Ed Shea appears on stage so rarely that it only made sense that as he returns to acting he'd tackle one of the more virtuosic roles in contemporary theater. Beginning Friday at Warren's 2nd Story Theatre, he'll be taking on the role of 35 characters in Doug Wright's one-man show I Am My Own Wife.

The play, which won the 2004 Pulitzer, is based on interviews with Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, a real-life German transvestite who managed to survive - openly gay and in drag - both the Nazis and the East German Communists, two of the most repressive regimes in modern history. Shea not only plays Charlotte, wearing a simple dress and pearls, but the playwright, Nazi officers, and an antiques dealer whom Charlotte helped send to jail.

There are about a half-dozen central characters who appear again and again, and a myriad of smaller roles that have just a line or two. In all, Shea is on stage by himself for about 1 hour and 40 minutes.

"As an actor, it really allows you to strut your stuff," said Shea, artistic director of 2nd Story Theatre, who was last on stage in 2006 for The Misanthrope. Before that it had been almost 8 years since he appeared in a play.

Shea was sort of the obvious choice for the part. He has a lot of strong actors in his company, but none quite so accomplished as he. He was for a dozen years a member of Trinity Rep. Besides, it's the kind of role he specialized in in the past.

The multi-role play is "combatively smart," said Shea.

"I've done these roles in the past, whether it was [Bob] Colonna casting me as Hamlet at 24. I know I can do these roles."

Still, he is approaching the challenging role with respect and a decided lack of "hubris." This is a part where too much fancy footwork can spell disaster, he said.

The only means Shea has of telling us he's morphed into a different character is by changing his voice. The one exception is the appearance of Alfred Kirschner, an antiques dealer Charlotte befriends and then turns in to the secret police for selling clocks on the side to American soldiers. Alfred appears at the opening of Act II in wool trousers, a plaid shirt and beret.

Otherwise, Shea wears a simple black peasant's dress, a black blouse, kerchief (with no wig) and pearls - and no make up. The outfit serves to tell us that Charlotte, whose given name was Lothar Berfelde, is in drag, but not so flamboyant that he can't temporarily transform himself into an SS officer or the play's author.

The staging will be equally spare, with a couple of screens on either side of the performance space where titles and images of Charlotte's possessions can be projected. Charlotte was an avid collector of old phonographs and furniture taken from the homes of deported Jews and those burned out of their homes by the communists. She has reassembled in the basement of her "museum" a Weimar cabaret that was going to be torn down. Now she keeps it open as a gay bar on Sunday afternoons.

Charlotte was even given a medal by the German government for her work in preserving the culture of the Reich. But that was called into question when it was learned that Charlotte was an informant for the stasi, the secret East German police. Once a hero, Charlotte was then cast as a villain.

The title of the play comes from a scene during which Charlotte tells how his mother once suggested that he marry. No need, he says, "I am my own wife."

Shea was taken by the show when he saw it on Broadway, but felt there were things he could do better.

"It was too academic, too obvious," he said. "And it had too many bells and whistles." What was missing, in part, was the "love" for the objects Charlotte collected for her museum. So rather than use an old gramophone, Shea and director Ryan Maxwell are using the sound of a gramophone, so the music, the essence of it, becomes the prop.

"It's very easy to wield this play like a club," he said, "rather than a conductor's baton, which is the way it should be played."

You'd think Shea might be intimidated by taking on such a challenging role after a three-year break from acting. But Shea thinks his directing has made him a better actor than ever. There are things he is able to do now on stage that he couldn't have done five years ago, he said. He is using a lot of techniques that he has taught his students during the past eight years.

"The best way to learn is to teach," he said.

One thing that drew Shea to the play, besides the chance to take on an incredible role, is the fact that it is so much about the artistic struggle of Wright, the playwright. It incorporates several letters between Wright and a reporter friend who tipped him off to Charlotte after the fall of the Berlin wall.

"It's one of those plays you could write essays about," he said, "but at the same time it's a hell of a story."

Ed Shea seldom steps out from behind his director's chair, but when he does, he puts on quite a show, as he's doing right now at his 2nd Story Theatre in Warren. Shea has taken on the role of a German transvestite in Doug Wright's one-man Pulitzer Prize-winner I Am My Own Wife, a tour de force for any actor.

Actually, Shea plays more than 30 characters in this play, subtly modulating his voice to fit the persona. There are no costume changes, no props, just Shea in a black skirt, kerchief and pearls standing in front of an audience for 90 minutes.

