WINTERTIME

At the Second Stage Theatre, 307 W. 43rd St., (212) 246-4422.

‘WINTERTIME” is like a Mozart opera minus the music and without the lyrics.

Charles L. Mee – known for such mythical updates as “Big Love” (which brought Aeschylus’ “Choephori” to Vietnam) and “True Love” (which set Euripides’ “Phaedra” in a garage) – likes to play clumsy games with the classics.

Here, under the dull direction of David Schweizer, Mee has a bunch of people assemble in a wintry country house and have trouble with love.

Heading the household are Maria, played by Marsha Mason (the original “Goodbye Girl”) in a French accent that comes and goes, and Frank, played adequately by Nicholas Hormann.

Both have lovers. Frank is visited by his whiny paramour, Edmund (T. Scott Cunningham). Maria has a flamboyant French lover, Francois, a smirking, posing, insufferable Michael Cerveris.

Also dropping in are Marie and Frank’s collegiate son, Jonathan (Christopher Denham) and his girlfriend, Ariel (Brienin Bryant), who have a big fight over Ariel’s previous romantic entanglement.

These types chat and quarrel endlessly and tiresomely; Mason’s bosomy Maria constantly changes her clothes.

At one point, a delivery man (Danny Mastrogiorgio) comes by and offers his thoughts on love in Plato and Sappho.

But all the would-be playfulness falls flat, since Mee – unlike, say, Shaw – doesn’t have the gift for bringing what’s in his mind to dramatic life.

That said, the setting of “Wintertime” is enchanting and original. Designed by Andrew Lieberman, it presents a winterscape that crazily, dreamily blends outdoors and indoors. A scattering of branchy trees mingle with couches; coffee pots snuggle in the snow and skis repose alongside wine bottles.

This helter-skelter mixing of nature and nurture seems to want to tell us something. Would that Lieberman had written the play.