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Coming in on the heels of Harvey Fierstein's "Kinky Boots" at the Overture Center comes a show with a lot to say and characters with a lot to lose.
But unlike "Kinky Boots," "Casa Valentina," StageQ's 2016-17 season opener at the Bartell Theatre, doesn't include men who wear women's clothing for entertainment. It involves a group of men who simply feel more at home in women's clothes than their own who must seek refuge in order to do so or risk personal ruin or arrest for donning women's garments.
The play is based on the story of a real group of cross-dressing men at a safe haven resort - Chevalier d'Eon to the play, Casa Susanna/Chevalierd'Eontohistory - in the Catskills in 1962. The story specifically focuses on a weekend when transgender activist Virginia Prince wanted to form a sorority for heterosexual, cross-dressing men which eventually became known as FPE or the Foundation for Personality Expression.
"The play itself is remarkable," said Katherine Cummings, 81, who spent several weekends at Casa Susanna and was present on that particular weekend in 1962.
Cummings is a transgender activist living in Australia who affirmed her identity as a woman in 1986 and works for the NSW (New South Wales) Gender Center. Her 1992 autobiography, which features a chapter on her experience during that weekend, won the Australian Human Rights Award for Non-Fiction.
In 2009, Cummings received an email from Fierstein about helping him draw out the details about the resort and its patrons in order to begin his project on Casa Susanna. After putting the project on a brief hiatus after a year of work on "Newsies" and "Kinky Boots," Fierstein continued to send Cummings revised copies of the script for a few years before the show opened on Broadway.
"I've been a fan of the show since it opened on Broadway in 2014," said show director and StageQ president Michael...