Play Guide I A M M Y OW N W I F E / /
July 16 – August 2, 2020
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TA B L E O F
P L AY G U I D E A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T S :
C O M P I L E D A N D E D I T E D BY:
D E S I G N E D BY:
Kennedy Styron Elizabeth Kensek Audrey Schwartz
Emily Holt emilyfightscrime.com
F O R M O R E I N F O R M AT I O N V I S I T WAT E RT OW E RT H E AT R E .O RG O R C A L L 9 72 . 4 5 0. 62 32
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01. 02. 03.
T H E P L AY L E T T E R F R O M T H E P L AY W R I G H T
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S Y N O P S I S : T H E P L AY
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BEHIND THE SHOW P R O D U C T I O N H I S TO R Y
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A B O U T C H A R LOT T E
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H I S TO R I C A L C O N T E X T
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A B O U T T H E P L AY W R I G H T
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ADDITIONAL LEARNING G LO S S A R Y O F T E R M I N O LO GY
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A L E T T E R TO O U R T R A N S C O M M U N I T Y
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THE NEW PRIDE FLAG
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Letter from the Playwright Walking the Tightrope Yet Again Doug Wright, playwright (March 4, 2020)
Writing a play is a vain, egomaniacal act. A playwright expects total strangers to pay money, gather at an assigned place and time, and listen in silence as he expounds on a subject of his choosing, usually for two or more hours. Let’s face it; that takes some nerve. Conversely, writing a play is also deeply humbling. The writer believes he has stumbled on a truth so urgent, so essential, that he simply must write it down then present it to others; his metaphorical heart on a plate. “I’ve felt this way,” he’s saying, “Haven’t you? And if so, perhaps it’s a universal truth! One that – despite our differences – binds us together as fellow travelers, and somehow makes us one?” Now the writer wants affirmation from those strangers. If they laugh or cry or applaud, then they are acknowledging both his humanity and their own. And if they check their watches or futz with candy wrappers then the writer has failed, and the truth he’s peddling isn’t universal at all; it’s idiosyncratic or strange or embarrassing, and not the great vehicle for affirmation that he had hoped. He winds up feeling lonelier than ever.
That in a nutshell, is the life of a playwright. He lives between those two extremes: rampant selfimportance and aching vulnerability. It’s a perilous tightrope. I Am My Own Wife opened on Broadway seventeen years ago. It won some prizes. It has since been produced in over thirty-five countries around the world. Almost every night for the past six thousand, two hundred and five days, it has been playing somewhere. It has been
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lauded by some critics, and dismissed by others. (It even landed me a husband; at a talk-back following an early preview , a handsome young fellow asked a question, and we’ve been together ever since.) One would think that by now, I’d become immune to the play’s reception.
But that isn’t the case, especially at this moment. The production you are about to see has been lovingly produced by the WaterTower Theater, which is – as it happens - in my hometown. I grew up in the Park Cities. As a child, I took acting classes at the Dallas Theater Center. I played juvenile roles at Theater Three, and acted in their children’s plays on Saturday mornings. (I remember one stint as a donkey in The Bremen Town Musicians, and another as a blue extraterrestrial in Space Fantasy II.) I carried a torch in The Merchant of Venice at the Fair Park band shell, and helped build the sets for a wild-west rendition of The Taming of the Shrew. I watched local artists like Preston Jones achieve success at home, and then on Broadway. I idolized area actors like Larry O’Dwyer, and Norma Young. To me, Metroplex stars like Randy Moore and his wife Norma were no less than the Lunts. Some people meet Shakespeare for the first time at Stratford or the Globe; I met him on Turtle Creek Boulevard. And some encounter Moliere at the Comedie Francaise; but when we first came face-to-face, it was closer to home, at the Quadrangle. In short, the stakes right now couldn’t be higher. (No pressure, guys.) Before the show begins, glance around at the audience. There, in the third row, that woman in the yellow blouse might be Linda Raya, my high school drama teacher. Behind her, in the blue jacket? That could very well be Synthia Rogers, my first mentor and a beloved actress on local stages. And on the aisle, who knows – yes! – it’s Mary Anne Hardison, who cast me as a twelve-year-old Scrooge in Dicken’s A Christmas Carol. And who’s that with his nose knee-deep in the program, reading these very words? It’s my nephew Ian, twenty-two and newly-graduated from college, who’ll be seeing this particular play, live onstage, for the very first time. So for me, the consequences of this production are profound and real. Charlotte von Mahsldorf - the gender-defying heroine of my play - has sauntered onstage in city after city, met the fiercest New York critics, the London cognoscenti, Swedish royalty, and Parisian sophisticates... and- in every instance - she’s held her own. But tonight in Dallas, she’ll be meeting the most significant set of all – my family, my friends, and the very folks who forged me. I’m walking that fabled tightrope once again.
