I Am My Own Wife

Eavesdropping on Survival

Oakland Theater Project, Oakland, CA

What does it mean to live in drag through history? To glide past tyrants in pearls and silence, to survive two regimes by curating the past while scrubbing yourself from it? Oakland Theater Project’s I Am My Own Wife doesn’t so much ask these questions—it haunts them.

Doug Wright’s Pulitzer-winning solo play isn’t new, but in this new staging, it feels peeled raw again. Under Michael Socrates Moran’s direction, the production becomes less biography and more séance. With every word, we raise the dead—Charlotte von Mahlsdorf among them, yes—but also queer lives erased by history, softened by translation, or twisted into palatable icons. This Charlotte refuses to be neat.

And then there's Renée Mannequin.

Reader, I don’t say this lightly: Mannequin doesn’t perform the role. She slips through it, like smoke through a keyhole. Switching between more than thirty characters, they give us not just Charlotte the antique-obsessed transgender woman who survived both Nazis and Communists—but Charlotte the myth, Charlotte the contradiction, Charlotte the curator of her own unreliable archive.

They wear a black dress and pearls. That’s it. No wig, no caricature. Just a voice that shimmers with restraint and flickers with danger. Their portrayal isn’t about mimicry—it’s about invocation.

But the true magic trick of this production is its intimacy. The audience sits in the dark wearing glowing green headphones, listening to Charlotte’s delicate East German tones pressed up against our ears like a secret. The sound design (Michael Kelly, take a bow) wraps around us like velvet and broken glass: vintage clocks ticking, a museum creaking, a record whispering German lullabies. It’s not just immersive—it’s invasive, in the best way.

The set—Sam Fehr’s subdued museum of mismatched furniture—is not a stage, but a reliquary. A queer archive that smells like linseed oil and ghost stories. Each prop could be a weapon or a confession. The walls don’t speak; they listen.

Still, this is not hagiography. Wright’s script wrestles with the dark corners of Charlotte’s story—her collaboration with the Stasi, the compromises she made, the contradictions we’re told to ignore in our heroes. Mannequin doesn’t resolve them, and neither should we. The play lives in ambiguity, in the dissonance between survival and sainthood.

This Charlotte doesn’t ask for your applause. She asks: Do you still want me when I’m not pure?

In a cultural moment where queer and trans narratives are expected to be either sanitized or sensationalized, I Am My Own Wife is neither. It’s slow. It’s uncomfortable. It doesn’t explain itself. It just stands there, in heels and history, and dares you to look away.

Verdict:
A ghost story in a pearl necklace. Quietly radical. Uneasy in the best way. You don’t leave this play clapping—you leave whispering.