Not Knowing What to Believe From the Past - talking to Seth Tucker about I AM MY OWN WIFE

Seth Tucker on the I am My Own Wife stage
with set designer Tiana Torrilhon
photo by Julia Bashaw

by Julia Bashaw

Charlotte von Mahlsdorf was a real person who survived the Nazi and Communist regimes all while being a proud transvestite woman. As she survived in plain sight she collected artifacts from people’s abandoned homes, and saved priceless items from being destroyed. She later opened the Grunderzeit Museum to display her collection. When she was 65 years old, Playwright Doug Wright wanted to interview her and he discovered the almost unbelievable adventure her life really was. His play I am My Own Wife is the result of the time he spent with Charlotte and it opens this weekend at BLK BOX PHX.

Seth Tucker is the actor who is tackling this one-man show, performing Charlotte and Doug’s roles as well as more than 30 other characters. One-man plays are not performed often even if they are a Pulitzer Prize-winner like I am My Own Wife. It could be because it takes a specific kind of talent and dedication to perform multiple roles all alone.

“It’s definitely the hardest thing I’ve ever done and I’ve ever seen anyone do,” Tucker said. “I just moved back to Arizona from New York in November and I really was looking for challenging work and I am also looking for a way to stand out and make a splash back into the scene. My wheelhouse since I started performing is character. I’ve done a lot of shows where I’ve had to play a lot of different characters so I felt that this was up my alley. The biggest challenge has been memorization but the biggest reward was once I was memorized I started to feel the importance of a show like this. It's a feat that I didn’t know I could do honestly. To prove to myself that I’m able to do something like this, I feel like I could do anything now.”

Doug Wright did not know how to translate all of his interviews with Charlotte into a play as a staged story. So instead he chose to write the play about his whole experience with Charlotte.

“What’s great about this show is that you do get to see Doug Wright’s process throughout,” explained Tucker concerning how Wright's process in constructing the piece is weaved into the play. “You see him hear about Charlotte, him approach her, and interview her. We are hearing first hand accounts from her, and her stories which is how the play is told through her own words. He was young when he started writing this and by the end you could tell, he says it in the show, he doesn’t know how to do it. He doesn’t know what to edit, what to preserve, so he just lays out information and gives it to the audiences. He is interviewing Charlotte who is a curator of a museum basically and so he thinks of it as if he is curating her, he can’t hide things. He has to show everything and that is what I believe makes the show so beautiful and heartbreaking.”

Seth Tucker
photo by Reg Madison Photography

As Doug discovers, Charlotte might not be all that she seems. There is much conflicting uncertainty surrounding the truth in Charlotte’s words and actions as she survived one of the hardest points in history. As an actor, Tucker had to approach Charlotte with open arms.

“It’s hard because even the playwright doesn’t quite know what to believe because the stories already seem unbelievable,” admitted Tucker. “But Charlotte does believe in everything she is saying and you can tell by the way that she had told her story and the way that he has recorded her, everything is so true to her. Maybe that’s how she has been able to get through everything that she’s got through. So I have to believe Charlotte just as Doug says in the show that he needs to believe her stories just as much as she does. Because of that it can empower a community that was marginalized, that was murdered, that they tried to extinguish. That empowerment is so valuable to the community that you have to believe some of the things but you can’t ignore all the information either.”

There are mysteries to be unfolded, answers that are lying in the pages of the script in this intriguing play about a woman and the decisions she had to make in order to survive.

“Charlotte has become my favorite,” smiled Tucker, when asked which of the three dozen characters he plays in the show is his. “She is this 65 year old German who has seen everything and she has this light behind her eyes and this humor that you wonder how she was able to after the terrible things she went through and the choices she had to make. She still has all this brightness to her.”

CLICK HERE for more information on this production, which runs March 7-16