"I Am My Own Wife"...

is bloody brilliant! If you have the opportunity, it is crucial that you see it. A lot of the time, theatre is (especially commercial theatre) worn down to the lowest common denominator in order to make it most accessible for an audience. This play on the other hand is different and gets it's audience in that difference. It reels the audience in, seemingly jumping up and down yelling, "I have a story to tell about a person, a time, and a place. Shut the fuck up, attention must be paid!" I don't think I've ever sat in an auditorium so still. There was no talking, no ringing, shuffling, or rustling; all attention was devoted to the breathtaking performance on stage. It really was an awesome experience.

In I Am My Own Wife, there is one actor who, with only a change of voice, posture, tone, plays many different characters-all fully. Centrally, it's the memoir, as told to the playwrite, of an East-German transvestite who lived openly as a cross-dressing gay man through the Nazi and Soviet regimes. Her story is very compelling-but equally compelling is the story-telling.

Since coming to London I've developed a bit of a love for languages. Language groups, their relationships, histories and...stories are incredibly interesting to me right now. In the case of this play, a lot of the "dialogue" takes place in English and German. While Doug Wright was careful to make sure the English-only audience never felt lost, his translations were always sort-of semi-translations. Thankfully my broken German got me through and, as evidenced by my solo laughter, I think I got a lot more than most people there. I even understood a couple German puns! Here's an example of the delicate blend of language and part of why I find myself fascinated by them: Early on, the author is interviewing Charlotte about the museum she curates. It's becoming clear that she is more interesting than her things tough and that she is, in fact, the more important museum. She tells him, "It was during the Nazi raids, I became this house." Easy for most people but they perhaps think the playwrite is pushing a bit for the metaphor. In fact though, it's brilliant. In German, the verb, 'to get' is 'bekommen' and the in simple past tense, 'bekam'. The poetry of how the sentence was created in all it's depth and simplicity stayed with me the whole show and added more than if I thought she merely talked funny. Umm...sorry bout that.

Anyway, Jefferson Mays, as the cast, was fully deserving of his Tony. He's astounding vocally (he switches between accents with amazing ease-Boston, old German woman/man, Southern American man speaking German and English, Russian, Japanese, Indian, British, etc.) and physically. Every little thing he did was full of his thought and had a meaning. Without the cliche one-person-talks-back-and-forth-by-switching-sides routine, he simply changed a crucial gesture and the audience understood.

Anyway, sorry about the school report/gush nature of this post. Moral of this story: see this play.