THEATER : Libby Appel’s Eager to Tell a ‘Story’ That Deserves Repeating : Director of South Coast Repertory production says Lynnda Ferguson is perfect as Philadelphian Tracy Lord in Philip Barry’s rich comedy.

Libby Appel, who is directing the upcoming revival of “The Philadelphia Story” at South Coast Repertory, has an appealing gift for hyperbole.

“There are maybe three people in the world who can play Tracy Lord,” she says of the central character in Philip Barry’s 1939 comedy, which begins previews Friday on the SCR Mainstage. “One is Lynnda Ferguson. The other two are Katharine Hepburn.”

Since Hepburn is really just one person (despite the outsize impression she gives), and since she is of a certain age, not to say retired from the theater, that leaves maybe only one.

Reminded during a recent interview of Blythe Danner’s portrayal of the role in a 1980 Broadway revival that got mixed notices, Appel reacted with a knowing grin, confident that the critical reception merely confirmed her point.

“Blythe Danner is totally wrong,” she asserted. “Lynnda is right. She has the class. She has the style. She has the confidence, the sexuality and the strength. I feel like I’ve discovered America with this girl. I know she’s been discovered before, but I’d never seen her until now. She knocks my socks off.”

Ferguson, an acclaimed actress on both the East and West coasts (in regional theaters and on Broadway), made her 1987 SCR debut as the downed aviatrix in a revival of Shaw’s “Misalliance.” She has just finished playing Olivia in Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night,” which closed Sunday on the SCR Mainstage. Tracy Lord will be her third starring role at the county’s top professional theater.

Appel, who had her socks back on during a break in rehearsals, also took an unexpectedly solemn view of a play that many regard as Barry’s most delicious piece of theatrical candy. Set in the Lord family’s Main Line mansion, it lightly satirizes the peccadilloes of Philadelphia high society while chronicling the romantic entanglements of a privileged, young divorcee who is about to get remarried.

“When I reread it, I found out it isn’t fizzy comedy,” said the Brooklyn-born director. “I think it plays like Noel Coward, but it’s Chekhov underneath. That may sound a little heavy, maybe too heavy. We’re certainly not going against the comic strain. But it’s not Kaufman and Hart.

“Philip Barry is much richer. He’s interested in drawing three-dimensional characters with their three-dimensional pain. Of course the play is charming. Of course it’s funny. It’s like wonderful cake, but it’s not just frosting. It has substance.”

The substance--call it Appel strudel--is “Tracy’s coming of age” on her wedding weekend, brought about by her confrontation with a reporter from Destiny magazine who arrives with a photographer to do an in-depth profile of the fashionable wedding and is not too happy about the assignment.

The meeting between the radical reporter-with-the-chip-on-his-shoulder and the frosty princess-with-the-silver-spoon-in-her-mouth involves the sort of meltdown that transforms her harsh judgment of virtually everyone around her, including her father and especially her former husband.

“Tracy has led an insular life up to this point,” Appel said. “Everyone has taken care of the hard work for her. In the meantime, she has an extremely puritanical attitude toward people who don’t live up to her standards.

“If she continues along that road, she’s bound for bitterness and cynicism. She needs to be knocked in the kisser, and she comes up against Destiny--the magazine of course. The two spies from Destiny are the catalytic force.”

Audiences seeing the original Broadway production would have recognized Destiny as a thinly disguised stand-in for Fortune, which had begun publishing trend-setting personality pieces at the time about the nation’s movers and shakers.

But while “The Philadelphia Story” seems nothing if not prescient about the sort of high-gloss celebrity journalism that has become commonplace today--let alone the pervasive tabloid mentality given fresh impetus by the current presidential campaign--Appel prefers not to underscore that aspect of the play for contemporary audiences.

She believes playgoers will make a more spontaneous, if starry-eyed, connection with the flawed sophisticates of Barry’s cosmopolitan drawing-room comedy.

“What’s important to understand,” she said, “is that these are people of quality. They are kind of like royalty, like the Kennedy family. As we saw at William Smith’s rape trial, the jurors were touched just by hearing (his uncle) Ted Kennedy speak. Well, that’s royalty. And that’s what these people are, (but) a little more akin to English aristocracy.”

SCR playgoers may or may not take to the Lords of Philadelphia with such worshipful devotion, but audiences long ago set the play and the 1940 movie made from it on a pedestal. “The Philadelphia Story” was enormously popular in its time.

For Hepburn, who starred in both, it was a huge personal triumph. She not only scored her greatest Broadway success with it but also reversed her paradoxical Hollywood reputation as a star who was “box-office poison.” Moreover, everyone knew Barry had written the script for her, not merely by tailoring it to her but by grafting her own well-known patrician attributes onto Tracy Lord.

Barry, too, experienced a popular resurrection. For almost two decades he had turned out roughly one play a year. “The Philadelphia Story” was his 16th Broadway production. But after initial success in 1923 with “You and I,” followed by a handful of hits up through “The Animal Kingdom” in 1932--most notably “Paris Bound” in 1927 and “Holiday” in 1928--Barry suffered an eclipse.

Though he lived among the rich and frivolous, he had a deeply religious streak. He also wanted to escape his pigeonhole as a writer of “high comedy.” Despite various efforts to do so, however, he seemed out of touch. He had a series of flops, beginning with “Hotel Universe” in 1930 and continuing with “The Joyous Season” in 1934, “Bright Star” in 1935, “Spring Dance” in 1936 and “Here Come the Clowns” in 1938.

Indeed, even after “The Philadelphia Story,” Barry was never to achieve the same success again. Before he died in 1949, he wrote another four plays and one unfinished script titled “Second Threshold.” It was completed by his friend, the playwright Robert Sherwood, and given a posthumous production in 1951. But the title was wishful thinking. Like the other plays, it didn’t really work.

“Barry always had serious intentions,” said Appel, who has no lack of them herself in a multiplicity of roles.

After “The Philadelphia Story”--which she took over when Warner Shook, the originally designated director, had the chance to stage “The Kentucky Cycle” at Los Angeles’ Mark Taper Forum instead--Appel is scheduled to direct Peter Shaffer’s “Lettice and Lovage” in Salt Lake City and Ibsen’s “Master Builder” in San Jose.

Then, in July, she becomes the artistic director of Indiana Repertory in Indianapolis--thus joining only a dozen or so women heading major regional theaters in this country.

“I’ve been on the road nonstop for about two years,” said Appel, who is also a nationally recognized acting teacher, the author of several books, a divorced mother of two grown children and the former dean of the Theatre School at California Institute of the Arts in Valencia (a post she held from 1980 to 1989).

“I guess I’m the flavor of the month. But as good as the road has been, it made clear that the next stage of my life is to put down roots again. I love coming in as a kind of visiting queen and doing my show. But I want to know how ticket sales are going. I want to shape a whole season. It’s a larger commitment.”

“The Philadelphia Story” begins previews Friday at 8 p.m. and opens Feb. 28 at South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tickets: $15 to $22 (previews); $23 to $32 (regular run to March 29). Information: (714) 957-4033.