Spinning Tree’s Full Gallop etches a likeness of Diana Vreeland

The keeping up of appearances can be hard. For someone like Diana Vreeland, who herself reflected a style statement, the task could be more arduous still. In Full Gallop, at Spinning Tree Theatre, we glimpse a snapshot of the now-late trendsetter and icon, during a trying transition in a later period of her life.

It is August 1971, and Vreeland has just returned from four months in Europe after being fired from her position as editor in chief at Vogue, where she had reigned since 1963 (following more than two decades at Harper’s Bazaar). “Your future’s behind you,” a friend has told her.

Vreeland was the type to keep her personal travails to herself — or to try to, anyway. So perhaps it’s fitting that this one-woman show, written by Mark Hampton and Mary Louise Wilson — here featuring a dynamic Cheryl Weaver as Vreeland and directed by Doug Weaver — offers a primarily surface impression of her persona rather than a deep biographical portrait. After all, she tells us, she likes artifice.

From the living room of her Park Avenue apartment, lavishly arrayed here in its signature “garden in hell” red, with red curtains, red rugs, red furniture (scenic and properties design by De De DeVille) — “I can’t imagine being bored with it,” she says of the color, “it would be like becoming tired of the person you love” — she proceeds to name-drop; plan a dinner party; communicate with her maid Yvonne by intercom; take calls; consider a job offer (from the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art — “Why is everyone trying to put me in a museum?” she asks); stash unpaid bills on her desk; and talk, talk, talk about her life and about culture, self-expression and her raison d’être, style.

We may not recognize all the names or relate to all her experiences, but Weaver’s spirited Vreeland, coifed in the famously dyed black hair (design by Russell Bagwell-Schein) and outfitted in black, holds court with us, and reveals as much of her inner life as the script allows. It’s as though the playwrights have made a sketch before committing oil to canvas, but Weaver gives us glimpses into what drives this forceful, guarded personality. And when she speaks on the subject of color, this tastemaker transmits a palpable exhilaration — animated, free, accessible.

For a woman of leisure who didn’t like to work (and didn’t have to until her 30s, when a need for money compelled her — “I was going through money like an alcoholic goes at a bottle of scotch,” she says), this arbiter of taste, who preferred bad taste to none at all, had a major impact on fashion and the industry. “Those who received the full force of her influence,” wrote Vanity Fair in 2011, “speak of Diana Vreeland as a kind of seeress, a philosopher whose subject happened to be style.”

While I walked away wanting more of all she didn’t say, I left the performance intrigued — and, remarkably, particularly attuned to Vreeland’s world of vibrant color.

Full Gallop

Through February 11, Spinning Tree Theatre, at Just Off Broadway, 3150 Wyandotte, 816-235-6222, spinningtreetheatre.com