Drew Barr, Director

 Drew Barr has directed productions of new, modern, and classical plays and musicals for theaters across the United States and around the world. He directed the Dutch-language premiere of the National Theatre of London’s War Horse, which opened at Amsterdam’s Royal Carré Theatre before a year-long tour of the Netherlands and Belgium. For the National Theatre, he also directed the Australian premiere of War Horse, which ran in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. He was the Resident Director for War Horse on Broadway at Lincoln Center Theater. Also on Broadway, Drew served as associate director for Nicholas Hytner’s productions of Sweet Smell of Success, starring John Lithgow, Kelli O’Hara and Brian D’Arcy James and Twelfth Night, starring Helen Hunt, Paul Rudd and Kyra Sedgwick, as well as for Simon McBurney’s acclaimed revival of All My Sons by Arthur Miller, starring John Lithgow, Dianne Wiest, Patrick Wilson and Katie Holmes. Drew was associate director and dramaturg for Simon McBurney’s production of The Kid Stays in the Picture at the Royal Court Theatre in London.

Drew has directed and guest taught for many of the country’s leading actor training programs, including the Juilliard School, NYU’s Graduate Acting Program, USC’s School of Dramatic Arts, SUNY Purchase, the University of Delaware’s PTTP, the University of Washington’s School of Drama and the Department of Dramatic Art at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. He is on the acting faculty of AMDA College of the Performing Arts in Los Angeles.

As an actor, Drew appeared on Broadway in Wendy Wasserstein’s An American Daughter. He was a founding member of East Coast Artists, a performance collective under the leadership of Richard Schechner, with whom Drew devised and performed in Faust/gastronome, The Three Sisters and Amerika. He toured the country as a member of Maurice Sendak’s national children’s theater, The Night Kitchen, playing the role of Alligator in the Sendak/Carol King musical, Really Rosie. 

Drew relocated to Lexington with his filmmaker husband, Tim Kirkman, in June 2024. Last year, he directed ActOut Theatre Group's productions of Angels in America: Millennium Approaches and Angels in America: Perestroika, both of which received rave reviews. 

In 2004, a pair of Pennsylvanian antique dealers shopping at New York City's 26th Street flea market stumbled upon an unmarked box of photographs—men in cocktail dresses and pearls, chatting in lawn chairs, posing by a lake, utterly at ease in front of the camera. What at first appeared to be discarded mementos of idiosyncratic drag queens, turned out to be a nearly lost record of a significant historical moment in trans history. Recognizing the importance of their find, the dealers compiled the photos into a book and began piecing together the identities and life stories of the individuals. Along the way, they learned how, in the late 1950s-early 1960s, the subjects of the photos came to gather at a Catskill Mountain resort called, the Chevalier d’Eon.

In Casa Valentina, Harvey Fierstein uses the details of those lives, as well as the lives of subscribers and contributors to the pages of Transvestia, an independent magazine for crossdressers, to tell the true story of an actual weekend at the resort in 1962, when Transvestia’s publisher and editor, Virginia Prince (‘Charlotte’ in the play), travelled from Los Angeles to the Catskills to rally support for a nationwide organization which would promote understanding and tolerance of crossdressers and their families.

At the center of Fierstein’s Chekhovian play lies a paradox: these were men who held respectable jobs, raised families, and moved through the world with all the unearned ease of post-WWII American masculinity. And yet the very rigidity of that society, with its proscriptive determinations of masculine and feminine behaviors, compelled these “pillars of society” to seek an outlet—a space, both physical and psychological, where they could nurture a secret self long hidden from the outside world. 

In the guest rooms of the Chevalier d’Eon, the ordinary articles of domestic life — a vanity, a housedress, a pair of borrowed earrings — became talismans of a fantasy feminine world, where guests cultivated their “girl within”.

Their goal was not exhibitionism, but, rather, to exercise a newly-discovered power of self-authorship. Through the pages of Transvestia, founded in 1960, and in gatherings like those at the Catskills resort, men who had spent years believing themselves to be alone in their desires discovered they were part of a community. They idealized very specific, very period-bound images of femininity: the suburban housewife, the girl next door, the well-bred lady, the bombshell. These were not radical images. They were conservative, drawn from the same patriarchy that insisted “father knows best.” Theirs was a politics of respectability, not rebellion, upheld by people whose long-held secret made them perhaps even more obedient to a system that regulated against them.

It's worth remembering how dangerous this was. In 1962, crossdressing could get you arrested under local "masquerading" ordinances. Police frequently enforced a “three-article rule”, arresting anyone not wearing at least three items of clothing matching their assigned sex at birth. Mailing educational material, like Transvestia magazine, through the U.S. Postal Service was a federal crime and led to an arrest and conviction against Virginia Prince. What the men of the Chevalier d'Eon were fighting for — a shared language, a measure of dignity, the simple relief of being understood — they were fighting for in near-total secrecy, without any of the infrastructure of information and support that is now taken for granted.

Fierstein doesn't present his characters as pioneers or as case studies. He presents them in their full fallible humanity — funny, frightened, vain, generous, self-deceiving, and self-aware, sometimes in the same breath. “The truth is, I’ve worked hard to make sure I expressed it right,” Fierstein says, “and I don’t come to conclusions in the play. Because I think it’s bullshit to come to conclusions when I know the truth isn’t the same for any two people” Fierstein takes their femininity as seriously as they did and, crucially, he contrasts their efforts with searching portraits of two real women, or genuine girls (“GGs” in the lingo of Transvestia) who are part of the Chevalier d’Eon family. Before Second Wave feminism ushered in life-altering changes and possibilities for women in society, Fierstein reveals the challenges, costs and enormous efforts of being a wife, mother and daughter.

“What I love about these photographs is the joy in their faces,” he says. In celebrating that joy and documenting their stories, Fierstein helps us also to share in the fierce, ordinary pleasure of their simply being seen.