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Some stories are easy to believe. Some are so believed by the storyteller that one has no choice but to believe in them just as they are.
The stories told by antique expert Charlotte von Mahlsdorf about her life as a trans woman in communist East Berlin examine what it means to live in a limbo between fixed reality and ones own centric perception. Doug Wright explores this through countless conversations and letters exchanged between himself and Ms. von Mahlsdorf in his 2004 Pulitzer Prize winning play I Am My Own Wife. I Am My Own Wife began its life as a workshop in July 2001 at the La Jolla Playhouse, then moving to Chicago, and later to Broadway in 2004 to star Jefferson Mays. Wright pulls the plays title from Charlotte’s 1992 autobiography of the same name, I Am My Own Wife, or more closely translated to “I Am My Own Woman” from the German “Ich meine eigene frau”, an anecdote spoken by Charlotte herself. Wright paints a vivid picture of marginalized life in East Berlin in the late twentieth century, the moral complexity of survival, and brings forth an observation of collecting stories as antiquities, aging through the passage of time. As Wright explores Charlotte’s time in navigating Naziera Germany, he highlights the hardships that followed Charlotte as she lived life loudly as a trans woman under
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such a harsh regime. With over forty characters weaving in and out of Charlotte’s stories, Wright has written this play to be performed by one actor. The actor portraying Charlotte faces the challenge of portraying her at the forefront while switching countlessly between her own centric perspective of those who influenced her. The play opens with Charlotte, aged 65, who has lived as a woman her entire life. In the beginning, Charlotte is portrayed by as a true hero and survivor of Nazi Germany and communist East Berlin. As the play begins to unravel, we begin to see another side of Charlotte; a more questionable side. This begins early in her life with the death of her father and follows her throughout adulthood as her sense of morality shifts and her choices become more questionable, all the while avoiding the same fate of many other LGTBQ+ people during the holocaust. While Charlotte is held up as an expert of Grunderzeit antiques, a cultural hero and a queer icon, there is much much more to Charlottes’ story than can be seen at the surface. As the narrative begins to deepen, Charlotte’s more dubious dealings begin to reveal themselves through her involvement as an informant to the Stasi regime. Her stories begin to unravel the true unpleasantries she engaged in to survive, even if it meant implicating those whom she loved to the Stasi. By the end of the play, Charlotte remains unremorseful and emotionally disconnected from her negative actions, placing all of her cares in the antique furniture she’s grown to love so dearly. Wright closes the play seven years later with Charlottes’ death within the very antique museum she helped create. He uses this as a conclusion to highlight his own personal frustrations with Charlotte, as her elusiveness and lack of empathy towards those she selfishly condemned. This forces the audience to both identify deeply and distance themselves from Charlotte, as she has distanced her own self from the reality surrounding her. I Am My Own Wife is a
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unique examination of humanity, empathy, and what it means to be a survivor. The full picture is not always a renowned work of art; it often bears a rocky underside that is subconsciously shoved away. Like Charlotte, we all often neglect to recognize the less glamorous parts of ourselves.
Through her stories, the audience is provided a mirror to examine what it means to be empathetic and honest with the whole picture, and not just the glamorized, outward mask we wear for others.
