Failed air conditioning forced me to escape The Women after its 90-minute first act. Call it a thermodynamic disaster — a hotter-than-hell auditorium combined with a production that never got lukewarm. I should have been suspicious from the start. From my first glance at the program, even, where I found two of the playwright"s three names misspelled.

I can only imagine what Clare Boothe Luce herself would have said. The lady was famous for not suffering fools — in fact, for the annihilating wit she used to finish them off. Both qualities are on ample display in The Women, Luce's 1936 comedy of manners in which a group of upper-crust Manhattan wives circle the wagons when the husband of one of them cheats on her with (can you imagine?) a perfume girl from Saks!

Today, The Women — particularly its star-studded 1939 movie version — is adored in certain gay circles as a camp artifact. It is less popular with heterosexual females, due in large part to its underlying misogyny. There are many things to dislike about The Women and Luce's own wants-it-both-ways worldview (she herself was a high-achieving writer and diplomat — as well as the trophy wife of Time magazine's publisher). Still, nobody would dispute that the script is a treasure trove of funny lines. In a good production, The Women can be dazzling. But to work on any level, the show demands the last word in luxury: gorgeous period clothes, sigh-inducing interiors and, most of all, acting of the greatest elegance and panache.

At the Adrienne, everything is makeshift. Costumes are a nonsensical thrift store hodgepodge. The ramshackle set — part chintz nightmare, part suburban Japanese restaurant — gives no sense of place or period (which here is unnecessarily updated to the 1950s).

Directing and acting (in Act I, at least) are equally misguided. The Women needs to play at breakneck speed, and here it ambles along. Clumsy scene shifts add unwelcome extra time. A few actors do earnest but misguided work, while others are sheer caricature. The worst performance is in the most critical role, Sylvia, who emerges as a sullen bore. Snarling or whining every line, this character who should be bitchily amusing is just a bitch. There is some compensation, though: Melissa Connell shines as Jane, the dramatizing maid.

Normally, The Women is dated but funny, and a fascinating keyhole look at the lives of wealthy New Yorkers. Here it's lifeless and laughless, and a glimpse only into the what-were-they-thinking? pretensions of community theater.

THE WOMEN Through Aug. 27, Theater Catalyst and the Palmer Project at 2nd Stage at the Adrienne, 2030 Sansom St., 215-563-4330