PITFALLS OF MEMORY

To the Editors:

In Oliver Sacks’s otherwise beneficial essay on the ways our memory of the past may mislead us [NYR, February 21], he maintains that such phenomena as “source confusions,” “autoplagiarisms” and “cryptomnesias” document its frailties. What we sometimes consider to be veridical memories of events may be no such thing and may, in fact, be false. He references the disastrous legacy of the so-called “recovered memory” movement in psychology, aimed at uncovering repressed memories of early sexual abuse. Unfortunately, it is still with us. Assuring us that we possess no cortical mechanisms for determining the truth or accuracy of our recollections, Sacks goes on to underscore the often elusive character of “historical” as opposed to “narrative” truth: what we deem to be past realities may be constructions of our imagination. But then he avers that such aberrations are “relatively rare” and that our memories are for the most part “solid and reliable.”

            You cannot have it both ways. If we lack inborn mechanisms to determine the truth or falsity of our memories, on what basis can we be sure that most of them are, as Sacks insists, reliable? He takes pains to illustrate the vagaries of memory by referring to Freud’s contribution to the subject, indicating that the father of psychoanalysis uncovered “grosser distortions” of memory when he realized that patient accounts of early sexual abuse were “fantasies.” Commentary on the subject in recent years has raised doubts over whether Freud really obtained “reports” or was actually confusing patient memories with interpretations he forced upon them. If the latter, then memory distortion can even assail investigators pioneering the study of the subject. Accordingly, if false memories can infiltrate hallowed corridors of received wisdom, maybe sometimes it’s not better to let sleeping dogmatists lie.

 

D. A. Begelman

New Milford, Connecticut 

‘Master Class’ is riveting drama at Shakespeare & Company

 

By David Begelman

Theater Critic

 

Word has it that Terrence McNally’s play about Maria Callas was inspired both by his love of opera and the classes she scheduled at the Juilliard School in New York City in the early 1970s. But during those appearances, well after her days of glory in leading opera houses, the diva did sing passages from arias in order to demonstrate their proper interpretation.

In McNally’s play, however, the actress who takes the role usually talks around the subject—for obvious reasons. Any simulation of one of the great sopranos of our time doing her thing is bound to result in invidious comparisons between the real diva and the performers who take on the role.

“Master Class” at any rate doesn’t depend on depictions of Callas singing. The play is about her as a person, someone who is portrayed in the drama as intolerant of the artistry of rivals including Zinka Milanov and Joan Sutherland, merciless when it comes to training three aspiring singers at Juilliard, and a survivor of some ravaging personal experiences in her ascent to the pinnacle of fame.

The show opened in 1995, with Zoe Caldwell in the lead and the stunning soprano Audra McDonald as Sharon Graham, one of her students. In Shakespeare & Company’s current production, the veteran actress Annette Miller is Callas, while Deborah Grausman is Sharon.

In the show, Callas’ approach to operatic interpretation involves a near fanatical emphasis on emotional preparation. She stops Sophie (Nora Menken) from singing an aria from Bellini’s “La Sonnambula” before the soprano barely opens her mouth. As far as the diva is concerned, the student has no conception of the emotional work demanded of her.

Maybe McNally’s Callas is a bit too hard on her performers. Although emotional preparation (a.k.a. acting) has improved over the years, the acting abilities of singers with glorious voices like Gigli, Melchior, Tucker and Bjoerling were often less than commanding.

But “Master Class” is only partially about singing, however much the lead character’s part is devoted to its technical aspects. When she pulls back from vocal coaching, McNally’s drama becomes a memory play in which Callas reprises vulnerable moments in her life. These include her youthful days as an “ugly duckling,” being savaged by critics earlier in her career, her marriage and separation from her first husband, her later triumphs at opera houses like La Scala, and her relationship with Aristotle Onassis, as well as the abortion he forced her to have.

