I Am My Own Wife Review

8/17/2019 I Am My Own Wife Review

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Access provided by University of Puerto Rico (10 May 2016 14:29 GMT)

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/49949https://muse.jhu.edu/article/49949


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heterogeneous group in terms of their obsessions,paranoias, tragedies, bodily perversions, and psy-chic tics. Do Asian Americans want “ big boobs, bigdicks, big noses, and big eyes” so that they can lookmore like white people (or white porn stars)? Sosuggest three men in bikinis, imitating the Chinesewomen’s swim team, as they chant these enhance-ments in their advertisement for a plastic surgeryclinic. Or are they more concerned with unravelinghistories of imperialism and neocolonialism in Asia,as tackled in three connected sketches, written byMichael Premsrirat, about a mythical SoutheastAsian island called Sukiprata, populated by eroti-cized “Amphiberasian” men whose way of life isthreatened by 50,000 Chinese settlers who’ve cometo set up banks?

The most conventionally activist sketch—in termsof U.S. racial politics—features a “Mr. Wright”giving a citizenship test to an Asian Americanplayed by one of the group’s principal writer-actors, Michael Chih Ming Hornbuckle, who walksinto Mr. Wright’s of fice. The citizenship candidateinsistently calls Mr. Wright “Mr. White!” andlaunches into mini-lectures in response to multiple-choice questions on the discovery of America(“America was never discovered it was conquered!”)and the Bill of Rights (“the right to bears arms andkill others is America’s most cherished value!”).

At the same time, the humor of the 18MMW isnot predominantly aimed at such rituals of citizen-ship that af firm white supremacy under the guiseof patriotic duty. For instance, the opening en-semble routine, “ John Woo’s Easter Family Din-ner,” is a fabulously funny genre parody in thestyle of the celebrated Hong Kong filmmaker. Thesketch imagines what would happen if the blinddaughter of a Chinese family brought home herfiancé, and he turned out to be the mortal enemy of her two brothers. Peppered with topical references(the main course at dinner is “freedom falafel,”

with mama claiming she got the recipe off Fox), thesketch nonetheless relies primarily on physicalhumor: the three male principals (Hornbuckle, GregWatanabe, and Harold Byun) morph into gangstashiding their guns from mom and sis as they traintheir muzzles on each other, and negotiate theimpossibility of holding two pistols each whiletrying to eat falafel (and Asian men just can’t resiststeaming food placed in front of their noses).

With influences ranging from Monty Python toCulture Clash, the 18MMW’s self-described mis-

sion is to educate, to teach about the absurdity of Asian stereotypes and the intra-ethnic rivalriesamong Asians themselves. In “World Cup 2002,”

one representative each from the Japanese andKorean teams meets with a soccer of ficial. The two

national representatives wave flags that get mas-sively larger and trade insults having to do withhistories of conquest and military occupation: “ Ja-pan ruled Korea for thirty-eight years. ClearlyKorea is inferior to Japan” versus “ Japan thinksother people are inferior. That’s what the Nazisthought, and they lost the war, kabooooom!”

While the 18MMW make it a point to ask foraudience feedback (you can vote for your favoritesketch), their sensitivity to what the audience mostlikes—though admirable—may also be their great-est shortcoming. Though greatest hits would seemto guarantee a sure-fire success, the lingering ques-tion remains—can audience voting produce a pro-gram with coherence and lasting vision? The18MMW, without question, are a talented writing

and performing group, and their material seemsdeep enough to generate multiple programs of over an hour’s length. So the lingering question is,why these sketches in this order, at this time inhistory in this location? Though this question is notsuf ficiently addressed in terms of Psycho Karaokeitself, a tentative answer might be found in thegroup’s own performance history. In October 2001,a mere month after September 11, the 18MMWstaged a more sustained program on the subject of activism, called Fifty-Two Percent, that alluded to

both real events (the World Trade Center blowing

up) and fictional ones (a plan to assassinate GeorgeW. Bush). If the 18MMW are not ones to shy awayfrom subjects thought by others as too “raw” tolampoon, then what might account for the lesssustained activist vision of the April 2003 produc-tion? Perhaps we might see Psycho Karaoke itself asan index of the times. If these things can be com-pared, comic political dissent after September 11appeared both daring and unique; with the currentreplay of (a) Bush’s war for oil, current eventsappear both more absurd and more tediously un-funny, even when transformed by such funny men

and women as the 18MMW.RACHEL C. LEE

University of California, Los Angeles

I AM MY OWN WIFE. By Doug Wright. Play- wrights Horizons, New York City. 14 June2003.

