Ben Gerrard Brings Trans Trailblazer Charlotte Von Mahlsdorf To The Stage

At least within the open-minded, cosmopolitan sensibilities of our major cities, transgenderism has reached the mainstream. Orange Is The New Black actress Lavern Cox, reality TV celeb Caitlyn Jenner, visionary film director Lana Wachowskis, writer, activist (and son of Cher) Chaz Bono, and pop icon Anohni can count themselves among an ever increasing number of high-profile trans men and women who today, can live in the public spotlight, openly and honestly as the gender they identify as, rather than the one they were born with.

Of course, this wasn't always so. A vanguard of defiant trailblazers, shunned as social pariahs and demonised as perverts, paved the way for the burgeoning acceptance the trans community enjoys today. One of the most well known of these early pioneers is Lili Elbe, the first known recipient of gender reassignment surgery, whose life was chronicled in the 2015 film The Danish Girl, starring Eddie Redmayne. Another, less familiar but arguably even more astonishing story, is that of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, who not only succeeded in openly embracing her female identity, but also did so under the glare of both the Nazis and the Stasi governments of East Berlin.

Her life was one of danger and adversity, but also resilience, tenacity and fierce, unapologetic survival. Bringing such a complex biography to the stage has proven to be a herculean task for actor Ben Gerrard. Tackling Doug Wright's Pulitzer Prize-winning play I Am My Own Wife - a one-man production which calls on its solitary performer to inhabit a range of different roles, including von Mahlsdorf - has been one of the greatest challenges of his career to date.

"She didn't want to hurt people, but she worked too hard to lose everything."

"I first performed it on stage a year ago, but because it's 75 pages with 36 characters, I started learning it a year before that. I think in order to honour such a challenging work it has to sit with you for a really long time," Gerrard explains. "It's a lot of individual characters to create, but there's also a lot of cultural things to consider. You need to know the world they come from, the vernacular and dialect, the circumstances that surround them, the history of the Second World War and The Berlin Wall. It's a fascinating work to get lost in, but also kind of terrifying."

Gerrard wowed Sydney audiences during a sold-out season of I Am My Own Wife at the Old Fitz Theatre in 2015, picking up a Sydney Theatre Award nomination on the way. As he prepares to return to this production, it's clear that immersing himself in von Mahlsdorf's life has forged a level of empathy that few actors have the luxury of developing. He speaks about her with the affection of a close friend. "She was extremely anti-Nazi, anti-Stasi, anti-censorship, but she was also incredibly smart, incredibly sensitive. She could spot danger a mile away, so in that respect, she was a very good survivor. She didn't want to hurt people, but she worked too hard to lose everything. She found herself in some impossible situations, because you were given no choice. If the Stasi came to you and wanted you to be an informant, it was very difficult thing to say no."

In addition to saturating his account in as much historical insight as possible, Gerrard has had to push his acting craft to its limits to achieve the flexibility required to realise this text's tangle of characters. "It's like a marathon," he admits. "I've never performed a role before that needs the entire day, leading up to that hour and a half on stage, to prepare. How you sleep, what you eat, what you drink, the exercise you do and when you start warming up; the whole day has to be devoted to that short time on stage. Very few roles demand so much of an actor."

Oriel Entertainment Group presents I Am My Own Wife, 17 Jan — 5 Feb at Fortyfivedownstairs