As in previous productions, the Director Daniel Gidron’s Shakespeare & Company’s staging includes actual recordings of the real Callas singing signature roles from her repertoire.

Miller’s portrayal of Callas tugs at the heartstrings, although on rare occasions became a bit affected and declamatory. Nora Menken, Alec Donaldson and Deborah Grausman gave pleasing interpretations of students singing arias by Bellini, Puccini and Verdi, while Luke Reed as Manny the accompanist and Josephine Wilson as a blunt stagehand supplied some lighter moments in the production.

“Master Class” runs through August 18 at the Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre, Shakespeare & Company, 70 Kemble Street, Lenox, Mass. Performances are Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday 8:30 p.m., Sunday matinees 3 p.m. Tickets are $15-$50 and may be purchased by calling the box office at 413-637-3353 or online at www.shakespeare.org.   

     

 

 

  

 

 

Marital Twitters: Donald Margulies’ Dinner with Friends at The Schoolhouse Theater

 

David Begelman

Dinner with Friends is about two couples whose separate marriages go in different directions. It won a 2000 Pulitzer Prize for drama, and recapitulates all the clichés it is possible to track in marital relationships that seem to be going well or are already on the rocks. That playwright Donald Margulies, author of Sight Unseen and Collected Stories, depicts this with at least a modicum of humor in a script that more or less sustains an audience’s attention, says something about his writing ability.

The playwright has a flair for dialogue brimming with yuppie sensibility. At the opening of the play, two of the partners in his drama, Karen and Gabe, have invited their friend Beth to dinner. Before the conversation takes a somber turn, Beth marvels at Karen’s talents in the kitchen, although the latter fears she may have overcooked the pumpkin risotto. She also wonders whether she should have beaten the eggs a bit more when preparing the lemon cake with polenta.

These culinary perseverations should alert any anthropologist opting to catalogue a primal rite of discourse over food and wine in this social set. In some groups, the patter inevitably continues unabated even through the most perilous of circumstances, like hurricanes or earthquakes. No meat and potatoes crowd, this. More likely than not, you’ll also find it watching a sunset rather than a baseball game, just as the couples do in Act 2, Scene 1, when Karen and Gabe introduce Beth to Tom for the first time.

Of course, there are cracks in the veneer. Karen, (played convincingly by Quinn Cassavale as a somewhat prissy and controlling wife), takes an occasion to scream upstairs to kids making noise while watching television. The stridency of her tone has a Bronx tenement, not Martha’s Vineyard, ring to it. But household manners are, for the most part, scrupulously consistent. Which means that when things go awry in a marriage in this crowd, it’s dollars to donuts the problem is pretty nearly always one of communication, or the frustration of unspoken latent need  (as in Act !, Scene 2, when Beth and Tom have at each other). Donnybrooks with flying beer bottles would be decidedly out of character for these folks.

Beth and Tom’s meltdowns are, accordingly, bouts of fury that have natural limits. But those of Karen and Gabe by contrast could have been packaged in Bloomingdale’s. Gabe (played with a marital devotion that sometimes verges on cowering) is especially wary of ruffling the occasionally snippy Karen.  

In the middle of the sedate Act 1, Scene 1 repartee between Beth (played emotionally, and with sudden bursts of tempestuousness by Jolynn Baca), Karen and Gabe, Beth suddenly starts crying uncontrollably. The reason is that her marriage to her husband Tom (played as a spouse struggling to come out of his marital cocoon of unrequited need) has broken down irreparably. The remainder of Dinner with Friends includes scenes between Karen and Gabe, Beth and Tom, Karen and Beth, Gabe and Tom, and a flashback scene when the married couple introduces Tom to Beth at the outset of what will later prove to be a doomed relationship.