PHOTOS: T O N Y AWA R D W I N N E R J E F F E R S O N M AY S A S C H A R L O T T E V O N M A H L S D O R F , B R O A D WAY 2 0 0 4
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Production
HISTORY HISTORY HISTORY Doug Wright’s award winning play, I Am My Own Wife was first produced as a workshop at La Jolla Playhouse in 2001, then moved to About Face Theatre in Chicago in 2002 for its premiere, and eventually moved to Broadway in 2004 to star Jefferson Mays. The work took home two Tony awards in 2004 in the categories of Best Play and Best Actor in a Play. The play premiered in Europe that same year at Stockholms Stadsteater starring Björn Kjellman. A year later, the American Regional premiere opened at Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati. The production travelled far and wide across the United States and Canada, and has continued to be produced by theatre companies large and small ever since. A French version of I Am My Own Wife (Ma Femme, c’est Moi) was performed in 2009 at Théâtre du Rideau Vert in Montreal, and was also produced in both Virginia and New York City. The work has since travelled across the globe, premiering in
Mason Alexander Park(they/them) in Long Wharf Theater’s 2020 production of I Am My Own Wife
Greece, Mexico, The UK, Germany, The Czech Republic, and even Tasmania. Wrights small one-person play about this peculiar, remarkable woman has managed to reach individuals all over the world and has won many international awards whilst doing so. I Am My Own Wife eventually returned to Chicago in November 2016 as a reimagined production starring Delia Kropp, using four actors instead of one, and marking the first professional production where Charlotte is played by a trans actor. This landmark decision was held in extremely high praise of critics, the LGBTQ+ theatre community, and Even by Doug Wright himself. In March 2019, a production was mounted in Atlanta, Georgia starring Peter Smith. The play was returned to it original one person format, marking the first professional production where all of the characters in the piece were portrayed by a trans/gender non-conforming actor. Most recently as March 2020, non-binary actor Mason Alexander Park starred in a reimagined version of the play at Long Wharf Theater in Connecticut, marking another milestone in the progression of this plays long trans-centric history. Winning multiple awards across the globe, this renowned classic has life in it yet. Wright’s commentary on the struggles of LGBTQ+ people living under harsh conditions and regimes is one that is sure to only get riper with age.
Delia Kropp(she/her) in About Face Theatre’s 2016 production of I Am My Own Wife
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about
CHARLOTTE Charlotte von Mahlsdorf was born with her given name Lothar Berfelde, to parents Max Berfelde and Gretchen Gaupp in Berlin-Mahlsdorf, Germany. From a very young age, Charlotte self identified as female, and expressed more interest in the clothing and articles of girls. Max Berfelde, Charlotte's father, was already a member of the Nazi Party by the late 1920s, and had soon become a party leader in Mahlsdorf. Because of his position in the regime, he forced Charlotte to join the Hitler Youth in 1942. Though Charlotte and her father had a tumultuous relationship, the situation came to a head in 1944 when Gretchen left the family due to the evacuations and Charlottes father threatened to kill her if she did not choose between the two parents within the hour. When Charlotte’s father reinterred to kill her, she struck him with a rolling pin, ultimately killing him. After an extended stay in a psychiatric hospital, Charlotte was sentenced by the court to four years in juvenile detention for her fathers murder, but did not serve the full term, as the jails were opened at the end of World War II. Upon her release and the fall of the Third Reich, Charlotte worked as a Second-hand goods dealer and began to embrace her femininity once again, and began presenting as a woman and going by “Lottchen”, the German equivalent of “Lottie” (a nickname for “Charlotte”).
With her vibrancy and outspoken presentation, she soon became a well-known figure within the city, and was doted upon by older men frequently. Soon, Charlotte discovered a love for collecting. She began acquiring household items, even rummaging through the remains of houses of which had been bombed-out and cleared under the Soviet control of East Berlin. Eventually, Charlotte became an expert of Gründerzeit antique furniture, and in 1960, evolved her collection into the renowned Gründerzeit Museum in the partially reconstructed Von Mahlsdorf Estate. The museum became a fixture in cinematic, artistic, and LGBTQ+ circles, even becoming the celebration and meeting place for the East Berlin LGBTQ+ scene from 1970 onward. In 1974, an attempt was made by East German authorities to take the museum under state control. Charlotte then, in protest, began giving away items from within the museum. With the help of attorneys, the LGBTQ+ circles in Berlin, and possibly her enlistment as an informant to the German Stasi police, the attempts ceased in 1976, and Charlotte was able to keep the museum.
