Wilma Theater to Present Two-Actor Version of I Am My Own Wife
(Photo © Joseph Marzullo)
The Wilma Theater’s upcoming production of Doug Wright’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama I Am My Own Wife will feature two actors: Floyd King will play the protagonist, Charlotte von Malsdorf, while Kevin Bergen will play Wright, who is himself a character in the piece. Previous productions of the play have featured only one actor.
I Am My Own Wife concerns Wright’s attempt to write a play about Charlotte, a transvestite who survived both World War II and surveillance by the East German secret police. The two-actor version is the idea of Blanka Zizka, the Wilma’s co-artistic director, who is helming the production; she approached Wright, who was the theater’s artist-in-residence in 2001, with the concept. “For me,” says Zizka, “the play is a meeting of two people who lived in two different political systems, of the enthusiasm of youth and the life experience of age, a seeker of truth and a guardian of myth, of a writer and a subject. I believe that two actors inhabiting these two roles will give the audience a deeper understanding of both characters.”
Wright agreed to the change because “Blanka is one of the most innovative and respectable directors that I know. She’s also a formidable theatrical intellect, and I think she has the capacity to teach me new things about a play I already know very well.” In addition to the Pulitzer, Wright won a Tony Award and a Drama Desk Award for I Am My Own Wife.
King is a veteran of Washington D.C.’s Shakespeare Theatre, where he has starred in Henry IV: Part 2, Hamlet, and Two Gentlemen of Verona. Bergen is a four-year member of Philadelphia’s People’s Light & Theatre, where he has appeared in The Miser, Arthur’s Stone, and The Forgiving Harvest. In addition to Zizka, who will also be directing Ariel Dorfman’s The Other Side with John Cullum and Rosemary Harris at Manhattan Theater Club this fall, the creative team for I Am My Own Wife includes Jorge Cousineau (set and sound design), Hiroshi Iwaski (costumes), and Russell Champa (lighting).