All manner of explanation for the rift between Beth and Tom is explored by Karen and Gabe, with a scarcely concealed nervousness about the implications it has for their own marriage. Gabe finally muses about what can happen when “practical matters outweigh abandon,” while Karen poses the searching question, “Don’t you ever miss me, Gabe?” All because what Beth and Tom have been through comes to shatter complacency about a marriage Karen and Gabe thought was as solid as anything could be.

Well, between considering the piety that it’s never wise to be overly smug about anything in a relationship, and the truism that if things don’t work out it’s best to split, there’s not much wiggle room for other options, anyhow. So what’s the literary point of Dinner with Friends? To rehearse two scenarios for audiences so they can wonder which one they are in? There is little here that is imaginative in the way of dramatic conflict. It’s pretty much the same old stuff we’ve heard time and again—off stage and on.

Director Pamela Moller Kareman does a credible job organizing the interplay among four actors who turn in distinct and contrasting interpretations of their roles. Quinn Cassavale as Karen and Steve Perlmutter radiate a conviction about the durability of what they have together, before the dissolving relationship of two friends gives them pause to question their staid thing. Jolynn Baca as Beth and Christopher Yates as Tom battle each other and their uncomprehending friends with verve before they both see newer possibilities in their separate lives.

Ken Larson’s scenic design was a bit on the slapdash side, and forfeited accommodation to the action so that darkened scene changes could avoid seeming awkward and prolonged.   

Dinner with Friends opened at The Schoolhouse Theater, 3 Owens Road, Croton Falls, NY 10519 on May 14, 2009, and runs until June 7, 2009. Tickets may be purchased by calling the box office at 914-277-8477, or online at www,schoolhousetheater.org.

 

Published in Citizen News, May 20, 2009       

Macbeth

 

He is a man at war with himself--in a unique way. He gulls himself into believing he is undecided or uncertain about plans he fully intends to undertake from the beginning. So there are actually two Macbeths who are protagonists in the tragedy.

His dialogues with himself are masterworks of feigned narratives when they are not so transparent that real intentions break through. For Macbeth 1 needs to convince Macbeth 2 he is plagued by internal dilemmas when he only seeks reassurance his plans will not backfire. In line with this, he strains to identify the ambiguity of the world with an internal moral struggle, play acting as relentlessly with himself as he does with others. The masquerade is taken to such lengths, it becomes second nature to him to confuse bombast driven by fear with authentic soul-searching. Only one thing unnerves him: the unknowability of the future, and his Act III monologues, far from being the agonies of a soul cast in self-doubt, are only feigned consolations that it will all go off without a hitch.

Macbeth's life theme is how efficiently he can seize the moment to ensure the inevitability of outcomes that were guaranteed before he began fretting about them. His energies are so bound up with self-subterfuge, he has little time for examining the probity of his aims. Rather, he devotes himself to the destruction of those who would undermine his goals: Duncan, Banquo, and the Macduffs.

Macbeth's determination, amorality, apprehensiveness about the future, and relentless need to cheer himself up combine to create a unique life strategy: casting others in roles necessary to bolster a view of himself. He seems to be saying, "If I wish to accomplish X, I shall convince myself I have certain reservations, and will seek those who will play the Devil's Advocate against my professed uncertainties. Macbeth's career of sham self-doubt creates an aura of moral circumspection. But the hesitant accommodation to natural law is artificial, and manufactured to assure himself he verges on being an all right guy underneath meaner ambitions that make a mockery of such pretensions.

Contrary to the view that Macbeth is a family man however corrupt, he is a totally private person. And far from being under the thumb of his wife, she too is another pawn in his game of self-subterfuge. From Act III to the end of the play she is dramatically unimportant, and is kept in the dark about her husband's designs on Banquo. If after Act II she hardly matters, why should critics assume she matters momentously before it? Macbeth's long-range plans were already finalized before his entrance in the first act, and Act I, Scene VII, is not the picture of a resolute wife resolving her husband's legitimate doubts, but of a husband tricking his spouse into appropriating the role of a partner in simulated war games. "Prove to me I won't fail" demands the general. "You won't if you buck up, old boy," consoles the consultant, "your enemy is within yourself." He has deceived her into thinking he has reservations over murdering Duncan, when what he really seeks is confirmation the whole thing will go off without a hitch. The irony of the scene is that he permits his wife's reassurance to allay his uncertainties about the future, even though it is based upon an inaccurate assessment of his motives.

