Ghost story

Trinity’s gleeful Blithe Spirit

April 8, 2008 4:44:04 PM

THREE’S A CROWD: Brazil, Kay, and Sullivan.

Audiences just wanna have fun. Sometimes. It’s for such occasions that Noël Coward wrote Blithe Spirit in 1941, when everyone in England could use its comic relief from wartime woes. (Its premiere, though, raised a brief ruckus from the Colonel Blimps, who harrumphed at any mention of death.)

Coward saved his messages for Western Union, except for the witty suggestions in his songs. Trinity Repertory Company is taking Blithe Spirit and pulling out all the laughs as well as all the stops, in a furiously physical, knock-down, drag-out production directed by Curt Columbus (through April 27).

The action takes place in the elaborate living room of the Condomines, Charles (Fred Sullivan, Jr.) and Ruth (Angela Brazil). She still needs reassurances that his previous wife, who died seven years before, was less attractive than she and is hardly missed at all. His comforting fibs are tested that evening when a séance yanks his surprised ex-wife from the Other World and plunks her back into his life.

That living room, by the way, is virtually an additional character. We can assume that the crystal chandelier is Baccarat or better because the painting above the fireplace is a Picasso, a Cubist figure nearly as disjointed as these two will soon feel. Designed by James Schuette, the set establishes a comfortable opulence, with books stacked next to a love seat — on which, we later learn, the dearly departed expired.

Few opportunities are not mined for gems. On opening night, before she entered the room, Cynthia Strickland had the audience laughing as she used a silly voice to greet her hosts as Mrs. Bradman, half of the other couple invited to the séance. Before Strick¬land said another word, she had me slapping a knee as she briskly wobbled in. Emitting squeals and beaming brightly, she used momentum instead of a walker. Actors know they own an audience when they get laughs on a line as simple as, “I’d love having my fortune told!” William Damkoehler has the subtle task of portraying the long-suffering Dr. Bradman. Reaching for a drink, he is grinning one moment and the next looking as penitent as an Inquisi¬tion sinner under his wife’s whip-snap glance.

As the medium, Madame Arcati, Barbara Meek delivers plenty of enjoyable, back-of-hand-to-forehead intentional excesses. But the most delicious opportunities for emotional fulminations are saved, of course, for Sullivan and Brazil, as the ghost-beset Charles and Ruth. His character is a novelist who was hoping that the medium would be a blatant fraud from whom he could get ideas for his next book. But before long, between exasperation over a spirit only he can see and frustration at first over not being able to convince his current wife that he is not playing a mean trick, Sullivan flashes between numbed patience and dagger-eyed glares like a lighthouse in a hurricane.

As enjoyable as the other performances are, Ruth’s threatened situation gives Brazil the opportunity to steal the show here. She gets to run the full emotional spectrum, from dutiful understanding to pop-eyed outrage. What could be funnier than Brazil doing Olympic leaps about the room, trying to catch the wires that must be dangling the objects Elvira (Phyllis Kay) is carrying around to prove she’s there? Well, a contender is her climactic hissy fit, which brought down the house.

By and large, Kay plays the returned Elvira as a relatively tranquil sea of calm amidst the two human typhoons dervishing around her. Elvira’s back story is that of a free spirit, so much so that she literally died laughing, so I could have used, oh, perhaps some pouting girlishness in some exchanges. But director Columbus apparently wanted to employ Elvira as placid contrast, like somebody setting a chair down in the middle of a barroom brawl to observe the participants with bemusement when not dodging flying objects.

I do have a quibble about some of the cast members’ accents, which sometimes hover in the mid-Atlantic and sometimes drift onto either shore. When Damkoehler first spoke, I thought he was establishing the point that Dr. Bradman was an American. Sorry, but although we soon forget about that sort of thing once engrossed in a play, it does distract from where they want us to get and stay.

But all in all, Trinity helmsman Columbus has steered this production away from any doldrums here. The wind in this Blithe Spirit’s sails is the laughter propelling it.