When you first meet Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, a feeling of confusion will nudge at you immediately. She will walk through a door, grin and then leave. In that one fleeting moment, before forming any real sense of her personality, you will wonder about her secrets. Two hours later, you still will wonder.

Such is the delicious dilemma of Doug Wright’s one-actor play “I Am My Own Wife,” which Penobscot Theatre Company is presenting through March 25 at the Bangor Opera House. Wright discovered von Mahlsdorf, a famed German transvestite and museum collector, through a friend working in Europe just after the Berlin Wall fell. During trips to East Berlin, Wright interviewed von Mahlsdorf about her life as a gay man who dressed as a woman and lived through the Weimar, Nazi and Soviet eras.

The central conflict of this extraordinary story is not von Mahlsdorf’s sexuality, but the revelation in her government files that she had named names to the Communists in postwar years. The play is ambivalent about the facts because von Mahlsdorf was not only a cunning amasser of antiques from the era of Kaiser Wilhelm II, she was also adept at guarding her own mysteries. Secret police, or Stasi, files are unreliable, and whatever information von Mahlsdorf cloistered, she took to her grave in 2002.

And Wright’s script doesn’t answer many questions. We learn about von Mahlsdorf’s childhood as a boy, about an oppressive father, whom she killed in self-defense, about a mentoring aunt, about the war years and about her dedication to the East Berlin museum. But by the end of the play, the overwhelming image of the enigmatic von Mahlsdorf is of a person who would go to any lengths to keep her curios out of danger’s way. Was she obsessed? Was she a spy? Was her collaboration a travesty? The confusion we encounter early on intriguingly lingers until the last line.

For all the rich history in the wings of this story, however, “I Am My Own Wife” never quite achieves the fullness it aspires to. In part, that is because Wright inserts himself as a character in the central action rather than resolving his playwright’s conundrums offstage. Charlotte is the star here, even if – and most likely because – she is an unreliable narrator.

In spite of the play’s imperfect focus, Gabriel Sigal breathes real life into the central character – as well as the 30-some others he portrays in the course of the two-hour show. He acknowledges Charlotte’s darker side, while at the same time revealing her humor and intrepidness. Sigal’s approach is both elegant and mannered, without being prissy, and that combination makes him exactly right for this role. His performance is as much a ballet as it is good storytelling. That said, a few of his affectations – a skirt-lifting plie with every first step, for instance – are more distracting than convincing when it comes to Charlotte’s personal, and perhaps psychological, etiquette. The only reason these small actions seem ostentatious is because Sigal’s craft is otherwise poetic.

Director Scott R.C. Levy delivers the pre-show welcome through a prerecorded message, a departure from his usual live greeting. The intent, he explains, is to keep the audience focused squarely on Sigal’s performance, but the effect is distancing. One of the benefits of this small theater is that it has a human voice and face to it before every performance. In this case, the technology doesn’t really serve the play or the experience in any organic way.

Levy has also designed the sound for the show, and his choice of music and various other recorded pieces is excellent. Yet almost all of it competes in volume with Sigal’s spoken word – at least it did on preview night. Set designer Lex Liang has squeezed much of the action as far back into the stage space as possible to create a telescoping sense of dimension to this dollhouse story. Consequently, Sigal’s voice is already compromised by the cavernous Opera House space, not to mention a variety of accents. Yes, the set with its illuminated windows and trusses of lights underscores the drama in a delicate fashion. But too many of Sigal’s words are lost in service to that design.

One solution may be to sit as close to the stage as possible – in search of the chamber theater experience this play offers. The other is to read the text before going. So even as the story, which opened on Broadway in 2003 and won the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award for drama in 2004, may be maddening and its main persona elusive, the encounter with Sigal’s fine work will be satisfying and accessible.

Penobscot Theatre Company will present “I Am My Own Wife” through March 25 at the Bangor Opera House. The show also will be performed 7 p.m. March 30 at Center Theatre in Dover-Foxcroft, 7:30 p.m. March 31 at Johnson Hall in Gardiner, 7 p.m. April 4 at Houlton High School in Houlton, 7 p.m. April 5 at Eastport Arts Center in Eastport and 7:30 p.m. April 7 at the Chocolate Church in Bath. For information, call 942-3333 or visit www.PenobscotTheatre.org.

Gabriel Sigal plays Charlotte von Mahlsdorf in the Penobscot Theatre production of “I Am My Own Wife.”