Macbeth plays the same game with himself he plays with his wife. Witness his monologue at the beginning of Act I, Scene VII, another masterpiece of obfuscation, prefaced by a slew of pseudo-justifications for not killing Duncan:

He's here in double trust:

First, as I am his kinsman and his subject

Strong both against the deed

 

Yet what is the mood of these reservations? Do they smack of personal conviction because Duncan is kinsman and sovereign? Or are they a phony rehearsal of reasons to hold back, as if the general were recapitulating the justification others would supply against regicide? That the latter hypothesis is the correct one is suggested by the fact that Macbeth straddles categorically dissimilar reasons for condemning the deed--too many in fact to convince us the litany stems from heartfelt feeling. Consider likewise another of his recriminations:

Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye

In other words, murder ruins your reputation. But if regicide were morally wrong to begin with, it is redundant to consider how committing it will tarnish one's reputation in the eyes of the kingdom!

Macbeth's litany of reasons against regicide is simply a rehearsal of bromides he has no intention of heeding. But they afford him the luxury of convincing himself he is both human and circumspect in a nerve-wracking business that may, for all he knows, boomerang. Macbeth is topical. He reminds us of all those contemporary politicians who surround themselves with toadies who tell them what they wanted to hear in the first place Afterwards, they insist their decisions were undertaken only after serious consideration of advisor feedback.

Macbeth murders Banquo seemingly to terminate a hereditary line. But there is another motive behind the act: Banquo, after Lady Macbeth, was personally closest to the hero. There are hints in Act I that Macbeth and Banquo feel they were on the same wave length, and could read each other's thoughts. So Macbeth fears Banquo for reasons other than the latter's being a hereditary competitor to the throne, for the victim has a

royalty of nature

Which would be feared. 'Tis much he dares;

And, to that dauntless temper of his mind

He hath a wisdom that doth guide his valor

To act in safety

In other words, Banquo is too savvy a person, and may prove to be a monkey wrench in the murderous designs of the hero. ( Macbeth has the suspicion Banquo sees through him, making him a dangerous adversary. The latter has invaded the general's personal space, and may in future act on the knowledge he gleans from it.) Apprehension over Banquo's personal traits is made to fade into concerns about the future royal line, and it is quite in the mode of Macbeth's thinking to pass imperceptibly to one set of fears from another so that the first is obscured. This way, the general conveys the impression he harbors anxieties about only one thing. Being on the same wave length with Banquo was suggested at the outset of the drama:

Think upon what hath chanced, and at more time

The interim having weighed it, let us speak

Our free hearts to each other

 

The earlier intimacy is yet another threat to vaulting ambition, inasmuch as it portends Banquo's being privy to the general's true character and intentions.

Ionesco’s Exit the King at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre

 

David Begelman

 

Judging from the Neil Armfield and Geoffrey Rush adaptation of Eugene Ionesco’s masterful 1962 drama, Le Roi se meurt, the burdens of royalty extend to many things. In their sumptuous production, director Armfield has three characters, a king and his past and present queens, traipse across the stage in cumbersome, overly long robes they have to manage with royal aplomb, if only to move from one spot to another. Their sweeps of ermine-laced garments accentuate highly placed positions in a realm that is, alas, on its last wobbly legs. Even the sun doesn’t shine as brightly as it once did in the kingdom, while the royal palace is a ramshackle shadow of its former glory.

The 400 year-old King Berenger’s world is closer to collapse than he ever imagined. His death looms but 90 minutes away—the length of the show, as his Queen Marguerite wryly observes—although he resists its clammy proximity tooth and nail, preferring instead to “rage against the dying of the light.”