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C H A R LOT T E VO N M A H L S D O R F A M O N G ST H E R B E LOV E D G R Ü N D E R Z E I T E RA A N T I Q U E S.
EXA M P L E S O F C H A R LOTT E ’ S M A N Y C O L L E C T I O N S W I T H I N T H E G R Ü N D E RZ E I T M US E U M
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Tragedy struck in 1991 when neo-Nazis attacked one of Charlotte’s celebrations at the museum and injured many people. After this incident, Charlotte announced her decision to leave Germany. Shortly after, in 1992, Charlotte was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, postponing her decision to immediately leave the country. In 1997, Charlotte acted on her consideration, and moved on to Hasselfors, Sweden where she opened a moderately successful antique museum with fixtures focused on the turn of the 19th century. At this time, The Gründerzeit Museum was sold by Charlotte and put under control of the city of Berlin. Sadly, upon her last visit to The Gründerzeit on April 30, 2002, Charlotte suffered a massive heart attack and passed away amongst the antiques she cherished so deeply throughout her life’s journey.
Charlotte’s life can best be described as one of an outsider, a fixture and icon amongst marginalized LGBTQ+ groups, a sexual and political chameleon of East Berlin, and most importantly a survivor whose actions call into question the true moral ambiguity of self preservation.
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HISTORICAL context
Germany’s capital and largest city, Berlin is home to more than 3 million people. However, before World War II, more than 4 million called Berlin home. As Adolf HItler came into power in 1933, the dictator vowed to clean up the city that he found to be so ugly and rename Berlin to a rebuilt “Germania.” When the majority of Berlin was bombed and destroyed by the Allied Forces, Hitler saw this as a positive thing, as he would no longer have to spend time and money demolishing the city. In 1944, Berlin was divided into four sections, each controlled by one of the Allied Powers. West Berlin’s government was maintained by the western powers while East Berlin remained under Soviet control. Passage of goods to West Berlin was eventually blocked, and food and supplies had to be airlifted into the city.
In an attempt to keep people inside of East Berlin, the Soviet Union began to construct the 27 mile long Berlin Wall. Originally built from barbed wire, the wall was twelve feet high and entirely made of concrete. Between its construction and its 1989 demolition, nearly 200 people were killed by Soviet police trying to escape East Berlin, but on a more hopeful note, it is estimated that more than 5,000 people successfully escaped.
T H E T R A G I C A F T E R M AT H O F T H E B O M B I N G S O F B E R L I N W H I C H T O O K P L A C E F R O M 1 9 4 0 - 1 9 4 5
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S TA S I P O L I C E M O N I T O R I N G T H E B E R L I N WA L L . S TA S I O F F I C E R S W E R E I N S T R U C T E D T O S H O O T O R A R R E S T A N Y I N D I V I D U A L AT T E M P T I N G T O C R O S S O V E R T H E WA L L .
