Jefferson Mays as Himself

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

Jefferson Mays can see it clearly: “Everyone should be in white tie – dinner jackets, at least. Gowns.


Smoking in the lobby.” He has spent nearly a year performing Doug Wright’s solo play “I Am My Own Wife” at the Lyceum, long enough to form precise views about what kind of crowd would suit the majestic, century-old Broadway theater. Now that closing night is less than two weeks away, and there’s nary a silk hat in sight, it seems that Mr. Mays’s antique vision won’t be realized. This may be the only dream the show hasn’t fulfilled.


The celebrated play tells the story of the “tranny granny,” a German man who decided to live as a woman, Charlotte Von Mahlsdorf, in defiance of Nazi and Soviet rules. For dealing with her story so sensitively, Mr. Wright won the Pulitzer and a Tony for Best Play. For bringing Charlotte to life, along with three dozen other characters, Mr. Mays won a Tony for Best Actor, defeating also-rans like Christopher Plummer, Frank Langella, and Kevin Kline. Over lunch at Angus McIndoe, Mr. Mays looked back on his uncanny Broadway debut. “Irony of ironies,” he said dryly at one point: The king of solo theater doesn’t like solo shows.


The show grew from the joint labor of the actor, the playwright, and director Moises Kaufman. “A yeasty, free-for-all collaboration,” Mr. Mays called it. After determining that a one-man play would be the best way to present the material Mr. Wright had collected from interviews and research, Mr. Mays went about stripping the genre of its cliches. “I said, ‘I don’t want costume changes. I don’t want funny hats, or racks of clothes trundling on,'” he recalled. “I wanted it to be simple, economical – no folderol.” He spends virtually the entire show in a black dress, head scarf, and string of pearls. Only voice and posture change as he depicts a pack of journalists, an obnoxious talk show host, even the playwright himself.


Breadth is clearly one of Mr. Mays’s great gifts, onstage and off. He has a boyish face and clear blue eyes, but his clothes tend towards traditional suit/vest ensembles [; he uses words like “folderol” ]. Although not yet 40, he has played roles ranging (this is true) from Hamlet, to Tartuffe, to Oscar Wilde’s JackWorthing, to Peter Pan. It’s worth noting that these performances have tended to be in regional theater: Along with his other achievements, Mr. Mays becomes Exhibit A for how New York sends talented actors away in search of juicy roles.


Mr. Mays said the difference between this show and playing, say, Hamlet, is lightness of touch. He must choose one feature that will establish a character’s identity for the audience. “It’s sketching. At Yale I was a student of art history. I’ve always been drawn more to sketches than finished products. It’s so much better to let the audience fill things in.”


As the show has moved to different workshops around the country, and an Off-Broadway stop at Playwrights Horizons, his performance has grown even more spare. “Sometimes it feels Japanese,” he said, referring to the massively restrained performing styles of the East. The move to the Lyceum has something to do with the change. “Every theater has its own meteorology,” he said. “At the beginning, when we were looking at theaters, I thought, ‘Oh God, no. My energy will go right up to the rafters here. I won’t reach anyone.'”


Since the run began, he has been won over by the house’s intimacy. He performs eight shows a week, without a microphone, and has never lost his voice. (Let us also anoint him poster boy for good training- his was at UCSD.) “These turn-of-the-century theater architects knew what they were doing. At the Lyceum I feel like I can reach out and touch the balcony, even if I can’t see it.”


He’s not kidding: Every night he makes a thrilling connection to an audience he can’t see. The show’s sidelights, combined with Lyceum’s architecture, make performances “like staring into a vaguely luminous fogbank.” Not that he would want to see individual audience members, even if he could. “They’re usually doing something horrible, reading their programs or stretching their necks. I always try to keep soft focus.”


Mr. Mays wore a beret to lunch, and left it on throughout; in warmer months, he said, he sometimes favors a straw boater. It’s clear he thrives on a certain regularity in his life, as in his work. Is it difficult to keep doing the same show by yourself every night? “On the contrary,” he said. “It’s a liberation.”


“Actors like to change things.’ Maybe tonight I’ll come in through the window instead of the door.’ I detest that,” he said. “I’m more of a workman – I want to build the show.” He accumulates tiny choice after tiny choice. As a demonstration, he showed how he would choose in advance whether he would lay his knife along the edge of his plate, or in its center.


You get the sense from what Mr. Mays wears, how he talks, and the work he does, that he believes deeply in a certain propriety: Make whatever rules you like, only follow them. He and his wife, Susan Lyons, “compulsively collect” books of etiquette from the 19th and early 20th centuries. They are planning to write a book about period stage behavior. It won’t tell actors how to play Sheridan or other classics, but will tell them what Sheridan’s original actors-and audiences-would have known.


Mr. Mays has learned the usefulness of such a book firsthand. Before one show, a costume designer gave him a funny suit to wear, one not in keeping with the world of the play. “I thought, ‘Why am I even here? Why not just put the funny suit on a dressmaker’s dummy and roll it onto the stage?’ You need rules, otherwise there’s stylistic chaos.”


At such moments, Mr. Mays sounds oddly similar to a David Mamet disciple. You can’t argue with the results. The fastidiousness of his performance – all his exquisite moves- conjure the onstage world Mr. Wright’s play requires. Even as he continues to enact it, he refuses to judge whether Charlotte’s version of her story is true. What matters is that she thinks it’s true. “We human beings have an astonishing ability to construct our own stories, our own personae,” he said. “They allow us to function in the world.”


The end of the Broadway run is hardly the end of Mr. Mays’s association with the play. Beginning in January, the show will tour for a year, maybe two. And then? “It’s an actor’s dream, an absolute actor’s dream. What could possibly match this?” he said. “Maybe I’ll stop. We came to Broadway, won some awards. Maybe I’ll go into stonemasonry. Glass-blowing. Some other practical profession.” He paused for a moment. Then a smile. “I don’t think that will happen.”


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