E-Mail This Article to a Friend Woman of mystery Doug Wright’s I Am My Own Wife is stranger than fiction BY IRIS FANGER

Of the many unlikely topics to engage the hearts and minds of American audiences, perhaps none is unlikelier than the life of German cross-dresser Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, who survived first the Nazis and then East Germany’s Communist regime. Born a boy, Lothar Berfelde, in 1928, she was discovered in East Berlin after the wall came down by playwright Doug Wright, who met and interviewed her and became her friend. The one-man play he subsequently wrote, I Am My Own Wife, won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, along with Tonys for Wright and actor Jefferson Mays, creator of Charlotte’s stage persona and more than 40 other characters. Mays will appear in I Am My Own Wife at Boston’s Wilbur Theatre for a week beginning this Tuesday.

Wright encountered Charlotte in 1993 through a journalist friend who was working in Berlin. "After the fall of the wall, all these incredible stories were emerging about characters who survived under Communism. She was written about in the German press and had published her autobiography by then, but she was unknown in America." Wearing a severe black dress and a simple string of pearls, Mays portrays Charlotte as, he explains, "a lady of the century before last, the late 19th century, the period of the furniture she so avidly and lovingly collected."

Part way through the decade-long process of bringing the project to the stage, Wright made the bombshell discovery that Charlotte had been an informer for the East German secret police. "Charlotte wanted very much to read her Stasi file, but it took several years for a private citizen to access it. However, if an American journalist put in the request, it was only a matter of days. Charlotte said if we would pursue it for her, she would let us read it in exchange, so that’s how we cut the deal. For a period of about five years, I was the only one who knew. That’s when I elected not to write the play."

When the German press got hold of the story and printed it, however, Wright felt he could continue his work. During the summer of 2000, he invited Mays and director Moisés Kaufman to the Sundance Theater Labs to develop the script. Kaufman had previously made collage-type plays based on real persons (Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde and The Laramie Project), with notable success; Mays had appeared in Wright’s drama about the Marquis de Sade, Quills, and an evening of his one-acts. "Moise took the original transcripts of the interviews and let us use them for theater games," Wright recalls. "Jefferson was always inventive. Their blood courses through the play along with mine." I Am My Own Wife premiered at Playwrights Horizons before moving in late 2003 to Broadway, where it ran for nearly a year. The Boston run follows a stop in Washington, DC, where first lady Laura Bush attended a performance.

Although Mays says that "it’s a great joy to tell her story to fresh ears every night," he’s conflicted about Charlotte’s involvement with the Stasi. "Her life story, her mythology, if you will, is irreconcilable with the file. Her dear friend could have told her to betray him to save the collection and herself, or she could have ratted on him to preserve her way of life. I think she told a truth; whether it was the truth I don’t know."

Wright believes that there are "certain things we’ll never know. One of the necessary and responsible actions of the historian is to preserve ambiguity as we preserve fact, and that’s one of the themes of the play. People get to take Charlotte home with them and debate her into the night."

I Am My Own Wife is at the Wilbur Theatre, 246 Tremont Street in the Theater District, April 19 through 24. Tickets are $32.50 to $72.50; call (617) 931-ARTS, or drop in at the Wilbur, the Colonial (106 Boylston Street), or the Opera House (539 Washington Street) box office.