A Place to Slip Into Something Comfortable
‘Casa Valentina,’ a New Play by Harvey Fierstein
Ben Brantley
April 23, 2014: A beguilingly gentle magic whispers amid the speechifying of Casa Valentina, Harvey Fierstein’s prolix play about cross-dressing in the Catskills in the early 1960s. 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. Directed with unexpected ripples of beauty by Joe Mantello, Casa Valentina, which opened on Wednesday night at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, conveys the blessed consummation that occurs for ordinary people when they’re transformed externally into what they think they are inside. As a Tony-winning chronicler of the lives of drag performers, in Torch Song Trilogy and the musicals La Cage Aux Folles and Kinky Boots, Mr. Fierstein has dealt with similar material before. But the central characters in those earlier works were gay. The men who populate “Casa Valentina” — expertly embodied by a cast led by Patrick Page and Reed Birney — are emphatically heterosexual. Or so they say, and mostly you have no reason to doubt them. Yet while they never quite eradicate their masculine miens and mannerisms, they never feel more truly themselves than when they’re wearing women’s clothes.
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