I Am My Own Wife is the winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. From the Obie Award-winning author of Quills comes this acclaimed one-man show, which explores the astonishing true story of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf. A transvestite and celebrated antiques dealer who successfully navigated the two most oppressive regimes of the past century-the Nazis and the Communists--while openly gay and defiantly in drag, von Mahlsdorf was both hailed as a cultural hero and accused of colluding with the Stasi. 
In an attempt to discern the truth about Charlotte, Doug Wright has written "at once a vivid portrait of Germany in the second half of the twentieth century, a morally complex tale about what it can take to be a survivor, and an intriguing meditation on everything from the obsession with collecting to the passage of time" (Hedy Weiss, Chicago Sun-Times).

I Am My Own Wife: A Play

Literature & Fiction

Doug Wright

Dramas & Plays

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

The Stonewater Rapture.

Wright, Doug

Dramatists Play Service, Inc.

A drama for a cast of 3 men and 3 women. Flo Stillman is a nursery school teacher, desperate to have children of her own. Her husband, Park, a bond trader on Wall Street, refuses to comply. Park carries an overwhelming secret: An affair he had with his secretary, a spirited young woman named Marilyn, already produced a baby. The child, brain-damaged, lies in a hospital incubator, the living manifestation of Park's infidelity to his wife. Now Park is terrified to procreate again, for fear of producing another handicapped infant. Flo, blissfully unaware of her husband's situation, still craves a child. She starts to compulsively adopt Third World children through late-night "infomercials" on TV. Soon, she is a foster mother of some renown. As she becomes increasingly obsessed with her responsibility to nurture the worlds' underprivileged, Flo's life takes a surreal turn. She experiences miraculous visits from Third World emissaries, and even endures a phantom pregnancy. Meanwhile, Marilyn's new boyfriend, Dash, a toll booth attendant with "super-human genes," decides to pirate Marilyn and her ailing baby away to the Midwest, where they can begin life anew. In a series of short, interconnected scenes, alternately comic and poignant, the play weaves an intricate web of conflicting desires. Written with the narrative logic of a late-morning dream, WATBANALAND is a haunting story about hunger in its very human manifestations: sexual, physical and spiritual.

Watbanaland.

This is a comedy for a cast of 5 men and 3 women. THE STORY: Doctor Royer-Collard, head of Charenton Asylum, is visited by Renee Pelagie, wife of the asylum's most notorious inmate, the Marquis de Sade. Furious that her husband's sadomasochistic pornography has tarnished her reputation, she offers the Doctor any amount of money, if only her husband can be kept from writing. After confiscating the Marquis' quills and paper, the Abbe de Coulmier is surprised to find lascivious new stories circulating in public. The source? A lusty young seamstress named Madeleine has been smuggling material out of the asylum. Immediately, the Abbe bars the girl from seeing the Marquis, but ever resourceful, the Marquis pens his stories on his bedclothes in wine, blood and worse. Driven to a fury, the Abbe strips bare the Marquis and his cell, leaving nothing but stone and straw. Undaunted, the Marquis devises a fantastic plan to whisper his stories from lunatic to lunatic, until Madeleine can pen them down-but the last lunatic, in whose cell Madeleine crouches, mutilates and kills the girl in response to the Marquis' grisly tale. A riot ensues, nearly destroying the asylum, and as the second act unfolds, the Abbe is driven to increasingly desperate acts to silence the Marquis: the removal of his hands, feet, genitals and eventually his beheading. Wracked by guilt, the once humane but now murderous and sexually deviant Abbe is committed to his own asylum where he finds himself crying out for a paper and pen with which to record his own newly arisen perversions. In the last scene, the boxes containing the body parts of the Marquis tremble with pleasure. One hand snakes loose from its box...and begins to write.

Quills.

Dramatist's Play Service

Unwrap Your Candy: An Evening of One-Act Plays - Acting Edition (Acting Edition for Theater Productions)

Grey Gardens: The Complete Book and Lyrics of the Broadway Musical

Humor & Entertainment

Applause Theatre and Cinema Books

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Books by Doug Wright