‘I Am My Own Wife’ @ Theatre Too
Photography by Linda Blase
—Martha Heimberg
Is history stranger than fiction? Check out Blake Hackler’s electric performance as 34 people in the current one-man show at Theater Too, Theatre Three’s intimate basement space.
Charlotte von Mahlsdorf (born Lothar Berfelde, 1928-2002) was a Jewish man living as a woman in East Berlin right up to the collapse of the Berlin Wall. She operated a museum packed with an eclectic collection of antique clocks and rare gramophones in her own huge house. She also moved an entire gay cabaret into her basement when the bar venue was threatened with destruction.
In Doug Wright’s I Am My Own Wife, winner of both a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award for Best Play when it opened on Broadway in 2003, Charlotte tells the audience what it took to survive as a transvestite — as she proudly calls herself — through the terrors of Nazi Germany. Wright based the play on his extensive interviews with an articulate and unapologetic Charlotte near the end of her life. His portrait of Charlotte also includes extensive research in records and newspapers of the time, which often test the veracity of Charlotte’s recollection of just how she got her hands on rare heirlooms clearly taken from the homes of Jewish prisoners of war.
Charlotte and Doug (the playwright himself) are just two of the nearly three dozen characters who tell her story.
Directed with smooth cadence and nuance by Garret Storms, the play stays clearly focused on its remarkable subject. Blake Hackler in a black dress, accessorized with a string of pearls and sturdy shoes, plays everyone…and makes it look easy. Charismatic and tautly precise, Hackler has demonstrated more than once that he can upstage a children’s choir or Lassie simply by adjusting his posture.
Here, Blake’s Charlotte opens the two-hour, two-act show by pulling off all the dust sheets, revealing the statues and gold-framed portraits and glowing lamps in Gabrielle Malbrough’s posh set design. Charlotte smiles lovingly at each object, recalling how these treasures sustained her soul, living as a man in a dress in a murderously homophobic society.
Hackler’s voice tremblers when Charlotte recalls her abusive father, and then grows harsh as the father speaks, pulling on a military jacket and becoming a commanding officer.
I was totally drawn in by Charlotte as a young boy, trying on a pair of strappy red sandals and turning before a mirror in giddy delight. Charlotte’s transgender aunt encouraged him to be the woman inside. “You should have been born a woman, and I a man,” says the beloved aunt, who told Charlotte that the two of them were “sexual intermediaries,” ahead of their time.
Hackler shifts swiftly back and forth from Charlotte’s heavy German accent to Doug’s forthright American reporter’s voice, creating the sense of an actual dialogue. Many people shift voices a bit when telling a story about a child or grouchy old man, but this multi-voiced performance is a roomful of actors embodied in one actor. We all have a version of ourselves that grows and changes as we live in a rapidly changing world — and do our best to keep our memory of what happened aligned with reality. Like the gender fluidity portrayed in the play, both historical news accounts and individual stories of “what really happened” in the past vary with the source.
Charlotte’s sometimes gruesome and increasingly touching narration of her past, coupled with doubting Doug’s investigative approach to his subject makes for revealing theater. What emerges is the portrait of a courageous woman who, against all odds, not only survives on the page, but comes to life on the stage as a delightful, multifaceted human being who hugged tiger cubs as a boy, and faced down Hitler’s SS as a woman.
Kudos to the whole design team: lighting designer Caroline Hodge, projections designer Jeffrey Schmidt, costume designer Christie Vela, sound designer Claudia Jenkins Martinez and props designer Kennedy Smith.
WHEN: October 15-November 1, 2026
WHERE: T3, 2688 Laclede Street, Dallas (Theatre Too on lower level)
WEB: https://www.theatre3dallas.com/
