SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE -- Gray, who grew up in Brooklyn (“in Flatlands, not the pretty part,” she says), and first taught writing at San Francisco State University, realized she had “constantly been describing all those summers at the bungalow colony (in New York’s Catskill Mountains) and my coming of age in this sort of fishbowl with my family. I always felt joy, and nostalgia, talking about this world that has long since vanished.”
Now the midcentury particulars of that upstate New York world — a working-class Jewish resort just a few miles from Woodstock where Gray, 62, spent every summer from age 3 to 15, including the culturally explosive summer of 1969 — are being reimagined at American Conservatory Theater in a new musical adaptation of her popular 1999 movie.