By Walter Tunis
Contributing Writer

The first order for those entering Casa Valentina this rehearsal evening is footwear. Shoes come off, heels go on. 

With ActOut’s production of Harvey Fierstein’s acclaimed play about the lives, identities, and conflicts surrounding a group of cross-dressing men in the Catskills in 1962, this single wardrobe change is, for the time being, more functional than fashionable. Men not used to walking in heels have to get accustomed to the change, the fit, the balance. But this is but a first step — figuratively, literally, and with all puns intended — into the world of Casa Valentina. By the time the play opens on July 10, a story will unfold of love and acceptance, as well as the divisions that arise at such a lifestyle retreat.

“The play is a fascinating exploration of very specific ideas, ideologies, and personal lines of acceptability,” said Casa Valentina director Drew Barr. “It’s just so interesting to question where one’s own individual sense of what is right and wrong comes up against society’s ideas of what’s right and wrong. That is a major dynamic in Fierstein’s play and is certainly something we’ve been wrestling with a lot.”

In his New York Times review of the play’s 2014 Broadway premiere, Ben Brantley wrote, “This intermittent, quiet enchantment is generated by men who otherwise tend to obstreperousness. But put any one of them in front of a mirror, with a tube of lipstick and some eyeliner, and he falls into a wordless rapture, as silent and luminous as a newly lighted candle.”

“The play is about community,” Barr explained. “It has been such an eye-opening experience to learn about this particular community through the play’s historical accuracy and truth — just the idea that, in the early ’60s, there was this community of cross-dressing men and their wives, who, if not open to the world at large, at least were open to each other, and found such personal pleasure and expression in their shared compulsion.

“I feel like the play is on one level a celebration of the fact that these people found each other and had a place where they could experience this otherwise unrealized side of themselves. Especially since so many of them were forced to practice or to explore that side in such deep secrecy.”

Against the fantasy

Casa Valentina is also a graduate course on dispelling gender assumptions. The first one to go is that cross-dressers are, by definition, homosexual. The characters here are married. In fact, the principals who operate the Catskills bungalow where the play takes place are a married couple, George and Rita, played by Shayne Brakefield and Melissa Rae Wilkeson. Their marriage sits at the heart of the play and fuels its overriding theme of acceptance.

“You read the script. You look at the words that are on the page and they can immediately appear to be in anger,” Wilkeson said. “I think that’s the easy way out. But Rita is coming from a place of love. She’s in love with George. She married George, and that’s her life. Rita loves these people. She wants them all to feel okay. That’s her whole reason for being.

“Drew has helped me find that people should leave the play feeling hope, feeling that it’s going to be okay. And this is kind of how I feel in real life. I want people to feel okay. I want them to feel loved. I want them to be validated, that they matter, because they do. And that’s all Rita wants.”

Another assumption Casa Valentina shatters is that these cross-dressing men, despite reveling in the release of identities hidden in their everyday family and work lives, share an unbreakable bond. In fact, the rift that develops when the characters are confronted with the necessity of going public as an official organization — a development that reveals a “serpent” in their community – presents an unexpected but seeming irreparable cultural divide.

“Oh, the in-fighting,” Brakefield remarks when discussing that split. “That’s Scene Seven. Instead of Twelve Angry Men, it’s Six Angry Transvestites.

“For me, Casa Valentina is a very thought-provoking piece. I saw it when it was on Broadway in 2014. It was a lovely, lovely production. Then, when Drew offered me the role, I jumped at it. One of the things that really resonates with me is that it’s saying, ‘With everything, there is a gray area.’ We’re all so conditioned to where we want everything to be black and white, particularly when it comes to identity and sexuality.”

The fact that the community created is largely insulated is intensely underscored during a devastating scene near the end of the play with Eleanor, the daughter of one of the characters. Played by Marianne Miller, Eleanor offers a sobering reality check from the outside world.

“We have two women who are coming out of this post-World War II/1950s/Eisenhower idea of women’s roles in society and in the home, of how women are supposed to be,” Barr said. All that is reflected in these men who are escaping from this idea of what a man is supposed to be into this fantasy of what a woman’s life is and how women behave and how they dress.

“Against the backdrop of that fantasy, we’re seeing two very real women confronting questions about who they are, about what their life is, who their family is, what their future is going to be. In many ways, Rita and Eleanor are anchors of reality who are clearly asking questions about how to understand what we want and who we are versus who we want ourselves to be versus who society wants us to be. Eleanor and Rita are people who give us very clear pictures of the reality of those questions in action.”