I Am My Own Wife, Program Notes
Playwright Doug Wright worked on both his Pulitzer Prize–winning play I Am My Own Wife and the current Broadway hit musical Grey Gardens during residencies at Peterborough’s MacDowell Colony. I Am My Own Wife examines the real-life character, Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, who was born Lothar Berfelde on March 18, 1928 in Berlin. "Lothar" became "Lottchen" and then “Charlotte” in a life that spanned Weimar decadence, the Nazi horror, and the subsequent 40 years of communism in East Berlin. Charlotte survived all of it living openly as a transvestite running a museum she had founded filled with 19th century German furniture, artifacts and musical instruments, all of dubious provenance. Berlin’s beloved Charlotte enjoyed cult status and cut a grandmotherly figure with embroidered skirts, pearl necklaces, neat silver hair and a winning smile. In 1991, two years after the Berlin Wall fell, a neo-Nazi attack on her museum, left several people injured and a disheartened Charlotte considered leaving Germany. Viewed as a cultural ambassador, Berlin honored her with the "Verdienstkreuz," Germany's highest civil award, in 1993. But in fact she moved to Sweden in 1997, once again opening a museum. Charlotte died from heart failure during a return visit to Berlin in April 2002.
The play, I Am My Own Wife premiered Off-Broadway in 2003 at Playwrights Horizons. It opened on Broadway later that year and won the Tony Award for Best Play, the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play and the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
Wright created the play from several sources: interviews he conducted with Charlotte over six-months in the early 90s, letters he exchanged with her until her death in 2002, newspaper stories and knowledge sifted from her "Stasi" East German Secret Service file. Actor Todd Almond returns to Peterborough to play Charlotte and the nearly 40 other characters in the story of one unlikely and fascinating human being.
The Peterborough Players present I Am My Own Wife and Thornton Wilder’s The Long Christmas Dinner as part of the MacDowell’s 100th Anniversary celebration. My adaptation of A Doll House also happily fits the category of “MacDowell work”. I first came to Peterborough in 1983 as a Colony Fellow. It remains one of the best experiences of my artistic life. The MacDowell is the ne plus ultra of artist colonies. Daily breakfast and dinner in the company of twenty plus artists of the highest caliber, whose conversation, creativity and wit fed my soul and my work, and in-between mealtimes, ten hours of sacred, guaranteed-to-be-uninterrupted work time—the only stress: beating the squirrel to the lunch basket the staff would leave quietly outside the studio door.
Doug Wright on the MacDowell Colony:
“They have all these little studios spread out across the beautiful New Hampshire woods. I was in a gorgeous little cabin, and every day they delivered my lunch and they delivered some firewood. I’d make a little fire in my fireplace and I’d go to work.
“There was this quiet aura of industry about the place. You never felt obligated to work, and yet you knew the time was so rare and the surroundings were so lush that you had better seize the moment and produce something. I found it an extraordinarily muse-friendly spot.”
“They have these wonderful ‘tombstones’ on the wall, and everyone who has been in your studio or cabin previously inscribes them before leaving. You find, (artists) like Aaron Copland, these titanic figures from the history of American arts and letters. So if you’re lacking inspiration, you just have to peruse the walls.”
The founder of the Players, Edith Bond Stearns, first came to Peterborough in the 1920s for the dedication of the main building at the MacDowell, Bond Hall, named for her father. A few years later in 1933 Mrs. MacDowell encouraged Mrs. Stearns to open the Players. Congratulations to our vibrant centenarian neighbor from its grateful younger sibling.