It is something of a mystery why Ionesco’s Exit the King is not performed on American stages more often. It is certainly one of his most impressive works. Perhaps its mordant note about an end to dreams of empire resonates with our current political situation; maybe the centennial year of the playwright’s birth had something to do with mounting the current production—who knows? Whatever the reason, theatergoers who miss this show will sacrifice an opportunity to experience something special: an impressive staging of a play by the author of The Rhinocerous and The Bald Soprano.

Ionesco has been described as an “absurdist” dramatist along with others, like Samuel Beckett. Yet the term refers to bodies of work of quite different scope. Beckett’s world is one in which language and experience are disconnected against the backdrop of an elusive reality, whereas Ionesco strikes a more Gnostic note: the rejection of the tangible world altogether. Reportedly, this theme had its origin earlier in the playwright’s life when, under a summer sun, he experienced a “luminosity” and sense of well being before a sudden world of empty meaning dawned upon him. Exit the King resonates with the same theme, although one revolving around the efforts of a monarch to stay alive in a world that no longer matters.

The production of Exit the King at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre is a polished one, with six accomplished actors turning in fine, although markedly different characterizations. A bravura performance by the Australian actor, Geoffrey Rush, as King Berenger, is the highlight of the show, and one that in all likelihood will be talked about for years to come.

This is Mr. Rush’s Broadway debut, and moviegoers are familiar with his portrayals in such films as Shine, Shakespeare in Love, Quills, The Tailor of Panama, and Pirates of the Caribbean. Less known is his training under Jacques LeCoq, an innovator in “physical theatre.”  The stint was no doubt instrumental in contributing to the actor’s gift for mime and stage movement. There are several moments in the production at which his accomplished vaudevillian, faux-balletic prancing and jigs drew peals of laughter from the audience. Yet the power of his performance lay in the way he combined the comic and tragic aspects of his role.

Other performers contributed solidly to the success of the production. Susan Sarandon (who had major roles in such films as Bernard and Doris, Thelma and Louise, The Witches of Eastwick, and won an 1995 Oscar for her role in Dead Man Walking) plays Queen Marguerite. The character at first strikes an ongoing cynical note at the pretensions of the king; yet she is the one whose final act of devotion is to guide the anguished monarch into accepting his demise.

The interaction between king and queen at the end of the play, while drawn out, may have been scripted purposely this way by Ionesco, as though he were delineating the end of a life as a slowly diminishing musical note.

Andrea Martin, a seasoned Broadway trouper, plays Juliette, a palace maid who scurries about the business of useless tasks for the king like a harassed gopher, grumbling all the way. Hers was a hugely funny and accomplished portrayal.

Lauren Ambrose is a younger Queen Marie, a royal figure of devotion to King Berenger, whose nerves were continually frayed by his dramatic posturings, while William Sadler as The Doctor brought this character’s obscure wisdom to bear on the king’s existential plight. Part physician, part alchemist, part magician and astrologer, he is every fairy-tale’s version of the court advisor whose head is crammed with the impenetrable stuff of non-existent truth.

Brian Hutchison as The Guard cuts a convincing picture of the palace sentry. Armored and robotic in both his movement and his responses to events going on around him, he is the quintessential yes-man for King Berenger. The Guard is perhaps Ionesco’s playful commentary on military culture, and one that would in all likelihood not sit well with an audience of American Legion veterans.

Humor was no stranger to Ionesco, nor to the current adaptors of his play. In his 1955 drama Jack, or The Submission, the playwright’s version of a son’s rebellion against his parents takes an extravagant turn. Impossibly, they insist he marry a girl with two noses. Quite naturally, he protests—but only because he wishes to marry one with three. In the current production of Exit the King, there is an enormous clap of thunder in a section of the play, whereupon all characters are suddenly seen scurrying about under a strobe light. When the disturbing event ceases, King Berenger exclaims: “What the f__ was that?” This sets the audience to howling, but obviously not at anything Ionesco had a hand in writing. 

