When’s the last time you called something a real drag? Or, better yet, when’s the last time you walked up to a beautiful woman and said, “What’s new, pussycat?”

If you’re living in the way-now, then those phrases probably got packed away with your bell-bottoms and hippie beads.

But dig this: Penobscot Theatre is reviving the 1960s culture with a hip adaptation of Georges Feydeau’s 1907 sex comedy “La Puce a l’oreille.” “A Flea in Her Ear,” a contemporary version by American playwright Frank Galati, opens tonight at the theater. Set in Paris in the 1960s, it’s a time of loose language, fast relationships, thick ties, big buttons and bold colors.

Colors with appetite, that is, such as red, which makes up a good portion of the set by designer Jay Skriletz, who is also the director for the show.

“The ’60s has been fun visually and we’ve had fun playing a wild visual style. Hopefully, it all doesn’t clash. There was a weird kind of harmony in the ’60s,” says Skriletz, who was a high schooler in Los Angeles during the 1960s.

Skriletz and Mark Torres, the producing director of the theater, chose the Galati version of Feydeau’s French farce because the setting brought a freshness to the original script. After mounting several shows that take place in the distant past (such as “The Heiress” and “A Christmas Carol”), the directors felt it would be fun to spring into one of the most colorful decades of this century.

Torres was hesitant to produce a play with humorous sexual situations and loaded language — the name of the hotel in Act II is Pussy A Go-Go, a detail which, Torres says, makes him cringe every time he hears it. But, adds Torres, “I also think it’s the job of the theater to push the envelope a little bit. It’s not real. It’s fiction. So let it be as wild as it wants to be. Nevertheless, it did cross my mind that our New England community might not respond happily.”

Underlying the rollicking plot of an insurance salesman who gets caught up in a swinging world of sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll is a commentary about social and economic issues.

“The characters — and this is also true of the ’60s — are caught in a dichotomy of class background, of either watching the ’60s go by or getting into it,” says Skriletz, who also directed last year’s season hit “The Foreigner.”

“In my recollection of the ’60s, the behavior wasn’t like learning a code,” he adds. “You just went with it. It’s kind of fun watching these characters and actors loosen up in the context.”

Torres, who plays a forceful Spanish gentleman in the play, says the 1960s setting is a perfect modern metaphor for the themes that Feydeau had in mind.

“It seemed to me that this free-wheeling society that Feydeau is trying to characterize fits in with that ’60s experimentation with all things fun,” says Torres, who was in junior high in Indiana in the 1960s. “For instance, the character of Goshe is usually a half-wit, but Galati has made him into a drug addict. It’s a perfect crossover into the contemporary scene.”

But Torres says the situational humor of the show — not the setting or time period — is what drives it. “There’s something hilarious about a straight individual caught up in a world he doesn’t traffic in,” says Torres. “It reminds me of the nightclub act where they get an insurance salesman out of the audience and everybody just falls apart because he’s totally out of his league.”

Actor Tamela Glenn, who was born in the 1960s, says the setting was an important aspect of developing her character, an upscale, Twiggy-like woman of the times. A white-blond wig, alligator skin go-go boots, mini dress and false eyelashes all contributed to how she began to mold her character. When she first saw the outfit, she exclaimed to costumer Ginger Phelps that it belonged on a 12-year-old. Phelps answered: “That’s just what I want. It’s a prepubescent look of the ’60s.”

“You can’t wear that get-up and not think about it,” says Glenn. “Those clothes dictate how you move and sit and that whole thing about how women walked in short skirts and that whole obsession with youth.”

Sound groovy?

“A Flea in Her Ear” will be performed 7 p.m. Thursday, 8 p.m. Friday, 5 and 8:30 p.m. Saturday, and 2 p.m. Sunday through Feb. 16 at Penobscot Theatre. For tickets, call 942-3333.