The play tells the real-life saga of Lothar Berfelde, who went by the name of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, an openly gay transvestite who survived two of the most repressive regimes in history, the Nazis and the East German Communists. Charlotte's story came to light with the fall of the Berlin Wall, when a reporter friend of Wright's tipped him off to her. Wright spent years on the project, recording Charlotte and visiting the curious museum she kept with collections of furniture, antiques and her beloved gramophones.

In fact the play begins with Shea stepping out into the stage area in drag and delivering in a crisp German accent a lecture about Thomas Edison and his talking machines. It wasn't long after that that a woman walked out of the theater.

So maybe the opening is a little unsettling. But stick with this play and you hear a remarkable story, warts and all. Charlotte became something of a celebrity after the reunification of Germany. She was given a medal for her efforts in preserving 19th-century German culture. Then it was learned she was an informant for the East German secret police. Her actions even led to the arrest of a friend and fellow collector, who appears at the beginning of the second act. People began talking about stripping her of her medal.

But then Charlotte is an often contradictory creature, whom Shea captures in all her facets. It's often a mesmerizing performance, as Shea slips in and out of a host of characters. At times he is Wright the playwright, his reporter friend John Marks, a member of the SS, and an upbeat TV talk show host, who is interviewing Charlotte. But mostly he is Charlotte, the odd eccentric who ran a gay bar in the basement of her museum right under the noses of the Stasi.

Director Ryan Maxwell has managed to keep the action taut here, to keep things moving. But it is Shea's acting chops that are most impressive, the way he is able to hold an audience in his grasp for an hour and a half, and make this mix of people seem so believable, so three-dimensional. At the end of the show, we feel we know Charlotte, know her friends and tormentors.

Really, the whole show takes place in the imagination of the audience. It's all about story telling, as we conjure up Charlotte's collection of kitsch, her run-ins with the authorities, and her murder of her abusive father. It's a stark, bare-bones drama about a very complex person, one we are never quite sure we can trust.

For those who haven't been to 2nd Story, the seats are arranged in the round in four quadrants with a simple intersecting crosswalk where Shea stands, slowly turning to take in the audience. The titles of the vignettes that make up the script are projected on screens on either side of the performance space. Ron Allen's lighting is often dark, with quick changes here and there to usher in new scenes or characters. Director Maxwell is also responsible for the sound design, a sonic collage of buzzing aircraft, bombs exploding and the haunting sound of a distant gramophone that helps flesh out our imagination.

There were an unusual number of empty seats at Sunday's press opening, which might indicate the public is a little skeptical of a play about a transvestite. And that's too bad if true, because this is an unusual night of theater, an intriguing play with an actor who is at the top of his game. It shouldn't be missed.

All roads may not lead to Warren but the ones that do should be a bit busier later this month - The 2nd Story Theatre opens its season with I Am My Own Wife, a play that won not only the Best Play Tony Award but also the Pulitzer Prize. And it's of special interest to the LGBT community.

I Am My Own Wife is a fascinating look at Charlotte von Mahlsdorf and the efforts by playwright Doug Wright to uncover the truth behind her story. Charlotte von Mahlsdorf was born Lothar Berfelde in Berlin in 1928. As a young man, his father made him join Hitler Youth. Later, as Charlotte, she made it through the Communist rule, managing to not only preserve the family home but also turn it into a museum of everyday items. When a nearby gay bar was closed by the government she raided the site, removed everything and rebuilt the bar in her basement, where she continued to use it for its original purpose.

She died in Berlin in 2002.

Obviously, no one has seen what 2nd Story will do with the piece - rehearsals hadn't begun when this was written. (The theater was dealing with a six-foot invisible rabbit.) But I have seen both the Broadway version and what a small theater did with the play in Cambridge, Mass. While the Broadway staging of I Am My Own Wife was, to use artistic director Ed Shea's word, "sumptuous," the audience still had to imagine the different settings. The Cambridge production was essentially a bare stage.

That means that I Am My Own Wife should fit nicely into 2nd Story's traditional approach of using little or no scenery to concentrate on the words. Shea is quick to point out that I Am My Own Wife is as much about playwright Doug Wright's experience recording the life of Charlotte as it is about Charlotte's life. Wright decides that it doesn't matter whether or not all he learns is true: a story is a story and how it influences people's lives and how it changes them is what matters.

For this play Shea is returning to the stage to face a mountain of challenges - for one thing he's the only person on stage. That means he plays more than 30 characters. Now, many of them are often represented by a line or two, but he must present Charlotte and Wright as fully rounded individuals - even when they share a scene.

