I Am My Own Wife
ArtsWest
Through June 1.

The biography of a real-life transvestite in East Berlin who murdered her Nazi father with a rolling pin, then glided through both the Third Reich and Soviet Germany wearing high heels and a string of pearls: It's the solo show that writes itself.

On the advice of an army buddy stationed in post-wall Germany, playwright Doug Wright (who also wrote Quills, a smart and nasty play about the Marquis de Sade and a priest who tries to "cure" him) traveled to Berlin to meet its most eccentric resident. Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, born Lothar Befelde, survived an abusive father, the bombing of Berlin, and an SS firing squad to become a center of gravity for persecuted gays in Communist Germany.

A collector of phonographs, antiques, and castaway keys, von Mahlsdorf was also the proprietress of a clandestine gay bar in her basement and sex club in her attic. Wright wrote a paean to this muse, staying loyal even when declassified files from the Stasi—the secret police—proved that von Mahlsdorf avoided prison by informing on her friends and lovers. This was a big deal: By the late '90s, von Mahlsdorf had become a folk hero and her collaboration with the Stasi a national controversy. (The writing in I Am My Own Wife only flounders here, as Wright tries to relate the facts while absolving her and telling us how he feels about it. Cutting the last third of that equation would've helped.)

In 2004, I Am My Own Wife won the triple crown of American theater awards—the Pulitzer, the Tony, and the Drama Desk—and, last year, ArtsWest and Seattle Rep had a brief struggle over who had secured the rights to the play for this season. ArtsWest won.

A two-hour solo show, I Am My Own Wife is an endurance contest, and local actor Nick DeSantis pushes through the play like an ox. He never stumbles or shows a hint of flagging, but he doesn't ever achieve lightness and spontaneity, either. We can see him thinking his way through his lines—which is understandable, given their volume, but it never lets us forget that we're sitting in a theater. BRENDAN KILEY

Spokesong
Seattle Public Theater
Through June 8.

The least painful way for a play to fail is to be bad in the beginning and the end and incredibly interesting in the middle. That way, you're not mucking through a dull production for a fantastic payoff, and you're not let down by a brilliant start to average proceedings. Spokesong's middle stretch is a smooth, funny, and charming ride, but the introduction and conclusion are specious.

Frank Stock (Daniel Flint, solid and satisfying) owns a Belfast bicycle shop that's due to be destroyed to make room for more roads. Frank's monkish devotion to his trade is interrupted by a woman named Daisy (Tracy Repep, sweet and endearing) whose car has just died. Frank immediately falls in love with Daisy, proposing marriage a half-dozen times or so before they even become friends. Because she's a history teacher, he tells her the history of bicycles in an entertaining monologue. But as soon as she's gone, he's sniffing her bike seat, blissfully unaware of exactly how creepy this is.

The IRA is blowing up car bombs everywhere—this is Northern Ireland, after all, as every overpronunciation of "about" as "abite" awkwardly reminds us—and the city seems hopeless. To keep things from getting too dour, airy musical numbers about bikes interrupt the history lessons, and Mark Fullerton, playing guitar and slide whistle in a variety of supporting roles, does the lion's share of making the songs entertaining by bringing some much-needed humor to the stage. This works well in the aforementioned sweet spot in the center. But the characters are too precious from the beginning, and a series of concluding monologues by each of them about "a hise divided" and other lofty clichés goes on for way too long. PAUL CONSTANT