Jefferson Mays is not concerned that playing a cross-dresser—not once, but twice—will typecast him out of a leading-man gig. Indeed, he doesn't think in those terms at all, insisting he's drawn to parts that intrigue him, regardless of how they may affect his career. "I don't think of myself as a leading man or a character actor. I just leap at those roles that interest me," he elaborates. "I never set out to play a German cross-dresser. I thought it was absurd. But if a role forces you to throw down the artistic gauntlet, an actor should leap at it, even if the performance turns out to be a dismal failure."
His last shot at playing a cross-dresser was anything but a failure. For his star turn as the transvestite Charlotte von Mahlsdorf—along with inhabiting many other characters—in Doug Wright's one-man show, I Am My Own Wife, he won Tony, Drama Desk, and Theatre World awards. And while that role undoubtedly put him on the map, Mays already had an impressive roster of credits under his belt before assuming his gender-bending mantle. These include appearances at regional theatres nationwide and a 1998 Obie-winning performance for the title role in Charles Mee's Orestes. In the two years following Wife's final Broadway curtain call, Mays has toured the show, starred in an episode of The Closer, and been featured in such flicks as Kinsey, Alfie, and The Notorious Bettie Page.
Mays can now be seen in a small experimental picture, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, recounting the experiences of another German cross-dresser, Daniel Paul Schreber, a late-19th-century judge who suffered from wild delusions, including his belief that he was able to communicate with God through a secret "nerve language" transmitted through sun rays. Incarcerated in an asylum, he came to believe that he was a woman and, without being blatantly effeminate, grew increasingly female in his persona. Schreber kept a massive private journal that inspired the movie.
By Mays own account, he has been one lucky actor. From the time he graduated with an MFA in theatre from the University of California in San Diego, in 1991, he has been working steadily, never having to take a day job or even pound the pavement in search of an agent. The latter came to Mays after seeing him perform in the senior showcase at the school. In fact, most of his roles have arrived by invitation, including Memoirs of My Nervous Illness and I Am My Own Wife.
But that doesn't mean he hasn't auditioned and, like any actor, had his share of turndowns. And that's okay too, insists Mays, a 40-year-old Connecticut native. "I actually enjoy auditioning because it gives me the chance to perform. Perhaps it sounds like a dodge to say this, but even if I don't get a part, I look at it as a happy parting of the ways. You want the people you're auditioning for to say 'Yes!' You can't go into an audition despairing. You have to feel that what you're offering is worthwhile. There is a lot of rejection. But I don't experience it that way. Maybe I live in a perpetual state of denial!"
Mays has a precise, professorial speaking style. Interestingly, as an undergraduate at Yale, he studied classics and art history with his eye on an academic career. But following a few acting stints in school productions, Mays switched gears, though he always loved language, he says. "That may be in part because I'm dyslexic and as a child I read aloud in an effort to deal with it."
At UCSD, Mays studied with experimental directors Anne Bogart and Tadashi Suzuki, whose theatrical aesthetic is highly physical. One thing is clear, they are not Stanislavsky based and neither is Mays. "I'm not anti-Method, if that works for you," he emphasizes. "But if I'm playing Hamlet, I don't say, 'How can I find Hamlet in me?' I say, 'How can I bring myself to Hamlet?' "
Mays views the character's voice and movement as the launching pad. Costumes also play their role in shaping posture, gait, gesture, and, by extension, character. "I get very excited during the costume fitting," he notes. "I'm hesitant to say that I work from the outside in as opposed to the inside out, but I believe it is the actor's job to give physical shape to the ambiguity."
To prepare for Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, "I listened to hours of her tapes," Mays recalls. "It was a feminine singsong, shot through with delicious malapropisms. In trying to impersonate her voice, I found I was breathing and holding myself differently. I spoke in the back of my throat, and then my chest collapsed and that led to my holding my hands demurely down. The flow of the dress made me sweep it behind me when I sat, with legs together. And when I walked, it was slow and deliberate, but not quite a mince. I wore black lacy underpants, and something about the feel of that—the sensation of the silk on my skin—had an effect on the way I moved on stage. I never met Charlotte, but I was told my walk was uncanny."
Consider May's path to Schreber in Memoirs of My Nervous Illness: "I came to it in a state of complete ignorance," he states frankly. "Of course, that's the way you come to all characters. And there really wasn't much to go on except Schreber's hefty tome that I made a valiant attempt to read. He was a fascinating man who prefigured Freud. He tried to communicate everything he was going through with Teutonic vigor. He could experience and watch himself at the same time. He was a functional psychotic who had a great sense of himself in the world.