It also means he has to memorize the entire full length play. (He was about a third of the way through when we met.) He talks of a trick to memorization that helps him. "I tend to memorize rhythmically...not the meaning of words but just the words and the rhythm of the words." Memorizing Doug Wright's role is easy. He's an American and the rhythm falls into place. Charlotte is difficult. Her speech pattern is that of someone who has English as a second language. The syntax is unfamiliar. And to make it a bit more interesting she was taught English by British teachers and that adds a touch of an English accent to the basic German.

Where did the title come from? The story is that Lothar/Charlotte's mother commented one day that soon he would find a woman, marry and leave the house. The answer was "I am my own wife."

And there are those questions the play raises. They include, Shea says, "Living as a transvestite (the way Charlotte referred to herself) is she exposing who she is or is she disguising who she really is? That's one of the most interesting questions through the whole play. Is it total honesty or is it a disguise and deception?

Shea is considering having post-show discussions after every performance.

Lothar Berfelde was born both a generation too late and a generation too early, growing up as he did in Berlin when the Nazis were coming to power in the '30s. Charlotte von Mahlsdorf had it somewhat better after the war in Communist East Berlin, but only somewhat. Since Lothar and Charlotte were the same person, it's surprising that she survived at all, especially in good humor, until her death seven years ago, an inspiringly well-adjusted transvestite to the last.

I Am My Own Wife, by Doug Wright, is being staged by 2nd Story Theatre (through October 25), with artistic director Ed Shea tempted back to the stage after a three-year absence. It's no wonder that he took on performing the one-man show himself, since it's a bravura challenge that requires him to slip in and out of some 30 characters in addition to the spirited Charlotte.

The remarkable thing about her story is less the fact that her spirit wasn't crushed - she remained too purposeful and busy for that - but that in 1992, the German government awarded this openly gay transvestite the country's highest civilian honor, the Federal Cross of Merit. The culture minister kissed her hand on national television. How civilized.

Shea starts out mutely, scanning the in-the-round audience with a kindly smile, his hands drawn up demurely, in a black house dress and black head scarf. Oddly, Charlotte begins with a lecture about Edison's phonograph, and we see that famous photograph, "His Master's Voice," a dog transfixed before the horn of an early phonograph, which became the RCA logo. This becomes pertinent as we learn that Charlotte became an antiques dealer who collected many of these devices and was fascinated at how they could take her into the scratchy, almost realistic past.

Shea snaps convincingly into many personalities and voices, though there's no getting around the incongruity of always wearing that black babushka. The other characters include Charlotte's Tante Louise, whose farm gave her an excuse for always wearing men's clothing. She gave the boy permission to become the woman saying, "Nature has played a joke on us." But the most significant character is Doug Wright, the playwright. When he interviews Charlotte in the museum of artifacts that she saved from Nazi and Communist destruction, he realizes that "She doesn't run a museum - she is one!"

Charlotte received the medal of honor for preserving the past, but eventually her own past catches up with her. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Communist government, a discovered Stasi file on her reveals that she was one of the one-in-three citizens who, at least nominally, informed on others. Although her cooperation was minimal, her business did benefit from abandoned properties of East Berliners who fled to the West, just as under the Nazis she had received items that belonged to arrested Jews.

Most controversially, and worrying, is whether Charlotte turned in her lover, Alfred Kirchner, who was accused of taking Western currency from GIs who bought his cuckoo clocks. He went to prison but wrote to her from there; we hear a kindly excerpt. Charlotte claimed that he insisted she report him in order to save herself, since the Stasi had the goods on him anyway. Nevertheless, Charlotte was reviled in the press in her own country. She lived in Sweden for seven years at the end of her life, before she died in 2002 during a return visit to Berlin.

On two large screens bracketing the performance space, scene titles are projected. More helpfully, at the very end is an image that's not only shocking but also invites us to understand, in one scary visual metaphor, the life we have witnessed. The 10-year-old, fair-haired Lothar is beaming with relaxed delight, as though he is showing off a couple of puppies bracketing him. But the two animals, sitting almost as tall as he, are adolescent lion cubs, their expressions as threatening as you'd imagine. Indeed. Growing up, Lothar had to deal with the vying instincts of two genders struggling within. Charlotte's satisfied smile on the cover of her autobiography shows that she successfully came full circle, back to the confidence of that boy.

One of the surprise Broadway hits of the decade is I Am My Own Wife, Doug Wright's drama that tells the true story of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, an East German transvestite and antiques collector who, defying the oppressive regimes of the Nazis and the Communists, lived her life openly gay and in drag.

As the New York Times pointed out, "How many visitors from the heartland of America will be eager to pass up the bling-bling of a Broadway musical for this quiet, dramatic tale about an East German transvestite played by an unknown male actor speaking in heavily accented English and wearing a black dress and a string of pearls?"