C I T I Z E N S O F E A S T A N D W E S T B E R L I N U N I T I N G A S T H E B E R L I N WA L L I S TA K E N D O W N . ( C . 1 9 8 9 )
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A G R O U P O F LG BTQ + I N D I V I D UA L S I N ONE OF BERLIN’S MANY UNDERGROUND G AY N I G H T C L U B S , C I R C A 1 9 2 0 ’ S - 1 9 3 0 ’ S
in East Germany The federal German Empire was formed in 1871. Paragraph 175 of the New Penal Code criminalized homosexuality. This law extended through throughout the Nazi Regime, and convictions increased by an astronomical factor during this time. The consequences of being caught were extreme, sending between 5,000-15,000 suspected offenders to concentration camps, where they were tortured experimented on, and relentlessly killed. The Nazi additions to Paragraph 175 in East Germany were repealed in 1950, but homosexuality still remained a punishable crime. In the years following a 1953 uprising, a program of “moral reform” was instituted to champion “masculinity and the traditional family. Homosexuality was seen as “a threat to the social and political health of the nation”. In 1954, communist gay activist Rudolf Klimmer, campaigned to have the law repealed, but unfortunately was unsuccessful. While his work did end up preventing any further convictions for homosexuality after 1957. Although the enforcement of Paragraph 175 ceased in 1957, it remained on the books until the official
decriminalization of homosexuality in 1968. In August 1987, the East German Supreme Court ruled homosexuality, just like heterosexuality, as “a variant of sexual behavior”. The court stated that “homosexual people do therefore not stand outside socialist society”, which awarded the LGBTQ+ people of East Germany the same civil rights as all of its other citizens. Today, same-sex marriage has been legal in Germany since 2017. Employment and provisionary discrimination is now banned countrywide, and the 1980 law requiring transgender people to undergo gender reassignment surgery and sterilization in order to legally change their gender has been ruled unconstitutional. In todays society, Germany is now seen as one of the most LGBTQ+ friendly countries in the world, with 87% of Germans believing that LGBTQ+ should be widely accepted by society. There are still challenges across the country for LGBTQ+ individuals, but the slope of acceptance is becoming more and more hopeful as the years progress.
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about the
PLAYWRIGHT Dallas native Doug Wright was born in 1962 and graduated from Highland Park High School, where he excelled in the theater department and was President of the Thespian Club in 1981. He earned a bachelor's degree from Yale University in 1985 and later earned his Master of Fine Arts from New York University. Wright’s play Quills premiered at Washington, D.C.'s Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in 1995 and subsequently had its debut OffBroadway at New York Theatre Workshop. The play recounts the imagined final days in the life of the Marquis de Sade. Quills garnered the 1995 Kesselring Prize for Best New American Play from the National Arts Club and, for Wright, a 1996 Village Voice Obie Award for Outstanding Achievement in Playwriting. In 2000, Wright wrote the screenplay for the film version of Quills which starred Geoffrey Rush, Kate Winslet, Joaquin Phoenix, and Michael Caine. Wright’s I Am My Own Wife was produced OffBroadway by Playwrights Horizons in 2003. It transferred to Broadway where it won the Tony Award for Best Play, as well as the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The subject of this oneperson play, which starred Jefferson Mays, is the German transgender woman named Charlotte von Mahlsdorf. In 2006, Wright wrote the book for Grey Gardens, starring Christine Ebersole and Mary Louise Wilson. The musical is based on the Maysles brothers’ 1975 film documentary
of the same title about Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale (“Big Edie”) and her daughter Edith Bouvier Beale (“Little Edie”), Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s aunt and cousin. In 2009, he was commissioned by the La Jolla Playhouse to adapt and direct Creditors by August Strindberg. In another La Jolla commission, he wrote the book for the musical Hands on a Hardbody, with the score by Amanda Green and Phish frontman, Trey Anastasio. The musical had a brief run on Broadway in March and April 2013 after premiering at the La Jolla Playhouse in 2012. He wrote the book for a musical, War Paint, about Helena Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden. The music is by Scott Frankel and the lyrics by Michael Korie. War Paint premiered at the Goodman Theatre, Chicago, from June 28 to August 14, 2016, with stars Patti Lupone as Helena Rubinstein and Christine Ebersole as Elizabeth Arden. It ran on Broadway in 2017. The musical received four Tony Award nominations for Ebersole, LuPone, for its set design and costume design.
As an ardent supporter for writers' rights in the theatre industry, he is a member of the Dramatists Guild of America and currently serves as the elected president of the nonprofit organization, also serving on the board of New York Theatre Workshop. He is a recipient of the William L. Bradley Fellowship at Yale University, the Charles MacArthur Fellowship at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center, an HBO Fellowship in playwriting and the Alfred Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, and in 2010 he was named a United States Artists Fellow.