I Am My Own Wife is a two-act documentaryplay detailing the startling life of Charlotte vonMahlsdorf, an East Berlin furniture collector andtransvestite who survived both the Nazi and com-


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Project reenact verbatim interview and press tran-scripts. While Kaufman’s texts feature several ac-tors in multiple roles, Wright set Wife as a one-person show, echoing Anna Deavere Smith’s solodocu-dramas as well.

The extraordinarily talented Jefferson Mays(Quills) plays Charlotte, her aunt, her peers, Nazis,DDR secret policemen, U.S. soldiers, reporters,Doug Wright himself, and thirty or so other fig-ures. Apart from costume addition, Mays remainedin Charlotte’s dress and headscarf, his imperson-ations faultlessly convincing, and his transitions

between characters, genders, and nationalities swift,distinct, and crisp. Mays was lucky, as he relates, inhaving access to Charlotte tapes. His rendition of Charlotte’s voice is deeply moving and lyrical.

Wright left intact Charlotte’s frequent slips fromEnglish back to German. Yet, even for non-Germanspeakers these moments are comprehensible. Theyreinforce the sense that, while non-mainstream,tortured, and reviled, Charlotte—working to pre-serve the beauty of her culture’s past—is thor-oughly, traditionally German. Mays’s performanceas Doug is compellingly self-deprecating, awk-ward and na ï ve, and his more fleeting roles—atalk-show host, a surfer-dude U.S. infantryman, afey, hair-tossing youth—are spot-on and seamless.

Working to maximum effect, Derek McLane’s setis ingenious. The main playing space, Charlotte’smuseum parlor, is delimited by a scrimmed wall of fussy white lace. Behind, floor to ceiling, are ware-house shelves packed with period bric-a-brac. Ahouse tour is metonymically enacted, within theparlor space, through a dollhouse furniture ar-rangement. A cabaret scene is suggested whenwarm-hued table lamps, unseen in the dark ware-house racks, are gradually illuminated. Clocks, thefocus of a subplot, similarly emerge when gentlylit. Beyond a very slight set alteration between acts,no change takes place. This alchemical design,

pleasing in its self-containment, also mirrors thisone-actor play’s motif of self-transformation.

The gripping first act begins with Charlotte’sfamily background and ends with the Nazi period.The second act, detailing a scandal—late in life,Charlotte was accused of having informed on afriend to the DDR secret police—while compelling,is weaker. Charlotte’s own narrative is over-whelmed by depiction of the media circus sur-rounding her, Wright’s disillusion with her, and—above all—a moral dilemma: was Charlotte von

Mahlsdorf, queer icon, a bad person?

Kaufman’s direction is strong in most instances:a moment where Mays becomes at once a tele-phone answering machine, its owner, and Doug,

Jefferson Mays as Charlotte von Marlsdorf inI Am My Own Wife. Photo: Joan Marcus.

munist periods. Born Lothar Berfelde to a brutalNazi father, but supported by a cross-genderedaunt, he lived as a woman from his teens on.Adopting antique furniture, largely from Jewsforced from Berlin, Charlotte ran a museum, aswell as a clandestine cabaret, through both re-gimes. Accused at a late age of collaboration withthe East German secret police, she spent her lastyears self-exiled to Sweden, passing away last year.

American playwright Doug Wright (Quills) trav-eled back and forth to Berlin from the early 1990sthrough the end of Charlotte’s life, accumulating atreasure of interview tapes in her rich, thicklyaccented voice. Wright recounts the failure of hisinitial attempts to transform the interviews into aMasterpiece Theatre-style dramatization. However,

he subsequently adopted the docu-drama works of Moisés Kaufman as his model. Both Gross Inde-cency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde and The Laramie


