See, what I found fascinating about "I Am My Own Wife" was Doug Wright using himself as a non-omniscient narrator for the play where he included his own ambivalence regarding her and the potentially dark aspects of her past to drive the narrative.
He had set out to write yet another of those damn "uplifting" solo gay hero plays seem to pop up every other month in New York that frankly I've stopped going to because they bore me to tears (the last one I liked was the Quentin Crisp doc "Resident Alien" at NYTW several seasons back, and I enjoyed that just for the wonderful Bette Bourne's performance -- the play itself was nothing new). Had he written some "Belle of East Berlin" solo show, I probably wouldn't have bothered and I doubt many people would have cared because it's been done to death in the last 20 years.
What made "Wife" different and special was just when you think it's going to follow the same old tired formula as all those other plays, at the end of Act One, Charlotte's Stasi file is unearthed, implicating her in spying and all sorts of heinous acts. It called into question everthing we had assumed about this sweet little old trannie up to that point in the play and THAT'S when I found myself leaning forward and getting really drawn into the story. Wright's struggle with how to tell this story, what to be truthful about, what, if anything, to leave out was fascinating to me.
Lisa Kron explores the same sort of issues in her play "Well" -- what does an artist owe to the truth and what responsibilities does he/she owe to history ..... Kron came to the same conclusion that Wright did -- warts and all unvarnished truth is a hundred times more complicated AND more interesting in autobiographical theatre, than the typical sort of well-made, black & white narrative, in which everything is tied up into a neat little bow. Messiness is good..... and very human.
Wright's decision to depict a complicated, not-always-heroic survivor -- a non-sanitized, not-ready-for-primetime, morally flawed real person rather than the sort of plasticized, perfect, super-"woman" that Hollywood would have turned her into if they had decided to tell this story -- elevated the entire enterprise into something truly thought-provoking and intriguing. And his willingness to show his own disappointment, his own disillusionment, his own personal need to believe Charlotte was something she was not, gave the play a profound human dimension it would have lacked otherwise.
I think Wright putting Wright into the narrative of that play turned it into something far more interesting than what he had initially set out to write -- a truthful consideration on the nature of hero worship and just who has a right to judge another person's past when you haven't walked in their shoes. As well as Wright thought he knew her, all people, ultimately, are unknowable. Whatever Charlotte did or didn't do in order to survive the Nazis and the Communists, we'll probably ever know -- but seeing "Wife" we all can, as Wright did, come to accept that her life, flaws and all, was worthy of respect.
"What a story........ everything but the bloodhounds snappin' at her rear end." -- Birdie
[http://margochanning.broadwayworld.com/]
"The Devil Be Hittin' Me" -- Whitney
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