E-Mail This Article to a Friend Fashion statement Annette Miller channels Diana Vreeland BY CAROLYN CLAY
	Full Gallop By Mark Hampton and Mary Louise Wilson. Directed by Daniel Gidron. Set by Brynna Bloomfield. Costumes by Gail Astrid Buckley. Lighting by Scott Pinkney. Sound by Dewey Dellay. With Annette Miller. Presented by Nora Theatre Company at Boston Playwrights’ Theatre through February 1.

There must be more than six degrees of separation between Golda Meir and Diana Vreeland. Yet Annette Miller, who won an Elliot Norton Award for her fierce solo turn in William Gibson’s Golda’s Balcony, is at it again, channeling sultana-of-style Vreeland in Mark Hampton & Mary Elizabeth Wilson’s 1995 vehicle Full Gallop. Rouged to the earlobes and sporting the barrette-held, widow’s-peaked, jet-black helmet hairdo, she flounces about Brynna Bloomfield’s approximation of Vreeland’s famously red Park Avenue parlor sucking the marrow out of a cigarette holder, assaulting furniture that doesn’t meet her standard of the moment, and giving vent to such emphatic Vreeland pronouncements as "Blue jeans are the greatest invention since the gondola!" The safety of Israel could not be farther away.

Co-author Mary Louise Wilson first performed the play, under the direction of Nicholas Martin. Here Miller is guided, as she was in Golda’s Balcony, by Daniel Gidron. It is 1971, and Vreeland, having four months earlier been summarily fired from her job as editor of Vogue, has just returned from a wound-licking tour of the Continent. To her high-dudgeon-immersed consternation, all of her friends are urging her to accept an offer from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to curate costume shows (which assignment turned out to be the last chapter of a career that had included 25 years at Harper’s Bazaar before the decade at Vogue). Instead, she has pinned her hopes on a dinner party for an oily potential backer who by evening’s end turns out to have slipped the country, leaving Vreeland to start brainstorming in a way that will crack the Met’s moldy costume cases wide open.

The tall, willowy Miller — done up in black slacks and sweater and sporting what looks like a boar’s tooth on a necklace — is more attractive than the "ugly chic" Vreeland (who in the show is less incensed by the New York Post’s reference to her "cigar-store-Indian looks" than by the rag’s calling her "70ish," which affront, however truthful, sends her screaming from the room). But she captures a woman who lives life with an exclamation point. Ordering flowers for every nook and vase, she sweeps on stage declaring, "I want this room in flames!" Then, between imperious phone conversations and a running intercom dialogue with an impassive French maid about the non-existent food for her upcoming dinner party, she regales us — whoever we are — about all and sundry, from the rapturously recalled azure of the Duke of Windsor’s eyes to the genius of the designer Balenciaga. And don’t worry that there are no Swedish meatballs in the larder; a diet of vodka-and-tonic and Lucky Strikes appears trimming.

Like the Huntington Theatre Company’s Bad Dates, Full Gallop is not a show bursting with significance. It’s not even as artfully shaped as it might be. But its subject is entertaining and not a little valiant, a veteran of a bohemian and luxurious life who made a legend of herself from little more than an original, obsessive (she ironed her Kleenex), adamant, and apparently unerring sense of style. On everything from fringe to freckles, DV has an opinion. But it’s the having of it, rather than the thing itself, that’s important. Swanning about her plush, flower-filled environment, Vreeland flamboyantly declares herself a disciple of vulgarity: "We could all use a splash of bad taste. No taste is what I’m against!"

Of course, Full Gallop isn’t all about such celebrated declarations as "Pink is the navy blue of India." It isn’t even about such myopic observations as that Hitler’s moustache was "just wrong!" Hampton and Wilson acknowledge Vreeland’s anger at having been brutally dumped by Vogue, as well as her fear that, as the Post puts it, her "era is over." And Miller, haughtily directing her rage at a recalcitrant chair cover or allowing tears to threaten the edge in her voice, paints a person more vulnerable than her coiffure (which by some miracle survives a number of histrionic lie-downs on a pillow-strewn couch without breaking).

Among the historical anecdotes Vreeland reels off for our edification is the tale of Elizabeth of Hungary, who exercised before it became fashionable and slept amid beefsteaks to moisten her skin. According to Vreeland, who claims to have been shown the blouse in which the queen was murdered, the tightly corseted royal, despite having been fatally stabbed, displayed no external bleeding and just "kept walking, kept walking, kept walking." That’s the sort of bold, not to mention neat, performance the fashion tsarina admires. And as Miller makes clear, it’s the sort of performance we’re watching, however metaphoric the knife.