Theater review“What I Learned in Paris”

7:30 p.m. Tuesdays-Thursdays. 8 p.m. Fridays-Saturdays. 2:30 p.m. Saturdays-Sundays. 7:30 p.m. Sundays. Through Sept. 30. $25-$50. Alliance Theatre, Woodruff Arts Center, 1280 Peachtree St., Atlanta. 404-733-5000, alliancetheatre.org

Bottomline: Fun and chick-friendly.

With “What I Learned in Paris,” Atlanta playwright Pearl Cleage delivers a sparkling comedy about the personal relationships written between the lines of history.

Using the moment in 1973 when Maynard Jackson was elected Atlanta’s first black mayor as a backdrop, this Alliance Theatre world premiere is a tale of feminist emancipation and love in the time of Stevie Wonder, bell-bottoms and Afros. In political divorcee Evie Madison (Crystal Fox), Cleage creates a champagne-swilling Auntie Mame-style character who will be either an epic trouble-maker or a New Age cupid in yoga pants.

Sweeping in to town on the night of Jackson’s victory, Evie finds her ambitious ex-husband J.P. (Danny Johnson) trying to avoid a scandal that could upset his chances for being named city attorney. With echoes of “The Women” and Shakespeare’s comedies about innocent lovers trapped in the headlights, Cleage dispatches a giddy, crowd-pleasing entertainment, launching the Alliance’s 43rd season in delightful fashion.

To be truthful, "Paris" can be safe and predictable. (My date turned to me at intermission and told me, with exacting precision, exactly how the story would end.) But Cleage is a formidable talent. And though her first-wives potboiler is cluttered with the effervescent Evie's many activities (she wants to buy a Buckhead mansion, create a salon to rival famed Washington hostess Pamela Harriman's, put on a shower and a wedding, all in the course of this 2 1/2-hour story), Cleage exhibits the clockwork timing and zingy punchlines of vintage Hollywood writing.

Shoes drop. Sensitive conversations are overheard. And secret kisses are witnessed by gossipy courtesans. Besides Evie and J.P., this entourage includes J.P.’s young love interest, Ann (the lovely Kelsey Scott), his aide-de-camp John (the wonderful Eugene H. Russell IV) and Jackson campaign worker Lena (a very fine January LaVoy). Straight-laced Ann and klutzy Barney Fife-like John are the lovestruck junior partners in this quartet of paramours.

Fox plays her diva role to the hilt, though she sometimes seems to be preaching from a script rather than inhabiting this outsize personality. Johnson is excellent as J.P., a character who reads much like an African-American Ted Kennedy and is hyper-aware of life in the fishbowl. As a woman who has almost total access to the drama while keeping her own personal life carefully concealed, LaVoy’s Lena is the most intriguing of the secondary characters.

Alliance artistic chief Susan V. Booth directs with confidence. Set designer Brian Sidney Bembridge imagines an over-the-top ’70s apartment with a slanted ceiling and mod details, and Lex Liang’s period fashions are authentic and fun. The knowledge Evie gains in her Parisian sojourns imbues this play with a light that, filtered through the prism of the change in American politics over the last 39 years, looks all the brighter.