As a kid, Harvey Fierstein and his family would often visit the Catskill Mountains. He knew there was a small resort colony nearby that catered to men who liked to dress as women. He also knew there was a nudist colony across the road. "We were kids," Fierstein would say decades later. "We only wanted to see the naked people."
When a producer several years ago began urging him to write a play about that rundown resort in Hunter, N.Y., Fierstein demurred. "I didn't have a desire to write about cross-dressers anymore," said the playwright in a 2014 television interview. He had already addressed the subject in the high-profile Broadway projects Torch Song Trilogy, La Cage aux Folles, and Kinky Boots, and had himself cross-dressed as the star of Hairspray .
But he agreed to at least research the people and the history of Casa Susanna, where heterosexual men could safely spend weekends in the country dressed not as drag queens in ta-dah! splendor, but as authentically replicated housewives of the late-1950s who could well be on their way to an afternoon of bridge in the suburbs. The result was the 2014 Broadway play Casa Valentina, opening Oct. 15 as the first play in New Conservatory Theatre Center's 35th season.
Fierstein's research began with a collection of old snapshots that a pair of inveterate flea-market hounds had discovered in 2004. Robert Swope and Michael Hurst didn't realize at first what they had stumbled upon, but it turned out to be the most extensive known visual representation of a gender-role phenomenon that had been crushed, ironically enough, by the early rumblings of the sexual revolution.
"It was such a private, intimate collection," Swope said in a New York Times interview. "All of the pictures are of this attempt by these men to present themselves as normal ladies. In many cases, they couldn't really pass as real women, and yet their sincerity about presenting themselves like that is so touching and so brave." Those photos became part of a book that Swope and Hurst published in 2005, creating a surge of interest in the long-shuttered Casa Susanna, and eventually leading to a producer's pitch to Fierstein that he create a new play populated with characters inspired by photos.
The more Fierstein studied the photographs, the more he was pulled in. "These people are just happy," he said. "They're, like, relaxed and smiling as they play Scrabble or knit or sit on a rocker on the porch." His research led him to track down Casa Susanna regulars, discovering that some had retired the women's clothing, some are wearing it full-time, and some have become women through medical intervention. Not all of those still alive, all of them elderly, wanted to talk to Fierstein, but many of them did.
"What really fascinated me was that no two did it for exactly the same reason," Fierstein said of the cross-dressing vacationers. "There were sexual reasons. There were social reasons. Some of them did it to at least briefly get away from the male role and relax into what they assumed was the female role. Some of them did it because they liked the underwear, and there was an autoeroticism about that. Or there was some sort of eroticism about their mothers or sisters or even grandmothers. There was every sort of thing."
While Fierstein has been hugely successful as the librettist of musicals and as a performer both in and out of drag, he hadn't written a non-musical play in 30 years when Casa Valentina reached Broadway. "I was so hurt and angry at critics at how they had received plays of mine, and basically I said, why bother? Why did I pour my heart out? So I stopped writing plays and said, if you want a nice dance number, I'll give you a nice dance number."
But he couldn't resist both the dramatic and comic possibilities about the stories that could be mined from the Casa Susanna story. "In all of my shows, it's people saying, 'I am what I am.' But with Casa Valentina, the interesting thing is they can't say that because, 'I am not who I am, and I want to be someone else than what I am.' These guys were judges and policemen and lawyers, and you wonder how strong the drive must have been to put on your wife's clothing because that was a dangerous thing to do in 1962."
Even in their dresses, the men remained defiantly heterosexual, and it was feared that homosexuals would somehow pierce their fantasies and jeopardize any future chance for acceptance. "There is a line I wrote where a character says, 'Fifty years from now, when homosexuals are still the back-alley vermin of society, cross-dressing will be as normal as cigarette smoking. And transvestites will someday be cheering for those of us in this very room today.'"
Casa Valentina will run through Nov. 7 at New Conservatory Theatre Center. Tickets are $25-$50. Call (415) 861-8972 or go to nctcsf.org.