Yet there was something about Wright's account of Charlotte's struggles that captured the attention of audiences. The success of its off-Broadway engagement in the spring of 2003 led to a transfer to Broadway the following December. It survived the winter doldrums to win both the Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize. It also won its star - Jefferson Mays - a Best Actor Tony in a role where he played more than 35 characters in this solo piece.

This week 2nd Story Theatre's Artistic Director Ed Shea takes the daunting challenge of starring in Wright's play in the company's production, which runs through October 25.

Wright came to write the play when it was suggested he meet Mahlsdorf, who had become something of a celebrity after the fall of the Berlin Wall. About that time, she was honored with Germany's highest civil medal, the Bundesverdienstkreuz (Federal Cross of Merit), as a cultural ambassador.

What he learned, though, cast doubt on Mahlsdorf's heroic story, which put his proposed drama in a credibility limbo.

Taking on the role was an actor's dream for Shea, who portrays the wide range of characters that come to play in Mahlsdorf's extraordinary story.

"The challenge for me has been the very quick mercurial changes from one character to the next," Shea told EDGE. "There's a lot of dialogue in this play. Unlike a typical one-person play, there's not one character who speaks for the whole play. It's a series of characters and they are many different voices. It's a marathon for an actor."

Shea has a lot of admiration for the work of playwright Doug Wright.

"I saw the play years ago when it was on Broadway," Shea said. "I was pretty impressed with the script and how it really took in an audience and that one person could take an audience on that kind of journey without leaving that one space. It really triggers audiences' imaginations."

"I can think of no play better suited to 2nd Story's style than I Am My Own Wife,"said director Ryan Maxwell. "Ed Shea has built a theatre, an audience, and a career in Warren by stripping plays down to the essentials: the actors, the audience, and the text between them."

Shea was last seen on stage in 2nd Story's 2006 production of Moliere's The Misanthrope, playing the title role. Shea has enjoyed a long career as a professional actor beginning in 1978 when he co-founded 2nd Story Theatre with Pat Hegnauer. He then spent twelve years with Trinity Repertory Theatre in Providence, playing roles in Angels in America, A Christmas Carol, and Macbeth.

Shea admits to having "burned out" on acting while performing in Angels in America, noting the experience was so emotionally and mentally draining that he felt he needed to take a break to focus on directing.

"I can't say what I like about acting. It's just what I do," Shea said. "Sometimes when I'm acting in a role that really suits me very well and supports who I am and allows me to really utilize my craft as an actor to its fullest extent, I am exactly where I should be in the universe at that moment."

Charlotte von Mahlsdorf (née Lothar Berfelde) the, now infamous, German transvestite was born in Berlin in 1928. She survived both the senseless brutality of Nazism and Cold War Communism.

In her early adulthood Mahlsdorf became a dealer in second hand goods. She began collecting everyday items, most often sifting through bombed-out houses. From ephemera (keys that opened nothing) to objet d'art, she made her living collecting. Her collection eventually evolved into the Gründerzeit Museum. Mahlsdorf even purchased the entire contents of a soon-to-be-razed local gay bar and re-assembled the collection in her basement. In doing so, she preserved a gathering space which continued to be used by local gay, lesbian, bisexual and trans communities.

For her courage, Mahlsdorf was awarded the German Federal Cross of Merit in 1992. In 1997, with the increase of neo-Nazi violence in Germany, she moved to Sweden. Mahlsdorf died of a heart attack during return visit to Berlin in 2002.

In I Am My Own Wife, playwright Doug Wright has crafted a remarkable (and multiple award-winning) piece, based on his extensive interviews with Mahlsdorf, public records, and previously classified documents. Mahlsdorf herself anchors the one-actor play, which brings in nearly three dozen characters in an hour and forty-five minutes.

What emerges is a complicated portrait of a woman. Mahlsdorf's transvestitism fades well into the background as we contemplate how (or if), as a paid Stasi collaborator, she betrayed the very friends she was protecting. As one of the characters in his own play, Wright comes to realize that Mahlsdorf curated not only objects, but also facts and history. She put forward the facts that she wants him to see and omits events, and time periods that do not serve her purpose.

The full weight of the production rests on Ed Shea, under Ryan Maxell's direction. Shea gives a compelling, and at times, gripping, performance as Mahlsdorf and collected characters. Dressed in a black hausfrau dress with orthopedic shoes and a single strand of pearls, Shea creates a whole world out of Doug Wright's words, matte black and audience imagination.

I Am My Own Wife is a fascinating story and this is a tremendous production, not to be missed.