A ‘Wintertime’ Snow Is Falling on Romance

Wintertime, and the livin’ ain’t easy. Tempers are jumpin’, and the jealousy is high.

Charles L. Mee’s delirious new comedy “Wintertime,” at La Jolla Playhouse, is set at an Eastern summer home in the dead of winter. Members of a fractured family and their lovers arrive for supposedly private trysts, only to discover that other members of the family had the same idea. Recriminations soon escalate to enormous tantrums and extravagant displays of tacky underwear and bare bums.

Mee, who takes pride in his inspiration from others, conjures up thoughts of Coward’s “Hay Fever” and the rhythms of Feydeau, which are especially obvious when one character wheels out a door and ritualistically prepares it for a round of vigorous slamming in which everyone participates.

But Coward and Feydeau aren’t the half of it. The reason why the door has to be brought to the stage is because Annie Smart’s set otherwise lacks doors and walls. This living room is inextricably interwoven with the bare trees, which grow right where the divan should be, and the falling snow. Mee’s play is a voyage into the human heart that ventures far beyond naturalistic confines.

The course of the conversation is sometimes Chekhovian. Mee’s script also acknowledges that he incorporated text by Laurie Williams and that he was deeply affected by Anne Carson’s book “Eros the Bittersweet.” When the plot goes bizarrely haywire, the most striking twist owes something besides a similar title to Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale.”

This brazen mixture of classic echoes and contemporary talk confirms Mee’s belief in his brand of stylistic collage. The play acquires a dazzling originality in the way it assembles its effects from so many sources. It’s a rip-roaring comedy that becomes an intellectual high-wire act.

It’s also a platform for some wild comedy performances, none more so than that of Francois Giroday as, well, Francois, the tres French lover of the lady of the house, Maria (Randy Danson). Francois starts the ball of suspicions rolling when he praises young Ariel (Emily Donahoe), the girlfriend of Maria’s son Jonathan (Daoud Heidami) a little too liberally, in the opinion of Maria and Jonathan.

Before the first act is over, Giroday has delivered the play’s most inspired aria on romantic dilemmas, has been revealed as the cad who abandoned yet another lover (Michi Barall) and has donned black lingerie for a kind of striptease in front of a gay man.

The man in question is Edmund (Tom Nelis), the lover of Maria’s bisexual husband, Frank (Nicholas Hormann). As the amusingly well-composed Frank bounces back and forth between Edmund and Maria, Nelis works up a head of grief that passes through overstatement to the realm of the ridiculous, particularly at a second-act memorial service.

Two neighbors, the aging lesbian couple Hilda (Lola Pashalinski) and Bertha (Lauren Klein), also make a vivid splash. But the play’s funniest scene belongs to Bob (Bruce McKenzie), who arrives to deliver an unsolicited compost maker, proceeds to deliver unsolicited remarks on the importance of love in Greek myth and then attributes all of the world’s problems--up to and including Jeffrey Dahmer--to the loss of love.

The entire play is shot through with prerecorded musical selections. The snippets of heart-on-sleeve opera that dominate the bulk of the soundtrack eventually give way to lighter, jazz-and pop-flavored numbers, reflecting the eventual evolution of the script into a surprisingly--though not entirely--happy ending.

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“Wintertime,” La Jolla Playhouse, La Jolla Village Drive and Torrey Pines Road. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m. Ends Sept. 15. $39-$49. (858) 550-1010. Running time: 2 hours, 35 minutes.

Emily Donahoe...Ariel

Daoud Heidami...Jonathan

Randy Danson...Maria

Francois Giroday...Francois

Nicholas Hormann...Frank

Tom Nelis...Edmund

Lauren Klein...Bertha

Lola Pashalinski...Hilda

Bruce McKenzie...Bob

Michi Barall...Jacqueline

By Charles L. Mee. Directed by Les Waters. Set by Annie Smart. Costumes by Christal Weatherly. Lighting by Robert Wierzel. Sound by Matthew Spiro. Movement by Jean Isaacs. Production stage manager Steven Adler.