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LGBTQ+ TERMINOLOGY
GERMAN TRANSLATIONS
LG BTQ +
S TA S I
Acronym for lesbian, gay, transgender, and queer (or questioning) communities
The East German secret police, slang for the German word “Staatssicherheit”
GENDER IDENTITY
GRÜNDERZEIT
One’s own concept of self as male, female or identifying as somewhere along or outside of the broad spectrum of gender
Used to describe the period in Germany from 1890 to 1900 that is the focus of Charlotte’s antique furniture collection BU N D E SV E R D I E N ST K R E UZ
TRANSGENDER A person whose gender identity differs from the sex they were assigned at birth. GENDER ROLE
The social behaviors that culture assigns to each sex. Examples: Girls play with dolls, boys play with trucks; women are nurturing, men are stoic. GENDER EXPRESSION
How we express our gender identity. It can refer to our hair, the clothes we wear, the way we speak. It’s all the ways we do and don’t conform to the socially defined behaviors of masculine or feminine. S E X U A L O R I E N TAT I O N
How a person characterizes their sexuality. G E N D E R - E X PA N S I V E
cross of merit, like a German Prix d’honneur E I N P L AT T E N S P I E L E R
a record player that uses a turntable, as opposed to the earlier phonographs that played wax cylinders F Ü N F Z E H N TA U S E N D fifteen thousand D I E S O P R A N I S T I N the soprano (female) W I E S O L L I C H SAG E N . . . How should I say...? W I E SAGT M A N . . .
How does one say...? FO LG E N S I E M I R B I TT E , JA?
Please, follow me, yes?
An umbrella term used to refer to people, often times youth, who don’t identify with traditional gender roles.
E I N E A LT E A N R I C H T E an old sideboard
T RA N SV E ST I T E /C R O S S - D R E S S E R A person who dresses in clothing generally identified with the opposite gender/sex. (An outdated term, but is used in the show)
UND DIESES MÖBELSTÜCK and this piece of furniture
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EIN TISCHLERMEISTER
EINS! ZWEI! DREI! VIER! FÜNF!
a master carpenter
One! Two! Three! Four! Five!
AC H TZ E H N H U N D E RT F Ü N F U N D N E U N Z I G 1895
T Ö T E N , T Ö T E T E , H AT G E T Ö T E T
A U F D E U T S C H in German “ WA N D U H R ” O D E R “ F R E I S C H W I N G E R ”
G U T E N A B E N D, C H A R L O T T E . U N D W I E GEHT ES DIR HEUTE? WIE GEHT ES IHNEN HEUTE?
“Wall clock” or “Freeswinger” (to describe the movement of the pendulum, which is not enclosed in a cabinet)
Good evening, Charlotte. And how are you today (familiar ‘you’)? And how are you today (formal ‘you’)?
NICHT PHONOGRAPH, SONDERN GRAMOPHONE.
Not phonograph, but rather gramophone.
I C H H A B E D E U T S C H G E L E R N T, U M D E I N P H A N TA S T I S C H E S L E B E N B E S S E R ZU VERSTEHEN.
E I N E S P E N D E a donation
I have learned German to better understand your fantastic(al) life.
kill, killed, have killed
T I T E L B I L D cover image, frontispiece
J E TZ S O L L E N W I R D E U T S C H S P R E C H E N , JA?
TA N T E L U I S E Aunt Louise
But we should speak German, yes?
D I E T RA N SV E ST I T E N : U N D I C H S P Ü RT E E I N E G Ä N S E H AU T . . .Ü B E R M E I N E N RÜCKEN KRIECHEN
EIN BISSCHEN, JA. ICH HABE MIT B E R L I T Z S T U D I E R T.
The Transvestites: And I felt goose pimples run down my spine.
A little, yes. I studied with Berlitz. A LS DAS E N D E D E S K R I E G S KA M , WA R E N S I E N O C H I M G E FÄ N G N I S ? -
MÖCHTEN SIE EIN PA A R S P R I T Z E K U C H E N ?
Once the war ended, were you (formal you) still in prison?
Would you like a couple of pastries?
S I E H A B E N D I E WO H N U N G VO N J O H N M A R K S E R R E I C H T. B I T T E H I N T E R LAS S E N S I E E I N E N AC H R I C H T N AC H D E M P F E I FTO N .
