Production resurrects noted wit> Parker play revealing

If you had to choose one writer from the Lost Generation to bring back from the dead for just one night of revelry, you’d have a mighty hard decision ahead of you. But if you put in a call to Dorothy Parker, that wisecracking New Yorker whose world was a jumble of the glory and the gory that life had to offer a clever girl in the 1920s, you’d be making a helluva swell choice.

Kathleen Lake, the actor, not only agrees with the choice of Parker, she theatrically exhumes her in the one-woman show “Excuse My Dust: The Life and Wit of Dorothy Parker.” A member of Acadia Repertory Theatre’s resident company for several summers, Lake has performed “Excuse My Dust” several times on the coast this summer and reprised it Monday at Acadia Rep. Unfortunately, the show doesn’t have a regular run, but Lake hopes to take it on tour this year to theaters, schools and other venues in Maine.

Parker herself once said of a show: “If you don’t knit, bring a book.” But that could never be said of this swanky production. Expertly written and directed by Linda Ames Key and Barbara Pitts, “Excuse My Dust” blazes Parker back to life for an evening of outrageous recollections and stinging reflections. As Parker, Lake jumps around in time, flits about in characters, and ends up presenting a walloping woman whose cogitations and complexities keep the audience clutching for her every snide word and shifty grin.

Parker had a certain elan when it came to being abrasive, vitriolic and flirtatious. Even she said she made self-pity into an art form. Most know Parker as the writer of amusingly cynical one-liners such as “Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses,” “Brevity is the soul of lingerie,” or “Scratch a lover, and find a foe.” In a review of a stage performance by Katharine Hepburn, Parker wrote that the actress “runs the gamut of emotions from A to B.” She is also attributed with the line: “One more drink and I’ll be under the host.”

“Excuse my dust” was the line Parker came up with when she and her wildly articulate and opinionated friends played a game called “epitaph” in which they wrote the words that might show up on their gravestones. The show “Excuse My Dust” is filled with nuggets from Parker’s word games at parties, captions from her work at Vogue, reviews in Vanity Fair and collections of her poems and short stories.

But the writing in this show that links Parker’s words with some insight into her life is equally formidable and shrewd. There’s no real nostalgia or sentimentality here. But there is historical perspective and self-effacement — both of which create Parker as a real person whose bad luck was as much a part of her own personal history as it was a part of the good-old-boy system in which she had to fight for her rightful spot.

Most of the show is adroit mind-flexing fun with scenes from the Round Table luncheons at the Algonquin Hotel in New York as well as from Parker’s fiction. Fitzgerald and Hemingway are there, and so are the editors Robert Benchley and Robert Sherwood, as well as Edna St. Vincent Millay and a cast of others from the Roaring ’20s.

“Excuse My Dust” has plenty to laugh out loud about, but it also has a poignancy and resignation that keeps this 80-minute show balanced and dramatic. Lake knows exactly when to take her pauses, when to let us linger and when to give us a swift kick right in the heart. Except for some scene-changing placards that punctuate the show unnecessarily, the action moves along with the fluidity of a dance piece that has all the brains of ballet and the brawn of the Charleston.