When evil gets off too easily

NEW YORK, July 20 (UPI) -- To be a survivor is generally considered an admirable human trait, but to be a survivor at a cost to others is offensive enough to be called betrayal in its meanest manifestation.

Charlotte Von Mahlsdorf, who died last year, was a survivor in the negative sense of the word, having informed on even her closest friends in order to survive both Nazi and Communist efforts to wipe out homosexuality in Germany.

Charlotte was a gay transvestite, actually a man named Lothar Berfelde who chose to wear women's attire when he was a young adult. She claims to have clubbed her abusive father to death, been jailed, and escaped, although there is no actual historical proof of this.

Charlotte was celebrated for her eccentricity in pre-Nazi Germany and was creator of a Berlin museum of unusual bibelots, Gay '90s furniture, clocks, and Edison phonographs and phonographic recordings, in the basement of which she played hostess of a secret homosexual nightclub. She was often the subject of interviews about surviving the Nazi Gestapo and then the Stasi secret police in Communist East Berlin and starred in a documentary film about her life.

During a series of interviews with American dramatist Doug Wright in 1992-93 Charlotte admitted ratting on her friends to escape arrest and this admission later became widely publicized, possibly forcing her decision to move to Sweden to live out her final years. Wright was inspired to write a one-man play about Charlotte titled "I Am My Own Wife," currently playing at the Playwrights Horizons' new theater on 42nd Street and starring Jefferson Mays.

Mays, a tall, slim 38-year old actor, is brilliant in his characterization of the 65-year-old Charlotte and dozens of other characters connected with her story including Wright, wearing a severe, almost nun-like black dress and head kerchief and a single strand of pearls. It is one of the tour-de-force performances of the theatrical year.

Wright is a justly acclaimed playwright whose screen adaptation of his drama, "Quills," based on an episode in the life of the notorious Marquis de Sade, was nominated for three 2001 Academy Awards and named Best Picture by the National Board of Review. "I Am My Own Wife" is a skillfully written, highly polished work for the stage that unfortunately bears the awful weight of an unpleasant subject.

Although Wright obviously admires Charlotte and tends to sentimentalize some of the morally dubious episodes in her bizarre career, he does put what is objectionable about the play in the mouth of one of the several characters portrayed by Mays - a friend of Charlotte's named Josef Rudiger who spent two years in a Commnist prison for deviant behavior.

Rudiger says: "They dislocated my shoulders from my sockets: they forced a catheter up my urinary tract and filled it with alcohol. And still, I uttered no one's name but my own. Complicity in this country should always be treated as a criminal act. Hasn't the 20th century taught us that much?"

It is difficult not to leave the theater depressed and confused by "I Am My Own Wife," because one feels Wright has attempted to make a hero (heroine?) out of Charlotte just for staying alive. That she never expresses any deep sense of remorse or guilt for what she has done is unconscionable on her part and on the part of the playwright, in this critic's opinion.

The play describes Charlotte as "the most singular, eccentric individual the Cold War ever birthed," and that alone should make her a worthy subject for a play imbued with promise of uplifting an audience. Eccentricity is always worth nurturing if it is creative, but in Charlotte's case it is not worth all the suffering her magnified sense of self-preservation caused when she agreed - by her own admission - to work as a secret agent for the Stasi.

Director-dramatist Moises Kaufman has directed the production with great simplicity, and Derek Pytel's museum setting consists of an intriguing mélange of old furniture and phonographs dramatically lit by David Lander. Charlotte's demure costume was designed by Janice Pytel. Sound accompaniment, including old recordings, is the creation of Andre J. Pluess and Ben Sussman.