'I Am My Own Wife': One-Man Show, One Special Woman

By Jane Horwitz
Special to The Washington Post
Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Bruce R. Nelson has played multiple characters and has done solo pieces, but the 35 people he takes on in "I Am My Own Wife," at Baltimore's Everyman Theatre, loomed as a new sort of theatrical beast.

So Nelson, winner of two Helen Hayes Awards (for his work at Rep Stage in "The Violet Hour" and "The Dazzle") made the not-so-easy decision to go to the Lincoln Center's video archive and watch the original performance by Jefferson Mays as the legendary German transvestite Charlotte von Mahlsdorf and 34 other people in her story.

Von Mahlsdorf survived both Nazi and communist regimes and lived to tell a lot about it, especially to "I Am My Own Wife" dramatist Doug Wright. Mays originated the performance (he did it here at the National Theatre in 2005) and collaborated closely with Wright and director Moisés Kaufman.

"Even though I had done similar types of pieces -- 'Santaland Diaries,' 'Travels With My Aunt,' 'The Pavilion' were all examples of me being [multiple] characters and sometimes talking with myself" onstage, says Nelson, "I was still intrigued as to how Jefferson would do it."

Nelson and director Donald Hicken were particularly concerned with technical details -- how Mays kept it clear for the audience who was speaking, how he made the lightning transitions between two or three characters, how he mimed the use of certain props.

Now that they're deep into rehearsals, Nelson says his concerns about losing his own "creative choices" after seeing the video have evaporated. "I'm definitely making it my own and I guess enjoying for the first time in a very long time, a process. Because it's so scaled down. It's me, the director, the stage manager -- and the subject matter is so thrilling."

When Nelson came to him with the script and asked him to direct, recalls Hicken, who also runs the theater department at Baltimore School for the Arts, he wasn't that familiar with the play. "I read the play . . . [and] it just really knocked me out, and I went back to him and I said, 'This is huge.' "

Hicken once thought of Nelson as a strictly comic actor, but discovered otherwise when directing him in both comic and dramatic roles in three Everyman shows: "The Turn of the Screw," "The Cripple of Inishmaan" and "Watch on the Rhine." He praises Nelson's "incredible work ethic."

The play raises questions of fact around von Mahlsdorf's life -- whether as a child, she really killed her abusive father; whether she was an informer for the East German secret police; or whether she fed them just enough baloney that they allowed her to continue to collect her beloved antique furniture and to keep her cellar as an underground gay cafe.

"As a gay man, I like to believe that this completely improbable person did all of these things. Now, whether they're true or not, part of me does not care. I think I care more about the fantasy . . . that she eluded these huge regimes and did it openly as a transvestite. I just love the thumbing the nose in such a brazen way," says Nelson.

Both actor and director see at the core of "I Am My Own Wife" (running Jan. 14 to Feb. 22) the playwright's journey -- how Wright's efforts to learn the truth and his struggle to shape the material led to a revelation. In the play, says Nelson, Wright "has his eyes opened. He thought growing up gay in the Bible Belt was tough. Well, look at Charlotte growing up when she did."

Observes Hicken: "You realize what the cost of survival is when you're dealing with oppressive regimes and that level of intolerance. What it actually takes in human terms to survive that is pretty remarkable."

Studio's 'The Seafarer'

Director Paul Mullins and actor Billy Meleady recently chatted with Backstage, as rehearsals began for Conor McPherson's "The Seafarer," running at Studio Theatre (Jan. 14 to Feb. 22). Neither director nor actor claimed to hold traditional religious beliefs, but both expressed strong faith in McPherson's religion-imbued fable about a man nicknamed Sharky who's visited by the Devil on Christmas Eve.

Mullins called the play "a really well-told yarn; a really great, elaborate story." He loved the fact that the other three characters in it are utterly clueless about the drama going on between Sharky and the vaguely sulfurous stranger, Mr. Lockhart. Sharky and Lockhart are only two among five ne'er-do-well Dubliners gathered for a bit of Christmas Eve drinking, storytelling and poker.

"The great fun of it and the great challenge of it is to make this extraordinary story [reach] that level of surprise," said Mullins of the play's blend of the mundane and the apocalyptic. "Three of these people never realize what happened here . . . that's as huge and epic in scale as it is regular . . . and common," said Mullins.

Meleady, a quiet, craggy Irishman who has been doing theater in Boston for 20 years, plays Sharky. "My first impression on reading it was that it was all Sharky's imagination," said the actor. Sharky is also, he noted, a newly sober alcoholic with a painful past in a roomful of drunks. The idea of the Devil in a suit sitting playing cards for a man's soul "evokes a lot of unpleasant imagery in one's mind -- 'The Lost Weekend,' " suggested Meleady.

Because the other characters have ongoing humorous chatter and situations, the actor continued, "it takes serious focus and concentration for Sharky to stay focused on his predicament. The audience seems to be watching comedy -- then you're going through this thing."

Although new to Washington, Meleady is not new to the role of Sharky, which he just played in Boston at the end of 2008 with the SpeakEasy Stage Company. He's also a member of the Sugan Theatre Company there, which specializes in Irish works. He even hails from a section of Dublin, Coolock, near where playwright McPherson grew up.

It was a rough life in blue-collar Ireland before the great economic boom of the 1990s. It was a tossup what kind of life Meleady and those around him chose, said the actor. "We were all on the dole, we were all unemployed. There was no work. So what do you do? You go on drugs or you use creativity . . . a lot of people turned to their creativity."

When visiting friends and family in Ireland, the actor said he gets teased for sounding too American or British (he spent time in England, too), but this side of the pond, he knows he sounds plenty Irish. While his fellow cast members Jeff Allin, Edward Gero, Philip Goodwin and Floyd King drill with dialect coach Betty Ann Leeseberg-Lange, Meleady has an easier task.

"I know exactly my shortcomings from years and years in Boston," he said. "Slowing down is key . . . to slow down from my natural patter."

Follow Spots

· The latest beneficiaries of the Canadian/Washington Theatre Partnership are Randy Baker and Jenny McConnell Frederick, co-artistic directors of Rorschach Theatre, and Janet Griffin, producing director of Folger Theatre. Every year since 2000, the partnership, sponsored by the Canadian Embassy and run by the Helen Hayes Awards, has sent artistic directors from two Washington area theater companies on a week-long theatergoing trip to Canada. Several Canadian plays have been produced here as a result.

· Howard University senior Zurin Villanueva, a native of Brooklyn, N.Y., has won Arena Stage's highly publicized open audition for the role of Yolanda in the theater's spring production of "Crowns." The musical-theater major was among 60 young women who auditioned to play the troubled teen character on Jan. 3 at the Lincoln Theatre. Villanueva and the 20 others who were called back had to sing, dance and perform a monologue before artistic director Molly Smith, "Crowns" director Kenneth Lee Roberson, music director E'Marcus Harper and actress Marva Hicks. Villanueva also got her Equity card for winning the audition.