Top: Jefferson Mays as Charlotte von Mahlsdorf (Photo: Russell Caldwell); Bottom: Charlotte von Mahlsdorf

Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, born Lothar Berfelde, died in Berlin in 2002, aged 74. She had cut a granny-like figure with embroidered skirts, pearl necklaces, neat silver hair and a winning smile.

A Broadway production based on her life seemed a hefty risk to take. Her life had, after all, spanned the Roaring Twenties in Berlin, Nazi horror, and the subsequent 40 years of communist dictatorship in East Berlin.

How much interest could a distinctly German story have for Broadway audiences? "Not much," warned some producers.

However, Dallas-born playwright Doug Wright, 41-year-old author of I Am My Own Wife took another view.

The play draws from several sources, says Wright; transcribed interviews conducted with Charlotte over a six-month period in the early 1990s; letters exchanged with her until her death in 2002; newspaper accounts of her life; and some less agreeable knowledge sifted from her "Stasi" East German Secret Service file.

As a fanatic collector and expert of late-19th century German artefacts she enjoyed cult status with Berliners who flocked to view the founder-period furniture, antiques, and early 19th century musical instruments displayed in a museum she created in Mahsldorf.

Viewed as a cultural ambassador, Berlin honoured her with the "Verdienstkreuz," Germany's highest civil award, in 1993.

Wright first made contact with "Charlotte" in 1992, following a visit to her "Gruenderzeit Museum" in Mahlsdorf. But it was not until later - and several more trips to Germany - that he pressed ahead with a play about her turbulent life.

Charlotte's life, much like that of the German capital, had certainly been turbulent. During World War II while still a youth he was charged with manslaughter under "his" birth name of Lothar Berfelde.

Repeatedly he'd witnessed his drunken father bullying and terrifying the mother he idolised. Finally, unable to contain himself, he lost control and beat his father to death with a blunt instrument.

Wright discovered that Charlotte was listed in Stasi secret service files, as having collaborated with the State's Ministry for State Security. There was mention of a man he was alleged to have betrayed who ended up in jail in the east.

"I grew up a gay in the conservative southern part of America," Wright was quoted as saying by the German weekly Der Spiegel. "I can only surmise what it must have been like to be a transvestite living in two totalitarian systems."

After the transvestite's early release from a southern German youth prison, he returned to war-devastated Berlin in the spring of 1945. Nazi soldiers discovered his true identity and lined him up against a wall to be shot.

He'd been hiding in a shelter designated for "Women and Children only". As rifles were levelled at the teenager, an officer intervened. "Is this how far we've degenerated, to the point of killing kids," he yelled when calling off the execution.

Mother nature had played tricks by making him a boy, Charlotte would claim in later years.

New York theatre reviewer Bruce Weber commented that Wright's play, recently premiered, "has a terrific story to tell about Charlotte - a soft-spoken but tenaciously gender-bending biological male."

The play depicts Charlotte's experiences with the "cruel repressions of the Nazis and the Communists, and her often harrowing tales of survival in the Gestapo and Stasi eras," writes Weber.

Actor Jefferson Mays wins praise for his "simply splendid, genuinely artful performance," concludes the reviewer, and for his versatility in playing 35 other characters in the play, including a tv talk show host, Stasi officials, American GIs, SS officers, and several of Charlotte's family members and friends.

"Mays is mesmerizing as Charlotte, presenting to us a character of steely pride and ferocious wariness, someone whose manner is so self- contained that it seems unassailable even in its most dubious claims."

I Am My Own Wife runs at the Lyceum Theatre on Broadway through January and February. –Sapa-DPA