Five women. Six years. In Wendy Wasserstein’s “Uncommon Women and Others,” the women meet in a New York restaurant 1977, six years after they graduated from Mt. Holyoke college for women, one of the traditional “seven sisters” colleges of the East.

The restaurant scene is largely a frame for a series of subsequent vignettes that unfold, a flashback to their senior year in school.

The women emerge as identifiable types: the smarter than anyone else Kate; wild Rita; the lost soul Holly; the traditionalist Samantha; and the one who just wants to find her prince, Muffet.

It’s a curious play, a period piece now, of sorts, that captures young women, at the brink of the women’s lib movement, and altogether unsure what is happening or how much they really want to be a part of it. The plot, as it were, is largely nonexistent; the tension derives from the inner workings of the women.

The Napa Valley College production, directed by Carla Spindt, clearly profits from the insights of the director who grew up in the ’50s and ’60s when her “role models were Cinderella, Snow White, my home economics teacher and my aunt who found her husband at college.” She’s brought together a young and talented cast who are utterly believable as they recreate their roles. A clever staging, seating the audience on stage in a U-shape around the performers, enhances the sense that one has been dropped inside their strangely cloistered world.

Leading the cast is Jillian Jones as Kate, in a performance that sparkles with energy and polish. Jones effectively captures the nervous determination of the smartest of the lot, the one most focused (on getting into Harvard Law), who at the same time clandestinely reads sexy novels and laments, “It would be nice to wake up one morning with nothing to prove.” She also achieves the feat of making her Phi Beta Kappa character likable, even sympathetic.

Krystle Strachan is charming as Samantha, the pretty and unsophisticated girl from the Midwest, whose resolution to the prevailing challenge to be “uncommon women” is to happily become engaged and map out her role as the woman behind the man who will become a great actor.

In the gritty role as Rita is Mary Ewart, tough, provocative and disturbing, but ultimately ineffective. She proclaims, “If I can survive till I’m 30, I’ll be incredible.” Six years later, she’s announcing, “If I can live to 40-45, I’ll be amazing.”

Krisi Pilkington, a familiar face for Dreamweavers audiences, makes her debut on the Napa college stage as Muffet, another character, who, like Samantha, is dragging the ’50s into the ’70s. Small, perky and unremarkable she says wistfully “I really do want to meet my prince. … Why haven’t I met my Heathcliff.” Six years later, she hasn’t met either Prince Charming or Heathcliff but is working in some kind of hospitality role for an insurance company. “I didn’t expect that I’d be supporting myself,” she admits.

Janelle Marshall-Williams is extremely effective as the complex and vulnerable Holly, one of the more interesting characters. She’s rich, black, a little Rubenesque and her idea of rebellion is to put her feet on the table during the daily afternoon tea service. The scenes in which she attempts to call a man she met at the Fogg art museum are near perfect snapshots of a shy girl trying confusedly to make a connection.

The one member of the group who doesn’t make it to the reunion dinner is the lovely Leila, played by Carnida Doran. Kate’s roommate who promptly develops an inferiority complex, she resolves her doubts about herself by going to Iraq to study anthropology.

Surrounding the core group of friends are peripheral characters who enliven the play with the comic touches: Loretta Faye Long is Mrs. Plumm, keeper of Mt. Holyoke traditions and dispenser of afternoon tea. Stephanie Dulay plays Carter, the silent freshman who observes the seniors with a deadpan air of bemusement and, sometimes, sympathy. Ambrosia Nolan is absolutely hilarious as the semi-hysterical Susie Friend, the self-proclaimed spirit leader of the house, in dire need of Valium.

While there are no male characters present in the flesh, they are never far from the stage. The God-like voice of Andrew Nolan rumbles through the theater, recounting the history of Mt. Holyoke and imparting such gems of enlightenment as: “An educated woman’s capacity is not exhausted but stimulated by demands.”

It’s the subject of men that dominates the play, nearly every scene and conversation. It’s curious to think that these women, if they graduated in 1971, must have started their college career in 1967; thus they were students during a rather tumultuous time: riots against the war in Vietnam were shutting down schools across the country; students were shot by the National Guard at Kent State; Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were assassinated; Nixon was elected; a man walked on the moon. Yet the women from Mt. Holyoke were, apparently primarily interested in the comparative anatomy of Harvard and Yale men.

In this sense, they remain a sort of garden variety common woman,  who except for an occasional dash of colorful language, would hardly differ from their predecessors.

My soon-to-be a college student daughter went with me to the Napa college production. As we left the theater I couldn’t help but observing having been at Berkeley in the ’70s, I can’t really recall that many tea parties. In return she said that the play’s dorm conversations didn’t differ much from what she’d heard in hotel rooms on recent school excursions. Therefore, we concluded maybe it really isn’t a period piece as much as an ongoing commentary on the unresolved dilemma of being female and smart.

It is, however, an uncommonly good production at Napa Valley College.

Performances continue this weekend, Friday and Saturday nights at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. Tickets are $12 for adults and $10 for students and seniors. Info, 259-8077.