BWW Reviews: Truth Transcending Mere Facts: I AM MY OWN WIFE at
The REP   A one-man show, it is a tour-de-force for both the
playwright, who appears as a character confronting the issues he
wants his audience to consider, and the play's solo performer,
called upon to play between thirty and forty roles. I am
speaking, of course, of Doug Wright's I Am My Own Wife, the 2004
Tony Award-winner for Best Play, now in perhaps its third
Maryland revival at the REP in Columbia, with Michael Stebbins,
holding down the Walt Whitmanesque job of containing multitudes.
Briefly, the play recounts two stories. One is that of Charlotte
von Mahlsdorf, transvestite, antiquarian, and curator of a
museum preserving, among other things, memorabilia of Berlin's
homosexual underground from the Nazi era through the Communist
one. The other is that of Wright, who interviews von Mahlsdorf,
becomes her partisan while trying to build a play around those
interviews, and then is forced to confront his subject's
unreliability as a witness