K A F F E U N D K U C H E N coffee and cake FREIWILD
Free game or wild game; something one might hunt DIE KETTENHUNDE
the chain dogs (slang for infantry police) HEUTE HABE ICH EINEN S P I TZ N A M E N F U R D I C H Today, I have a nickname for you.
You have reached John Marks’ apartment. Please leave a message after the tone. DAS G E H E I M N I S a secret, a mystery MIT EINEM BLUMENTRICHTER with a gramophone horn A L L E G E G E S S E N all eaten
SICH SCHEIDEN LASSEN to leave to someone to decide
K U N S T H A N D L E R art dealer
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S A M M L E R Collector S C H L A G Cream A U T S C H ! Ouch! D I E B R U TA L I TÄT, S O L C H E B R U TA L I TÄT
The brutality! Such Brutality! N I E M A L S Never! WIR MÜSSEN DIESEN AU TO B U S I N S P I Z I E R E N .
We must inspect this bus. GROSSMUTTER
grandmother LOTTC H E N
diminutive for Lotte (Charlotte) Q U AT S C H ! D U B I S T Z U D R A M AT I S C H !
Nonsense! You are too dramatic! DAS I ST N I C H T M Ö G L I C H . D A S KÖ N N E N SIE NICHT TUN.
That’s not possible. You can’t do that! SELBSTBIOGRAPHIE
autobiograph
for the
TRANS COMMUNITY: We all do our best to live authentically. Our personal lives are compiled of stories and memories completely unique to our individual journeys. No one knows better about how to live authentically than trans individuals. While trans people continue to fight hard for representation, it is up to the allies to stand behind them. As we feel our way through Charlotte's story, we must remember that her story is just that – hers. Just as every individual is capable of building their own identity in order to live as their authentic self, we must remember that other people's identities are only theirs and not built for the fulfillment of other people. As a whole, society must continue to work on letting go of the preconceived ideas of what it means to be trans; the spectrum is broad and ever-evolving. Charlotte never went through any medical transition, yet she was a proud trans woman. This fact is irrelevant, because she was always sure of her identity as a woman and lived authentically, no matter how difficult it may have been. She did not feel the need to alter her physical form in order to live as her true self. Charlotte was an icon of breaking the status quo in order to live as precisely who she was. As I Am My Own Wife continues to be produced, Charlotte's story will be heard by many to come. The play will continue to morph and adapt with the progression of society from its original form. A wide spectrum of identities will take on the chance to portray Charlotte, and they will each carry the show with the weight of their own journeys. Everyone deserves the chance to live as they want to live, and make the choices they want to make. As a whole, it is our job to set stereotypes and preconceived ideals of what fits into a category free. Just like Charlotte, every person deserves to tell their story. Every person's identity is their own.
R E S O U RC E S FO R LG BTQ + IN D IV ID UA LS O R T H O SE W H O H AV E Q U E ST IO N S A BO U T T H E C OM MU N IT Y:
Trans lifeline and peer support hotline: 877-565-8860 Trans resources: www.translifeline.org LGBTQ+ hotline: 1-800-273-8255
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the new
PRIDE FLAG as described by its designer, Daniel Quasar
BACKGROUND:
LGBT 6 full sized color stripes representing life (red), healing (orange), sunlight (yellow), nature (green), harmony/peace (blue), and spirit (purple/violet) HOIST:
5 half sized stripes representing trans identity (light blue, light pink, white), marginalized POC communities (brown, black), as well as those living AIDS, those no longer living, and the stigma surrounding (black).
EXPLANATION: When the Pride flag was recreated in the last year to include both black/brown stripes, as well as the trans stripes, I felt there needed to be more thought put into the design and emphasis of the flag to give it more meaning.
The 6 stripe LGBT flag should be separated from the newer stripes because of their difference in meaning, as well as to shift focus and emphasis to what is important in our current community climate. The main section of the flag (background) includes the traditional 6 stripe LGBT flag as seen in its original form so as not to take away from its original meaning (see above). The trans flag stripes and marginalized community stripes were shifted to the Hoist of the flag and given a new arrow shape. The arrow points to the right to show forward movement, while being along the left edge shows that progress still needs to be made.
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