Becoming Charlotte by Michael Kearns
July 2013
“Only he who cries out for the Jews may sing Gregorian chants.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Perhaps the most significant thing I’ve done to become Charlotte is to hurl myself into 700 or so pages of Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, a jarring book written by Eric Metaxas. While I’ve read books that telescope Nazi Germany and Hitler’s hyper insanity, this book focuses on one person’s inner and outer tumult that results from the epic tragedy. Bonhoeffer dies; Charlotte survives and triumphs.
If one was doing a production of The Diary of Anne Frank—whether actor, director, or designer—reading Bonhoeffer would be a good investment in the artistic process (more than a Wiki search). If one is playing the lead character in Hedda Gabler, it would be necessary to bone up on the life of playwright Ibsen as well as the issue of women’s rights at the turn of the century.
As if the character of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf isn’t enough (in Doug Wright’s I Am My Own Wife) the actor (in this case, me) must also breathes life into a cast of characters of various genders (including the “third gender”), ages, ethnicities, birthplaces, and states of mind. Charlotte, however, is unquestionably the star of the show and—while I can’t short shrift any of the other characters, whether they have one line or twenty—it is her psyche that I must nail.
Charlotte has an ineluctable relationship with Hitler’s Germany. While he is not depicted in the one man play, his grotesquery plays an immutable role in the transsexual’s life. Bonhoeffer helped me to contextualize Charlotte in a world so horrific that it remains almost impossible for me to grasp.
Charlotte is German. Summon the assistance of premiere accent coach, David Alan Stern. I have the book and the CD and I’ve—well, uh—glanced at the thin paperback and listened (half-heartedly) to a few of the lessons I’ve read her autobiography, which inspired Wright’s stunning work. I’ve bought the markers and have begun marking each character’s lines with a different color. A photo of Charlotte stares at me from my bathroom mirror.
Yet the recurring thought in my head is, Can I do this? Oh, I can do the accents. But can I do it all of it in one outing on the stage? Perhaps it’s my age (Charlotte is “nearly 65”), perhaps it’s the drug retinue I’ve endured for more than twenty-five years to treat the HIV that is as much a part of me as Charlotte’s accent. Is my brain capable of all those lines, all those intricate shifts? Perhaps it’s just fear.
I have been teaching lessons on fear for decades. Embrace it, run toward it (not away from it), don’t try to suppress it. It can be your kickstarter, your buddy. “There would be something terribly wrong if you weren’t afraid,” I tell my daughter who is embarking on her college career in the UK.
“There would be something terribly wrong if you weren’t afraid,” I tell LynnMarie Rink and David Trudell, two of the solo performers I am currently directing.
While ostensibly disparate (she’s a little bit polka, he’s a little bit rock ‘n roll), LynnMarie and David share the intensity of revealing themselves in powerful solo excursions: Rink’s Wrap Your Heart Around It (opening at the Falcon Theatre on July 20) and Trudell’s Night & Dave, opening at the Spirit Studio Silverlake on August 11 with a date-to-be-set at Malibu Playhouse this winter. They are both born storytellers, revealing their intimacies with charismatic panache.
This is the first experience with LynnMarie and she’s a trouper; a seasoned performer (five Grammy nominations for her stellar accordion work), who knows her way around the stage and is learning her way around the process of bringing a narrative to life. She has virtually learned the craft of acting in a couple of weeks and she’s fucking fabulous at it.
David and I have been working together for the past two years. We speak in shorthand; our artistic spirits got married way before gay marriage was legalized. I’ve had only a few of these “marriages” in my life and I am grateful for this one. Night & Dave, which premiered at Highways Performance Space, is a deeper and more reflective Dave than we saw last year (In Heat In Hollywood) but that don’t mean it ain’t funny.
Although LynnMarie and David are ostensibly as different as Charlotte and I, it’s the human architecture that binds the four of us. The thread that tethers us is the high wire act that each of us will perform when we set out to excavate our history in order to illuminate humanness with all its ineluctable darkness.
I love the theatre: the terror, the rewards (not awards), the collaborations. I stood in the Falcon the other day and there was the seductive buzz of work—from the person handling the saw to the sound designer finessing cues. This is my home away from home, I thought. This is where I belong.
Back to becoming Charlotte: Hmmm, well at least she doesn’t play the accordion.
Becoming Charlotte is a monthly blog that Michael Kearns will be writing in preparation to star in I Am My Own Wife at the Malibu Playhouse in June of 2014.