Seven Oaks Magazine.

It’s difficult to imagine any constituency of thinking people that wouldn’t be completely captivated by the Vancouver Playhouse’s current production of award-winning playwright Doug Wright’s I Am My Own Wife. Those with any interest whatsoever in biography, history, historiography, queer issues, Nazism, cabaret culture, museum curation, ethics, antiques, black market smuggling, patricide, morality and/or transvestites will be held completely in the thrall of this breathtaking narrative – and if, by chance, one happens to fall outside the purview of any of those intellectual or philosophical catchments, they will still, surely, be taken captive by the masterful storytelling at work here.

I Am Wife Own Wife is primarily the story of Berliner Lothar Berfelde/Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, an obsessive collector of items from the Weimar and Grunderzeit periods of German history and design as well as an openly gay transvestite who managed to survive as such during both the Nazi and Stalinist eras of her city’s history. It is also, though, the story of Doug Wright, a gay American playwright from the Bible Belt, inspired and, initially, intoxicated by Charlotte’s courageous story of survival. As the details of that story come to light, however – and as the extent of the questionable compromises that Charlotte made in order to make her survival possible become clearer – Wright becomes torn as to how to present his protagonist.

There are thirty-five characters in this play, spanning the Second World War as well as the Cold War, plus several nationalities and genders; naturally, then, I Am My Own Wife is a one-person show. Tom Rooney is the performer who makes all this possible (at one point playing interviewer, interviewee and translator) and – opening night stumbles notwithstanding – he is incredible; funny, heartbreaking and always engaging, much like Pamela Gien, the auteur of the one-person Syringa Tree which opened this season at the Playhouse.

It’s best to let Lothar/Charlotte’s story unfold as told by she and Wright, slowly and, sometimes, with purposeful inconsistency and surprises. This is a stunning portrait of those who live on social frontiers; the borderlands between male and female, totalitarianism and libertinism, storyteller and historian, honest biographer and hagiographer, hero and informant.