Doug Wright's remarkable play ''I Am My Own Wife," now happily but briefly at the Wilbur Theatre, gives the wonderful Jefferson Mays an actor's dream: the chance to transform himself, alone on the stage, into more than 40 characters. More profound and more rare, though, is the transformations it reveals in those characters, in their stories, and in their meanings to us and to themselves.
The play, which began as a small New York production, moved to Broadway, and went on to win both the Pulitzer and the Tony in 2004, draws on the life of a real person, an East German transvestite and collector named Charlotte von Mahlsdorf. Wright interviewed Charlotte (nee Lothar Berfelde) before her death in 2002; he also read press accounts of her life under both the Nazi and Communist regimes, examined the government records that revealed her troubling collaboration with the dreaded Stasi secret police, and recorded his own impressions of her weirdly personal museum of old furniture, clocks, and gramophones. But he has taken all this unwieldy raw material and, aided by Mays's graceful acting and Moises Kaufman's subtle direction, shaped it into a beautifully structured, genuinely theatrical work of art.
