“I am my own wife,” Lothar Berfelde told his mother when she explained he would one day get married. Lothar would in fact become Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, a transvestite who founded the Grunderzeit Museum and survived both the Nazi and Soviet regimes.

Doug Wright’s Pulitzer Prize-winning, one-man play I Am My Own Wife is based on the playwright’s interviews and correspondence with von Mahlsdorf in the 1990s. It is a story worth telling. Von Mahlsdorf’s life as a transvestite in East Germany spanned two of the most repressive totalitarian regimes in history. She escaped her abusive father by murdering him, and her teenage job clearing furniture from homes of exiled Jews led to a career as an antique collector while running an underground Weimar club on the side.

^{Brendan Hanson in I Am My Own Wife. Photograph © Daniel J. Grant}

All of this is conveyed in a 90-minute monologue – given a tour de force performance by Brendan Hanson in this Black Swan State Theatre Company production. Dressed in a black skirt and hair scarf, Hanson draws on a full spectrum of accents and subtle body language to delineate more than 30...