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
