“The Women” by Clare Boothe Luce was a smash hit on Broadway in 1936. Running well over two hours, it is a curious work in many ways. The Old Academy Players revival, which opened this weekend, shows that it remains provocative.

Essentially a comedy of manners, “The Women” satirizes the ways of upper-crust women in Manhattan. Excluded from larger participation in society, their interests are limited to marriage, childbirth and the joys of social game-playing.

The cast is entirely women. In triumphant satire, Luce excludes men from her show. The play is a girls’ night out, as 18 actresses gambol about the stage, some playing multiple roles.

The game is to manage the men they depend on and to one-up each other. The action takes place during the Great Depression, yet these women give little attention to the entourage of maids, cooks and saleswomen who make their way of life possible.

Mary Haines is the central character. Happily married for 12 years and mother to two children, Mary is thrown into crisis when she learns offhandedly that her husband has taken up with Crystal, a perfume salesgirl at Saks.

Over two years, Mary changes from naïve housewife to knowing woman. She ends up in Reno, Nevada, where she takes “the six-week cure” as it was called, complete with “jungle red” fingernails, and learns to more than hold her own in a world full of conniving, catty gals.

You believe Nicole Gerenyi’s portrayal of Mary as the naive, unworldly socialite. But her transformation is unconvincing because playwright Luce takes little interest in her. “The Women” is more concerned with the gossiping ill-will, presumption and caprice of Mary’s social circle.

Drawing on personal experience in high society, Luce’s “The Women” feels like a comic exorcism. Seizing the moment, director Loretta Lucy Miller encourages her actresses to kick up their heels. Numerous performances are memorably over the top.

As the femme fatale Crystal, Chloe Richter’s tough mien radiates the inner unhappiness of a seductress and social climber. As Sylvia, Corynn Smith delights in seeing her “friends” suffer. When unmasked, she cries out, “And after all I’ve done for you!”

Daria Husseinzadeh radiates comic energy as Edith, the socialite who is ever complaining, either pregnant or in recovery. Linda Palmarozza stars as Countess, a middle-aged woman working on her fifth marriage, yet amusedly detached from her own marriage game.

Nancy is different from the other women in the inner circle. Played by Sonya Aiko Hearn, she is a writer who calls her unmarried status “a frozen asset.” Essentially, Nancy is the mouthpiece for the playwright’s distancing and world-weary observations.

The political focus of “The Women” is problematic. The play hints that the laughable smallness of the Manhattan society women reflects the repressive patriarchal order. But in the thick of the Depression, these women are themselves an unenlightened, privileged class.

The larger suggestion is that this entire class-structure mess needs to be swept away. And yet, Luce has Mary’s working-class manicurist make a sly reference to interloper Crystal as “The New Deal,” and Crystal personifies self-interest and amorality in its most crass, egregious form.

“The Women” disowns its own satire, or perhaps more pointedly, is contemptuous of everything. It is more like a no-holds-barred comedy revue in which a score of women go through their routines. As in all such comedy revues, some routines hit the mark and have you laughing in your seat. And some do not.

Old Academy Players is located at 3540-44 Indian Queen Lane. “The Women” will run through Oct 4. Tickets are available at 215-843-1109, or online.