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speaking on it, is delightful. Kaufman’s choice toinclude moments of the real tapes themselves atthe play’s end is breathtaking. However, Kaufman’shand in Wright’s text detracts as well. Charlotte,like the Wilde of Gross Indecency, is beset by pressconflict; lionized as a queer icon, Charlotte, likeWilde, may also have lied. As with the case of Matthew Shepard in Kaufman’s The Laramie Project,Charlotte is exploited by a spectacle-hungry media.Doug, the character of playwright Douglas Wright,struggles with divided feelings toward his subject,as did Kaufman’s Laramie actors, when sent to thesite to investigate. Gross Indecency, Laramie, andWife each begin with explicatory reportage and endwith moral dilemmas for author and audiencealike. They all conclude with gestures toward de-termined indecision: Wilde cannot be judged bytoday’s more enlightened standards; the people of Laramie, while often ignorant, mainly mean well;Charlotte may have had human flaws, but wecannot really judge. When a bit of queer history ora moral lesson is conveyed, Mays’s pace slows andhis diction intensifies, seemingly to prevent theaudience from missing it. Kaufman’s characteristictone is skewered in Jeff Witty’s ( Avenue Q) recentThe Plank Project, a Laramie send-up. In Plank , actorsresembling Kaufman and his team of actors inter-view rural community members about an 1,100-pound transvestite who has fallen down a well.

Plank mocks Kaufman’s play as self-aggrandizing,over-earnest, and pedantic. The second act of Wife,at fleeting moments, also suggests a Kaufmanparody.

Kaufman’s pursuit of objective documentarytruth-making shortchanges his subjects and countershis expressed multi-perspective post-structuralaims. Kaufman’s reduction of richly-textured expe-rience to facile ethical debate—all too common inpolitically-oriented theatre today—mars I Am MyOwn Wife, an otherwise outstanding performance

and play.S.I. SALAMENSKY

University of California, Los Angeles

such small hands. By Tina Howe. SyracuseStage, Syracuse, New York. 20 May 2003.

The world premiere of Tina Howe’s such smallhands reflected the dramatist’s continued medita-tion on the dynamics between mothers and chil-dren. Syracuse Stage commissioned such small hands

for Tony award-winning actor Elizabeth Franz,who played the roles of two sisters in this one-person show directed by Robert Moss. Its titletaken from an e.e. cummings poem, the play’s firstact revolves around a documentarian, Cassandra,who returns to her deceased mother’s studio to

begin recording her memories of her mother; whilethe second act addresses the memories of Cas-sandra’s sister, Lucy, a house-painter. Both charac-ters struggle with memories of which child theirvolatile mother favored the most and the impact of their mother’s art on their careers and personallives.

In the tradition of other plays by Howe such as Approaching Zanzibar, Painting Churches, and Birth After Birth, such small hands focuses on the relation-

ships between parents and children. Perhaps mostreminiscent of Painting Churches in terms of a poetfather, an overbearing mother, and an artist child,such small hands takes a darker look at the woundsinflicted upon adolescents by their parents. Cassan-dra and Lucy’s mother frequently exiles them whenthey do not meet her standards of behavior andappearance. Lucy recalls appearing before hermother in eclectic attire for church and being toldthat she was “an absolute fright, like a deformedfetus floating in a jar.” Howe weaves themes of sight and perception throughout the play—the

artistic visions of the artist-mother, the manner inwhich the sisters perceive their mother and them-selves, the lens through which the mother viewsher daughters, and, of course, the hindsight of boththe loved child and the less-loved child. Ironically,

before her death, the girls’ mother goes blind;“seeing was somehow beside the point,” but Lucylearns that she can be herself while reminding theaudience “all you have to do is look.” While overlysentimental at points, such small hands adeptlynavigates the waters of metaphor and lyricism inits portrait of the bonds— both broken and strength-

ened—

between a mother and her daughters. In Act 1, Franz walked onstage as Cassandra

with perfectly coiffed thick hair, dressed in anopalescent beige suit, lavender scarf, pumps, andtasteful jewelry—the aesthetic epitome of success.In Act 2, on the other hand, Franz appeared asLucy with thinning hair, dressed in a red turtle-neck, paint-splattered denim overalls, a flannelshirt, socks, and sandals—an earthy mother figure,the polar opposite of Cassandra. The women existin two different worlds—Cassandra has workedthrough three marriages and has no children while

Lucy married once and enjoys her large family of children and grandchildren. Cassandra’s documen-tary provides both women with an opportunity tocome to terms with their turbulent childhood and

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