A different role, a common thread
Ripley's glam-rock idol, like the transvestite
he played earlier, both search for understanding
JULIE YORK COPPENS
Theater Writer

Most actors worry about typecasting: Who wants to spend the rest of his career playing lonely East Germans of ambiguous gender?

Scott Ripley is unconcerned. The star of "Hedwig and the Angry Inch," opening next week at Actor's Theatre, sees more differences than similarities between that show's glam-rock idol and Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, the elderly transvestite he portrayed last season in "I Am My Own Wife."

For one thing, Hedwig has undergone transgender surgery -- so, although the procedure wasn't completely successful, he, or rather she, isn't a transvestite in the strict sense. Nor is she East German anymore, having married an American GI and emigrated to the United States shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Plus, the personalities of the two characters couldn't be more different.

"It's not hard to love Charlotte von Mahlsdorf," says Ripley, who will reprise that role next spring in Booth Playhouse. "She's really sweet. Hedwig is not sweet. She's actually detestible. It's hard to care about somebody like that... Still, there's a curious, deep innocence about her, even after all she's been through. She's smart. She's witty. She's talented."

She's also a fiction. "Hedwig" author John Cameron Mitchell and songwriter Stephen Trask built their 1998 show, later a film, around Mitchell's drag-queen persona. A memorable, German-born babysitter once hired by Mitchell's military family inspired the character, but most of the "Hedwig" saga -- her botched sex-change, her ill-fated romance with an aspiring pop star, her "internationally ignored" concert tour with an Eastern European pickup band -- is made up.

Mahlsdorf, by contrast, really lived: In "Wife," playwright Doug Wright recounts his interviews with the aged transvestite, a notable antiques collector and remarkable survivor of the Nazi and Communist regimes.

Still, for Ripley, the two characters, and the many others they encounter on their quests for understanding, are equally real.

"I have to play Hedwig's truth" -- chiefly, the actor says, the painful truth that lives in the scarred place (the "angry inch") between her legs.

"To me, it's not a joke. That's my genitalia," Ripley says. "Where does her darkness come from? She's been living with no sexual identity for 20 years. And then to have someone you love, someone who you think completes you, look at you like a freak -- I don't think you can understand Hedwig unless you go there."

And now that he is there, Ripley says, he has no desire to leave. He understands why Charlotte actor Billy Ensley loved the role enough to play it twice, in past stagings at Actor's Theatre; Ensley, who's directing the current production, says it was time to pass the torch, as it were, to a new interpreter.

Ripley would embrace a long run of "Hedwig," a rocking reminder of his own college-garage-band glory days. He's just as eager to step back into Charlotte von Mahlsdorf's sensible shoes -- more comfortable, to be sure, than Hedwig's platform boots.

"I'd love to do these shows in rep," Ripley says, meaning, performing them in the same theater on alternate nights. "If you look at it, it's what -- 40 characters in two plays. I mean, that's fun."

HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH

Scott Ripley is the glam-rocker in search of love.

WHEN: 8 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday, 8 p.m. Aug. 10-11, 16-18, and 23-25. 11 p.m. shows Aug. 11, 18 and 25.

WHERE: Actor's Theatre of Charlotte, 650 E. Stonewall St.

ADMISSION: $28.

DETAILS: 704-342-2251; or www.actorstheatrecharlotte.org.