I Am My Own Wife

×

Expand

The Justice Theater Project

Brian Westbrook in I Am My Own Wife

It took some daring for museum curator Charlotte von Mahlsdorf to reconstruct and preserve the last Weimar cabaret, Die Mulack-Ritze, in the basement of her Gründerzeitmuseum after the gay bar’s 1963 demolition at the order of East German authorities. But far more courageous was her fifty-year sojourn, from the 1940s through the 1980s, as a self-identified transvestite in East Berlin. She somehow managed to live through two of history’s most oppressive, gay-persecuting regimes, the Third Reich and the German Democratic Republic that followed it. When playwright Doug Wright first visited von Mahlsdorf in 1992, he concluded that she didn’t run a museum; she was one: a living chronicle of untold stories in gay history behind enemy lines. His subsequent interviews and research—including in Stasi intelligence files—resulted in this Pulitzer- and Tony-winning 2004 biographical play. Brian Westbrook takes on this rarely seen one-person show in an enhanced staged reading—fully embodied, with costumes and set—for Justice Theater Project. Jackson Cooper directs. Various Times. —Byron Woods.