The Daily Progress, Charlottesville, Va., Tristan Lejeune Column: ?Wife’ a Marriage of Fine Acting, Writing

By Tristan Lejeune, The Daily Progress, Charlottesville, Va.

Jun. 23–One-man shows are risky business. Not only are you putting all of your eggs in one basket (if your one man sucks, the whole thing falls apart), but you’re automatically limiting your range too — there are lots of things any given person just cannot do alone.

But the Heritage Theatre Festival’s production of “I Am My Own Wife,” going on at the Helms Theatre until June 28, turns its single-ularity into its greatest strength.

Not only is its one man a very good one (Malcolm Tulip can hold the stage with just a small smile), but the play’s messages on the scars and subjectivity of history make all the more sense when filtered through one adroit performer.

“Wife,” which is directed with both maturity and amusement by Gillian Eaton, tells the true story of Lothar Berfelde, aka Charlotte von Mahsldorf, a German transvestite and collector of antiquities who miraculously survived a violent, patricidal childhood, the hells of the Nazi regime and Soviet bombings and, perhaps worst of all, the dangers and oppressions of decades under East German paranoia.

Tulip plays some 30-odd characters in the telling of the tale, including Charlotte herself, as well as playwright Doug Wright during the investigations that led to this script.

When Wright first finds Charlotte she seems not only to have survived her perilous life, but thrived in it — the emotional and psychological damage doesn’t show at first glance.

Not to mention that for an antiquer, she’s done quite well for herself. The physical backdrop, like Tulip’s performance in front of it, is the very best kind of cluttered.

Full marks to scenic designer Sara Ward, whose sumptuous work blends the line between set and prop. The stage is covered with old chairs, battered luggage, motionless clocks, silent musical instruments, bird cages both gilded and un-, books, pictures — it’s not just eye candy, it’s a hearty, wholesome eye meal, and Tulip serves it up with aplomb, showing theatergoers the dusty, battered fragments that make up a life.

Right around the act break it comes to light that Charlotte was a Stasi informer and may have even sent a close friend to prison.

Writer Wright and director Eaton gently point out the hypocrisy of a world that admires survival but sneers at what surviving sometimes requires, and all the while Tulip has a harder and harder time raising poor Charlotte’s eyes.

The actor doesn’t so much “leap” from character to character (that would be disjointing and tiring) as simply breathe one out and the next one in, letting each fill him for as long as is required, then gracefully moving on.

His is the kind of sympathetic, measured turn any real-life persona should be grateful to have embody him or her.

At play’s end — to loud, enthusiastic applause — Tulip, to acknowledge the breadth of actual humanity he has portayed, takes a bow and then a curtsy. He deserves both.

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