Student Chooses Pulitzer Prize-Winning Drama For Distinction Project
I Am My Own Wife - Sheafer Theater/West Campus, Nov. 30-Dec. 2 at 8 pm, Dec. 2-3 at 2 pm
Tickets are $5 general admission, $3 students and seniors and will be sold at the door.Trinity senior Michael Ayers was attracted to the idea of doing a senior honors project when he acted in Amit Mahtaney's (T '05) honors project his sophomore year. Mahtaney directed an Ibsen play, Ghosts , and Ayers auditioned for the play and was cast, so he saw from the inside what a distinction project entailed.
Ayers decided he would like to act in a one-man show, so he went to Theater Studies Department chair John Clum and asked for suggestions. Out of all the play titles tossed out, Ayers chose I Am My Own Wife , playwright Doug Wright's winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Ayers will perform November 30 - December 3 in Sheafer Theater.
While a one-man show might imply a one-character show, I Am My Own Wife is actually a 35-character show. It is the story of transvestite Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, born Lothar Berfelde (1928-2002), a German biological male who dressed as a woman and survived both the Nazis and the Communists in East Germany with wit, courage, and determination.
"Acting in a show with 35 characters is the ultimate display case for what I've learned over four years studying theater at Duke," says Ayers. "There is very little costume change, so I will have to be 35 distinct people with just voice and gesture."
Ayers is working with his voice teacher Wayne Lail from the Music Department for diction and dialect coaching and with Theater Studies professor Rafael Lopez-Barrantes, who specializes in body work. Jay O'Berski from the Theater Studies faculty will direct Ayers, and fellow-student Hillary Norman (T '07) is providing set and costume design.
Von Mahlsdorf is the main character in the play of course, but playwright Doug Wright makes himself a character as well. "Putting himself in the play serves a very useful purpose," Ayers explains. "The playwright poses many of the same questions of the very complex von Mahlsdorf that the audience might be asking themselves."
Wright got to know von Mahlsdorf as he interviewed her between 1992 and 1994. His play is a lightly fictionalized retelling of von Mahlsdorf's life based on those interviews as well as letters and the public record.
He found that von Mahlsdorf was the daughter of a wife-beating Nazi, but she had a perceptive and understanding aunt who dressed as a man and told her, "Nature has played a trick on us." Her aunt introduced her to the work of Magnus Hirschfeld, a physician who pioneered the study of sexuality in the early 20th century, who said that transvestitism was a "common, utterly natural phenomenon."Wright depicts von Mahlsdorf as a survivor who did what she thought she had to do to make it through some of the darkest, most repressive times in modern history.
Critics have noted that the genius of Wright is in presenting von Mahlsdorf as a fully developed subtle character with charm, intelligence, and imperfections and not merely as a two-dimensional curiosity.
It is obvious Wright admires his subject, when he relates near the end of the play "that Lothar Berfelde [von Mahlsdorf's birth name] navigated a path between the two most repressive regimes the Western World has ever known - the Nazis and the Communists - in a pair of heels."
Ayers is busy getting to know his 35 characters, and as he meets the tremendous challenge of inhabiting 35 different personalities, he says he has no misgivings about choosing such an ambitious project. "If it weren't daunting, it wouldn't be worthy of a senior distinction project," he says.
I Am My Own Wife , Nov. 30 - Dec. 2 at 8 pm and Dec. 2 and 3 at 2 pm, Sheafer Theater, Bryan Center, West Campus. Tickets will be sold at the door only.
www.duke.edu/web/theaterstudies for play information.
###
