Capturing the Artifact (An Editor's
Note)
By Jonathan Kalb
I Am My Own Wife
By Doug Wright
Playwrights Horizons
I have now read half a dozen admiring reviews
of Doug Wright's I Am My Own Wife, all of them acute, persuasive,
and intelligent (including the two published on HotReview.org),
but none has mentioned what seems to me one central aspect of the play's
power and appeal: that it plays out a wonderfully ambiguous twist on
the genre of docudrama.
Consider this work as a theatrical counterpart
to the film Capturing the Friedmans, Andrew Jarecki's richly
disturbing documentary about a family destroyed by accusations of child-molesting.
Both Jarecki and Wright deal with subjects readily condemned by others
(Wright's focus is the famous East German transvestite Charlotte von
Mahlsdorf, who was also a Stasi informer), and both share a deep appreciation
of studied indeterminacy. That appreciation is why questions about polemicism
swirl around each artist, ultimately dissipating for lack of evidence
either way. I Am My Own Wife may be a brilliant solo performance
by Jefferson Mays, a fascinating portrait of gay survivalism, and a
moving self-exploration by Wright--all of which has been said--but it
is also a peculiar documentary "trial" of sorts in which the playwright
turns out to be ambivalent about submitting his suspect to our judgement.
To imply in the end, as Wright does, that Charlotte
is to be treasured primarily as a walking museum (largely because she
runs a museum of old furniture and furnishings, and is something of
an antique herself) simply won't do. Too much evidence about possible
untruths and half-truths has been presented by then for us to dismiss
it, and such factual tidbits are always mildly alluring, if not titillating,
in the information age. Moreover, the playwright has already protested
too much about not judging his subject: "I've no right to sit
in judgement," says Mays, speaking in Wright's voice. The effect of
this remark is to ensure that the genie of judgement will never go back
in the bottle, no matter what is said. It's as if part of Wright thought
he had written a neatly self-referential play about writing a play on
a difficult historical subject, but another part knew he had written
a messily ambiguous report on his own strenuous efforts to withhold
judgement as a researcher and playwright.
There are of course plenty of works that are
ruined by their authors' ambivalence, but this is one that was saved
by it, primarily because the play is built on impersonation. In a sense,
the drama itself is dressed in a sort of "drag." Its preoccupation with
judgement marks it as a moralizing project in the mold of Miller's The
Crucible, Bentley's Are You Now or Have You Ever Been?,
and Hochhuth's The Deputy, but its decided effort to blur the
line between victim and perpetrator marks it as a relativistic project
in the tradition of Kipphardt's In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer
and Anna Deavere Smith's Fires in the Mirror and Twilight:
Los Angeles, 1992. Which tendency is the heart and skin of the
play and which is its "costume"? That's just the undecidable point.
And perhaps this is part of what disturbed the
writer Alexis Greene, who remarked in her HotReview.org article
that she found Charlotte "fascinating, but veiled and not quite human"
and that "we rarely glimpse [her] soul." Being fully human, to Greene,
apparently means being morally accountable. Yet the humans who mean
the most to us, Wright seems to be saying, are not necessarily so accountable;
it's precisely there, in their unaccountability, that their humanness
resides. Hence Wright's quintessentially theatrical impulse to embody
such a person (or have Mays embody her) as meticulously as is humanly
possible.