was untenable; it prevented any kind of meaningful reunification with the West. So they had to absolve many informants, and acknowledge that they, too, were victims of a monstrous, manipulative regime.
“The ambiguities surrounding Charlotte’s Stasi involvement are real … and I wanted to present it with all its maddening inconsistencies intact.”
Mahlsdorf, born in 1928, worked as a boy helping a dealer clear out abandoned apartments. He developed a fascination with everyday household items and later, after a forced stint with the Nazi Youth, founded the Gründerzeit Museum to display them. Eventually some came to question whether the collection was in fact the stolen spoils of expelled Jews.
“At one point in the play, Charlotte says her priority system is her museum, her furniture and, only then, other human beings. That creeped me out for a while,” said Sandvold. “But when you think about it, her love for furniture and old things is actually what sustained her, whereas she was often persecuted by other people.”
Wright (“Quills,” “Grey Gardens”) is known for theatricalizing known but wildly divergent subjects such as Mahlsdorf and the Marquis de Sade.
“I’m fascinated by characters that are often labeled eccentric,” said Wright. “In them, we see our own obsessions, distilled. We may not all be inveterate collectors like Charlotte, but chances are, we all have a relative who collects a few too many Hummel figurines, or orders compulsively from the Franklin Mint. And while very few of us indeed have the voracious, perverse sexuality of the notorious Marquis de Sade – how many of us would want the world rifling through our underwear drawer or perusing our computer files?
“The characters I choose to depict may seem initially outrageous, but they all – to my mind, at least – highlight some key aspect of human nature. What most of us possess in moderation, they happen to possess in extremes, which makes them great subjects for drama. What are plays, after all, but our lives compressed and heightened?”
But appropriating true stories for dramatic purposes comes with challenges and responsibilities. Wright is a dramatist first, a biographer second.
“I was paralyzed by the overwhelming circumstances of Charlotte’s life,” said Wright. “She weathered the Nazis. The communists. How could I, as a privileged, white, gay playwright living in New York ever accurately depict oppression that extreme? Her life encompassed the 20th century. It felt completely beyond my reach.
“Then a dear friend had the insight and compassion to say, ‘You’re right. You can’t possibly write about a subject that broad, that paralyzing – especially when you lack both credibility and expertise. In fact, you’re an expert on only one thing when it comes to Charlotte – your own 10-year obsession with her.’ And so I made that the subject of my play.”
Wright, having grown up gay in hostile Texas, wrote himself into the piece. He is much like the audience – charmed at first, but more troubled as new facts come out.
“Putting myself into the play was truly an act of desperation,” said Wright, who finally finished the script at the Sundance Institute with the help of initial director Moises Kaufman (“The Laramie Project”) and actor Jefferson Mays, who won a Tony playing Charlotte on Broadway.
“I couldn’t hit upon a dramaturgical solution that would give a clean dramatic shape to the story of her life. It was too messy, too sprawling. But our relationship had a very clear arc – the arc of any love story.
“I was infatuated with her, and I placed her on a pedestal. Then I saw her very human failings, and felt betrayed and disillusioned. Finally, that morphed into a truer, more profound and adult love … the ability to view a person with all of their contradictions intact, and still recognize their fundamental value.”
Though the play does not try to strike contemporary parallels, Sandvold nevertheless found them creeping in throughout his creative process.
“You start to realize that these regimes we consider to be hideous persecuted people and restricted their rights and freedoms based solely on sexual preference or gender identification,” said Sandvold. “I’m not saying that we are in any way like the Nazis, but you can’t deny that many Americans right now are also actively pursuing restricting the rights and freedoms of people based on the same things.”
Wright is not interested in passing judgments on any of his characters. “I’m far more invested in merely presenting them – warts and all – with their humanity intact. And it’s not our innate goodness that makes us human; it’s the eternal wrestle between pure impulses, and our darker, more primal instincts.”
Theater critic John Moore can be reached at 303-954-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com.
“I Am My Own Wife”
SOLO DRAMA|Curious Theatre Company|Written by Doug Wright|Directed by Christy Montour-Larson|Starring Erik Sandvold|Acoma Center, 1080 Acoma St.|THROUGH OCT. 14|8 p.m. today, dates then vary|$28-$32 (2-for-1 Thursdays)|303-623-0524 curioustheatre.org
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Read unpublished excerpts from John Moore’s interview with playwright Doug Wright, including comments on how “I Am My Own Wife” to was birthed as a play, and about Wright’s Transylvanian fan base.
