Julianne Boyd, the artistic director of Barrington Stage Company, is nothing if not audacious. For her first show of the season, she chose a play that sounds like a hard sell for a bourgeois Berkshires audience: I Am My Own Wife (a hit on Broadway in 2003), which is the true story of a German transvestite who murders her father, collaborates with the Communists, tours the S&M bars of Berlin and runs a house museum filled with antique phonographs and gramophones. What's more, the play is a one-man show that requires an ambidextrous actor who can create dozens of roles—and just as many unique voices—without missing a beat or changing out of his black kerchief and string of pearls. As if that were not enough of a challenge, Boyd had not even found a place to stage this production until early May. Live theater, of course, is always about living on the edge, and the role of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf et al. turns acting into an extreme sport—the dramatic equivalent of a decathlon. The actor Vince Gatton meets the challenge with humor and humility. He does a star turn by not acting like a star or turning Charlotte into the larger than life figure she never was in real life. It's counterintuitive but as the play progresses and Charlotte reveals more about herself we become less sure of who she is and more aware of the complexities of her multiple predicaments. After all, a German man who's able to survive World War II and its aftermath by always wearing a skirt is in many respects an incomprehensible figure.
But the play (nimbly directed by Andrew Volkoff, who worked with Gatton on last season's Fully Committed at BSC) does not hinge on Charlotte's sexual identity; it centers on her humanity and the individual choices we all make for our physical and emotional survival. (And Pittsfield, a city with its own identity crisis, is an apt setting for such a story.) The play seemed to strike a resonant chord with the multi-generational audience at BSC's new Stage II (the VFW Post 448 Hall, above) on Wednesday night. During intermission, they murmured appreciatively about Gatton's agile acting and multiple transformations (that are especially impressive since he never changes his costume in the first act and only briefly twice in the second.) At the curtain call, the audience hesitated before giving him a standing ovation, which he'd clearly earned by providing an impressive and heartfelt evening of drama all by himself. I Am My Own Wife is at Barrington Stage Company through June 8.
