Let God and man decree
–A.E. Housman, Last Poems
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Charlotte was the quintessential survivor. According to her book, she beat her abusive father to death with a kitchen utensil in an act of “preventive self-defense.” She made it through air raids, deportations, jail, Nazi oppression, the ruin of Berlin by Russian invaders, and the tyranny of communism. She lived openly as a “sexual intermediary,” thanks in large part to the childhood influence of a cross-dressing lesbian aunt who shared with Charlotte her hidden copy of Die Transvestit, by the Alfred Kinsey of his day, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld. (His groundbreaking archives were destroyed when the Nazis came to power, and Hirschfeld died in exile.) With the approval of the East German government, Charlotte established the Grunderzeit Museum, a mansion furnished a la 1900. In the basement was a replication of the Mulackritze, a Weimar-era cabaret and sex club once patronized by Marlene Dietrich and Bertolt Brecht. In 1992, after the reunification of Germany, Charlotte was awarded the state’s Order of Merit for her work as a cultural conservator, and her memoir ends on a triumphant note: “I am an optimist. I believe in the triumph of goodness even if it is sometimes slow in coming.”
Kaufman and Wright have demonstrated in past work their fascination with enigmatic figures on the edges of homosexual life. Wright’s Quills dramatized the imprisonment of the Marquis de Sade; Kaufman’s credits as a writer-director include Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde and The Laramie Project, an exploration of the 1998 murder of gay college student Matthew Shepard and its aftermath. All three works cut through cliches and the usual presumptions. In Wright’s account de Sade–a philosopher and proselytizer for individual rights as well as a sexual torturer–is as much martyr as madman, and Kaufman ruminates on the extent to which Wilde and Shepard recklessly brought their tragedies upon themselves. As in Gross Indecency, produced by Court Theatre in 1998, the issue in I Am My Own Wife is not “truth” or “lies” but conflicting truths. If Charlotte did indeed have a sordid past as an informer, why call attention to herself with a book? And why would she collaborate with Wright, giving extensive interviews for a stage biography? Was she a true innocent, a harmless old tranny granny, or a conscienceless collaborator determined to survive at the cost of others’ lives? Or was she mentally ill, as one psychiatrist opines in the play, spinning her tales as “reassurance to the chaos in her psyche”?
Where: Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn
