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Intriguing Love Song hums two tunes

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A study in portraits

Charlotte von Mahlsdorf lived her life by a very particular order of passions: “Museum, Möbel, Männer.” That’s Museum, Furniture, and then, lastly, Men. Charlotte began collecting antiques as a boy (then called Lothar) in Nazi Germany, around the same time he began dipping into his mother’s wardrobe. A devout collector and a transvestite from a young age, Charlotte managed not only to survive as a gay “undesirable” under two repressive regimes — first the Nazis and then the Soviets — but to preserve a remarkable museum of relics as she did. Obsessed with recordings, her Gründerzeit Museum contained tens of thousands of Edison tinfoil and wax cylinders, as well as phonographs, gramophones, clocks, knick-knacks, and — in the basement — the last surviving Weimar cabaret. As portrayed by the superlative Tom Ford, the elegant and eccentric Charlotte is the subject of I Am My Own Wife, the rich and moving one-man show on stage now at Portland Stage Company, under the direction of Drew Barr.

Although this is a one-man show, Charlotte is far from its only character. Ford takes on an astounding 33 additional roles — from Charlotte’s cross-dressing aunt Luise, to the Stasi police, to Charlotte’s friend and fellow collector Alfred Kirschner. But the most significant and striking of these secondary characters is the persona of the playwright himself. Wright, a gay writer who grew up in the Bible Belt, was fascinated by the figure of Charlotte, and — himself obsessed with preservation — traveled to Germany to interview and record her stories.

Although Wright originally intended to turn his 500-plus pages of interview transcripts into a straight biography, he eventually came to include himself, along with precious glimpses of his process into the script. We watch the playwright meet Charlotte, speak to her in stilted German, exalt her charms to his friends, and obsess over evidence that Charlotte survived, in part, by informing on a friend. The relationship between Wright and Charlotte — and between Wright and his own project of preservation — becomes a poignant analogue. “Don’t you see?” he rhapsodizes to a friend, “She doesn’t run a museum. She is one.”

We have the rare pleasure, in this production, of seeing the stage of the Portland Performing Arts Center stripped down to its bare and lovely essentials. Designed by Anita Stewart, this set lets us enjoy the full height and depth behind the proscenium, all the way back to the old brick, the ropes and the ladders. Downstage are an Edison phonograph and a set of drawers into which Charlotte places some of her treasures. In the middle are a freestanding white door (salvaged and restored by Charlotte), a chalkboard riddled with German script, and a glass case of relics — including a copy of Die Tranvestiten, which Charlotte received from her aunt, and the tapes Wright made of his interviews with Charlotte. A simple but deeply evocative set, it conjures at once elements of a museum, a school, a promisingly expectant empty stage, and the high-ceilinged, highly adaptable spaces of the imagination. We suspend our disbelief, as usual in the theater, but this setting also encourages us to watch it hanging there, and to consider the complexities as well as the power of collecting and displaying pieces of a human story.