E-Mail This Article to a Friend Broadway contenders Transplants revive the Fabulous Invalid BY CAROLYN CLAY
	I Am My Own Wife By Doug Wright. Directed by Moisés Kaufman. Set by Derek McLane. Costumes by Janice Pytel. Lighting by David Lander. Sound by Andre J. Pluess. With Jefferson Mays. At the Lyceum Theatre, 149 West 45th Street. Caroline, or Change Book and lyrics by Tony Kushner. Music by Jeanine Tesori. Directed by George C. Wolfe. Music director and conductor Linda Twine. Choreography by Hope Clarke. Set by Riccardo Hernández. Costumes by Paul Tazewell. Lighting by Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer. Sound by Jon Weston. With Tonya Pinkins, Capathia Jenkins, Tracy Nicole Chapman, Marva Hicks, Ramona Keller, Harrison Chad, Chuck Cooper, Alice Playten, Reathel Bean, Veanne Cox, David Costabile, Chandra Wilson, Aisha de Haas, Anika Noni Rose, Leon G. Thomas III, Marcus Carl Franklin, and Larry Keith. At the Eugene O’Neill Theatre, 230 West 49th Street. Jumpers By Tom Stoppard. Directed by David Leveaux. Set by Vicki Mortimer. Costumes by Nicky Gillibrand. Lighting by Paule Constable.

NEW YORK — "Borrowed plumes" are fine if they bristle and shine. So what, as we gear up for the June 6 presentation of the Tony Awards, if some of the most stimulating productions currently on Broadway originated somewhere else? Doug Wright’s meticulous I Am My Own Wife and Tony Kushner & Jeanine Tesori’s tough, soaring Caroline, or Change opened earlier this season Off Broadway, then transferred to more commercial venues. And a crisp, glitzy, yet heartfelt staging of Tom Stoppard’s 1972 Jumpers comes to Broadway courtesy of the National Theatre of Great Britain. No matter. If Broadway seldom grows such heady stuff from seed, it can at least transplant it from its own back yard or across the pond.

Wright’s play, which won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and will probably win the Tony for Best Play, not only epitomizes the old saw that truth is stranger than fiction but explores the Unamuno-esque notion that fiction may be truer than fact. The subject of this "one-woman show performed by a man" is Charlotte von Mahlsdorf (born Lothar Berfelde), a German transvestite with an exacting passion for collectibles of the Gründerzeit period at the end of the 19th century in Germany. By some miracle, she survived both the Nazis and the East German Stasi while wearing a dress. She was honored after the fall of the Berlin Wall (for, among other things, preserving in her basement an entire Weimar cabaret that otherwise would have been destroyed by the Communists) but came under attack when it was alleged that she had been a Stasi informant. Having moved from the Berlin suburb from which she took her name to Sweden, she died of a heart attack while touring her own Gründerzeit Museum, which is chock with old gramophones and clocks, during a visit home in 2002. She was 74.

Wright, the author of Quills (both the play and the film), became aware of Mahlsdorf in the early 1990s, made several trips to Germany to interview her, and corresponded with her for a decade. The playwright is a character in the play (one of 35 uncannily embodied by the Tony-nominated Jefferson Mays), which draws, Anna Deavere Smith–like, on interview transcripts, excerpts from letters, and damaging chunks of Mahlsdorf’s Stasi file, as well as on imagination. In the end, the play not only tells an extraordinary story; it muses on whether the power of the story isn’t of greater import than the veracity of its teller. Says the Wright of the play: "I need to believe in her stories as much as she does! I need to believe that . . . Lothar Berfelde 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. I need to believe that things like that are true. That they can happen in the world."

The sharpness and modulation of Wright’s script are mirrored in the production, which is directed by Moisés Kaufman of Gross Indecency and Laramie Project fame, on a simple but magical set by Derek McLane, through the back wall of which shimmer shelves and shelves of ancient gramophones, clocks, cadenzas, etc. The soft-spoken, slightly built Mays is gotten up for most of the play in wimple-like black scarf and dress, a single strand of pearls, and men’s shoes — he looks for all the world like a novice extra in The Sound of Music. The actor’s Charlotte is genteel and precise, eerily reproducing the real person’s cadenced, almost metronomic recounting of events as fantastical as patricide (taking a cue from Christy Mahon in The Playboy of the Western World, Mahlsdorf claims to have murdered her brutal Nazi father) and smuggling. And Mays (still in his little black dress) differentiates with vocal and physical effortlessness among a host of other characters, from the lesbian aunt who helps the teenage Charlotte embrace her sexual identity to hectoring Nazis and neo-Nazis, secret policemen, politicians, pundits, even a high-flying television-talk-show host who introduces Mahlsdorf as "Berlin’s own Trannie Granny."

In a moving conclusion, we hear Mahlsdorf’s own voice, seemingly projected through the horn of an old phonograph, singing the praises of a similar object in her beloved museum. Just before, the character of Wright has described a childhood photo he was sent by Mahlsdorf that arrived a few days after her death. As the spectators leave the theater, they’re faced by two large blow-ups of this symbolic gift from the beyond: a snapshot of the art collector as a jug-eared young boy on a zoo bench, cuddling up to a pair of magnificent and relaxed-looking but doubtless dangerous lions.

I Am My Own Wife takes an unforgettable character that might have flummoxed even Reader’s Digest and folds her — dress, pearls, lovingly handled collectible, and all — into a contained and elusive meditation on the preservation of history, the murkiness of complicity, and the bravery of self-invention. It’s also a playwright’s love letter to a subject who both bewitched and disappointed him: a dramatic embrace, warts and all. Who can say which is the more gallant oddity: Charlotte von Mahlsdorf herself or this impeccably produced, small-scale theater piece on Broadway?

Not to be outdone when it comes to tucking politics into unlikely places, Pulitzer laureate and Angels in America author Tony Kushner goes Wright one better, making his wry yet passionate Brechtian offering a musical — a complex, witty, near-operatic songfest about race and socio-economics set in Louisiana in 1963 and featuring a dirge for JFK movingly rendered by a singing basso bus. In addition to the bus, with its "awful freight of woe," there’s a warbling washer scatting Bobby McFerrinishly in a below-sea-level basement hot as Hades, along with an insinuating James Brown of a dryer and a radio represented by a Supremes-like trio wafting Motown harmonies into the steam. But the hard heart of the autobiographical musical, which Kushner wrote with composer Jeanine Tesori, is white-clad, grim-faced African-American maid Caroline Thibodeaux, who presides over the basement of a middle-class Southern Jewish household and not much else.