The logo for The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife is a cartoon by frequent New Yorker contributor R. Chast, which promises a deadpan drollery redolent of, say, Fran Lebowitz. But the Tony-nominated comedy is the work of camp classicist Charles Busch sticking a foot into the mainstream, and it stars not men in drag but Valerie Harper. Indeed, the play, about a well-intentioned, would-be-intellectual Upper West Side matron undergoing a midlife meltdown in a $900,000 co-op on Riverside Drive, reads more like an extended Rhoda episode than Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, which is a more typical representative of the Busch œuvre. The stage equivalent of Easy Listening, it’s savvy enough to put a likely segment of the theatergoing audience front and center. Indeed, the best jokes involve the cluttered cultural agendas of game, educated, Jewish, Manhattanite arts boosters; included is an Irish all-male Oresteia being performed at BAM. Would that Busch had cooked up that, with all its clog-dancing, cross-dressing possibilities, rather than this tepid, albeit stylishly served, stew of low farce and high sophistication.

The play did find its audience in New York, where the Manhattan Theatre Club production transferred to Broadway and ran almost two years, first with Linda Lavin and then with Harper in the lead role. That would be Marjorie Taub, who travels, in the course of two hours and several costume changes, from being beached on her couch, a victim of bad hair and severe depression, to expensively clad empowerment.

Busch grew up on the Upper West Side, and to his credit, he seems to appreciate, rather than denigrate, the rich, jobless Marjorie, with her saintly physician husband, Jewish-maternal cross to bear, coop-flown children, multitudinous shopping bags, and equally numerous literary enthusiasms. Indeed, the parallels between Marjorie’s journey and that of her spiritual hero, Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha, are rather droll.

But the catalyst that lifts Marjorie from the slough of despond, where she has landed after a fit of smashing cartoon-character figurines in the Disney Store, is just too convenient. A long-lost childhood friend shows up, ostensibly knocking on the wrong apartment door, and stays to regale Marjorie with her exciting, Zelig-like life, which has run the gamut from inspiring Andy Warhol to paint soup cans to introducing Princess Di to the land-mine cause. The breezily accomplished Lee Green, as Lillian Greenblatt has renamed herself, quickly has Marjorie back to expanding her horizons. And in the play’s funniest scene, before Marjorie and husband Ira begin to suspect that she’s a con artist, she sets not only Marjorie but also the faithful allergist heavy-breathing with promises of a " divine pan-sexuality " that, despite bourgeois reservations and exaggeratedly dropped jaws, they take her up on. In its broad sweep, though, the play is a less subtle take on John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation, with Mogen David replacing Chardonnay.

Still, if The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife adds up to little more than a rather obvious commercial comedy, it is turned out well. Santo Loquasto supplies a lavish yet warm and slightly funky apartment set, with lots of wood and books. Ann Roth’s costumes, especially for Lee, are elegant yet amusing. And the players, given that they’re shackled to stereotypes, prove, under Lynne Meadow’s direction, almost balletic in the broad-comic moves and takes. Harper has always been likable, and so she is here, even when blaring, in her highly identifiable Rhoda blat, about getting Dr. Kevorkian to kill her bowel-obsessed mother. No, not Nancy Walker but Frieda, who lives in the same building and is therefore able to pop in on a regular basis, metal cane and pocketbook in hand, to deliver blunt pronouncements and dispatches from the intestinal front.

Mike Burstyn is all relaxed cheer as the genial if self-regarding Ira, who has retired from a lucrative practice to " teach, give, impart " and can’t decide in which direction a proposed ménage makes him want to run. Anil Kumar is similarly upbeat as the helpful doorman (not Carlton), Mohammed. Jana Robbins brings a breezy, ingratiating sophistication and just a touch of wackiness to Lee, tossing out tidbits from her character’s far-flung life like dizzyingly mounting crumbs of Who’s Who. And Sondra James, as Frieda, provides a more scatological Golden Girls presence. But, hey, isn’t that the wrong sit-com?