Casa Valentina: Theater review by David Cote

Harvey Fierstein’s first nonmusical play since 1987’s Safe Sex concerns a group of straight men who in 1962 meet in the Catskills to dress and act like women. The ensemble includes such fine character actors as Larry Pine, Reed Birney, Gabriel Ebert and Patrick Page. Clothes unmake the men in Casa Valentina, Harvey Fierstein’s mostly effective period drama about cross-dressers in 1962. Set at a Catskills resort that caters to straight married fellows who secretly dress and act like women, the play delicately traverses a midcentury American subculture at the time represented only in dirty jokes and horror movies. But if you want to know what impels these men to externalize their feminine sides, the play has difficulty peeling away more than a layer or two—it’s more about gussying up than stripping bare.