Transgender Charlotte is a survivor in Gigante’s ‘Wife’
During Nazi Germany’s darkest days, the child born in 1928 as Lothar Berfelde was already identifying as Charlotte von Mahlsdorf. Dressed as the woman she felt herself to be, she lived most of her adult life in East Germany.
It’s hard enough being gender fluid in Trump’s America. That Charlotte survived the Nazis and the Stalinists — living through the fall of the Berlin Wall and into the early 21st century — seems impossible.
“You shouldn’t even exist,” writes a character named Doug, stand-in for playwright Doug Wright in his Pulitzer-winning “I Am My Own Wife.” With actor Michael Stebbins playing Charlotte, Doug and 33 other characters, it’s now on stage in a justopened Theatre Gigante production being directed by Isabelle Kralj.
Those characters include Charlotte’s loving lesbian aunt and abusive Nazi father; the SS commander who contemplates shooting Charlotte; officials from East Germany’s Gestapo-like Stasi who interrogate her; and Doug — who, gay and from the Bible Belt, has many reasons for identifying with someone like Charlotte.
There’s no quickchange costuming; with one significant exception, every character is presented through a 60something, makeup-free version of Charlotte herself, wearing pearls but dressed in austere black, from her kerchiefed head to her orthopedic black shoes.
This costuming boldly suggests that it’s the transgender person who is the norm — and who plays at being other characters much as each of us constructs identities featuring normative notions of gender.
“I wear your clothes and you wear mine,” Charlotte says at one point to Doug.
Using one actor to impersonate all 35 characters underscores how Charlotte’s continual shape-shifting was integral to her survival. Her bobbing and weaving included four years in the 1970s as a Stasi informant; as Charlotte tells a questioning Doug, “never forget that you are living in the lion’s den. Sometimes you must howl with the wolves.”
It’s a good line. But as channeled by Stebbins, it’s one of many moments that doesn’t fully capture Charlotte’s theatricality, complexity, conflict and emotional range — this Charlotte is a bit too saintly.
Stebbins credibly embodies Charlotte’s hardwon equanimity. But he doesn’t always dig deep enough to register the psychic cost of her various dodges and betrayals.
Much of Charlotte’s peace and stability came through the beautiful objects she acquired, from old clocks, phonographs and furniture to an entire Weimar cabaret, lovingly recreated in her basement. People might betray Charlotte; objects never did.
Stebbins describes some of those objects as he presents them through beautifully crafted doll-house miniatures; he also shares scratchy recordings from a bygone era. “The music would pour through the horn and make things better,” Charlotte dreamily tells us.
And so it does — proving, as this remarkable survivor continually did, that imagination can sometimes transcend history.