Mason Alexander Park's Gender Journey

Mason Alexander Park will star in the solo show I Am My Own Wife, the Tony and Pulitzer prize winner which plays New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre Feb. 5 to March 1. The play is based on the true story of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, an openly transgender woman surviving both the Nazi and Communist regimes of East Germany. Park, a non-binary actor, will play von Mahlsdorf and an array of other characters.

“A lot of cis [identifying with birth gender] actors have to really try to pretend to be a woman and it often comes across as performative and even campy. When you see an actor like Charles Busch, who has lived his life along a gender spectrum, even when he’s deliberately doing camp it doesn’t read the same way as a cis man in a dress. For any actor who has lived their life outside of the gender roles, it allows them to bring something a little more nuanced to each character and make something believable out of it. That’s what is cool about being a non-binary actor. I feel that I can put as much into the male roles as the female roles — and all the ones in between, too. I’ve had the experience of all of those characters and I have had the experience of trying to fit into those worlds as much as I possibly could as I was trying to figure out who I was.” longwharf.org