"Woman Seeking... theatre West" is the confusing name of a new theater company that just inaugurated its West Coast branch with Last Summer at Bluefish Cove. (A brief history of WS... tW: Artistic director Christine Mosere founded Woman Seeking... in New York City 11 years ago, eventually wanted to move her family elsewhere, and chose Seattle.)

The core story of Bluefish Cove is both familiar and daunting: A tough, smart woman dying of cancer is surrounded by her close friends for their last summer together at Bluefish Cove. But the play's surface is all shimmery, queer romantic comedy: Bluefish Cove is a secret summer beach retreat for a group of East Coast lesbians, all of whom have known each other (carnally and otherwise) for decades. When a recently divorced straight woman stumbles into their haven, all wacky hell breaks loose.

First produced in 1980, Bluefish Cove thumps along with the comic pacing and kooky characters from that Golden Era of Sitcoms (think Taxi and WKRP). The subplots are exhausting, but you can infer them from the play’s four couples: the wealthy patrician (matrician?) and the spoiled brat, the hippie homemaker and the sculptor, the best-selling feminist author (who is strategically closeted, the better to subvert heartland housewives) and the droll secretary—plus the dying-of-cancer one (who is also the group’s libertine) and the recently divorced naïf (who must, for the sake of dramatic symmetry, fall in love with the dying-of-cancer one).

Besides its plot devices and caricatured types, Bluefish Cove also inherited that Golden Age’s tolerance for sudden punches of ham-fisted pathos. A typical offence: “Kitty, Bluefish Cove is more than just a lesbian beach colony—it’s a family.” But when it isn’t clobbering you over the head, the script, by Jane Chambers (1937–1983), is both sweet and wry. Its patter aspires to the frank lightness of Noël Coward’s—and it sometimes rises to the occasion. (Wikipedia trivia: The L Word apparently traces its name to a bit of dialogue from My Blue Heaven, a Jane Chambers play from 1981: “You’re really—? The L-word? Lord God, I never met one before.”)

The eight women of Bluefish Cove fight, flirt, reminisce, hold forth on feminism and gay liberation, and tell each other to please shut the hell up about feminism and gay liberation already. The performances vary widely (to put it charitably), but Laura Kenny leads the pack with a lovably bombastic performance as the alpha-female Dr. Cochrane. Eleanor Moseley makes a steely and seductive Lil (the dying one), with a few dashes of the flapper—she's a drinker, a smoker, and a loner. Her stubborn pride in the face of death and her summer love affair with the divorcée (played by artistic director Mosere) dominate the play's sadder second half.

Opening night was a benefit for Gilda's Club, an organization for people with cancer and their families—there was a lot of quiet sniffling during the last 10 minutes of Bluefish Cove.