Dale Ferguson’s forlorn set was well appointed for the play, and reminiscent of the surreal paintings of Eugene Berman, while Damien Cooper’s lighting enveloped the ongoing action wonderfully.

At the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, there was no advance notice in the playbill of the use of strobe lighting to alert audience members who had seizure disorders. Ordinarily, the requirement to avoid such a mishap is a slower flash rate. Unlike some Ionesco dialogue, not funny.

Exit the King opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, 243 West 47^th Street, NYC, on March 26, 2009, and closes on June 14, 2009. Performances are: Tuesday at 7 PM; Wednesday – Saturday at 8 PM; Wednesday and Saturday at 2 PM; and Sunday at 3 PM. Tickets range from $66.50 to $250.50, Students: $26.50. Tickets may be purchased online www.playbill.com  or at the box office, 212-239-6200.

 

This review was published in the Citizen News of New Fairfield, Connecticut, May 13, 2009           

  

January  28, 2012

NYRB: LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

In his otherwise commendable overview of Daniel Kahneman’s contributions to psychology, Freeman Dyson winds up in the latter part of his review close to a conceptual tailspin. Bemoaning Kahneman’s alleged failure to reference Sigmund Freud in his book or its thirty-two pages of endnotes, Dyson launches into broadsides about the omission that bear further scrutiny.

Dyson notes the scientific diminuendo of enthusiasm for Freud’s psychoanalysis, both as an explanatory enterprise and treatment approach, and references commentary by Sir Peter Medawar and Frederick Crews. The contemporary disenchantment, however, is far more widespread than many suppose, and includes commentary by such notables as Thomas Szasz, Ernest Nagel, Karl Popper, Karl Kraus, Vladimir Nabokov, Adolph Grünbaum, Malcolm Macmillan, Ludwig Wittgenstein, not to mention a long tradition of academic psychology that is centuries old. Yet Dyson, opting to ignore the fact that this dissenting tradition includes spokespersons who have harbored doubts about the scientific and empirical basis for Freud’s system, clings to the belief that Hahneman’s work somehow lacks appreciation of the “insights” of the founder of psychoanalysis. The stance is all the more paradoxical, since Dyson elects to characterize the difference between Freud and Hahneman as between “literary” and “scientific” contributions. (As early as 1895, we find Freud admitting that, “It still strikes me as strange that the case histories I write should read like short stories and that, as one might say, they lack the serious stamp of science.”) But if the value of an explanatory system is its appeal to a “literary,” rather than a “scientific” sensibility, why is it a scientific shortcoming to ignore it in a fresh approach to psychological theorizing? And just why are Freud’s insights “complementary,” rather than “contradictory” to Hahneman’s, as Dyson avers? In just what sense does literary value “complement” scientific value in a purely scientific formulation?  

Dyson makes several other curious observations. As against Hahneman’s experimental approach, he contrasts William James along with Freud as a thinker more given to literary, rather than scientific contributions, calling the two “artists” rather than “scientists.” The example is an unfortunate one to illustrate his point, since James in 1890 published the seminal “Principles of Psychology,” a work that along with the laboratory studies of Wundt, Fechner and Helmholz in Germany in the same century set the stage for what was to later become a rich tradition of experimental psychology. And, contrary to Dyson, it was not Hahneman who “was to make psychology an experimental science,” but a tradition begun a century or so before he was born! Nor did he “revolutionize” psychology; he only made an important contemporary contribution to it.

Other of Dyson’s comments would appear to suggest that his familiarity with psychology may be somewhat on the deficient side. According to him, “strong emotions and obsessions cannot be experimentally controlled,” a proposition that seems to be confusing ethical constraints on certain types of research with methodologies that are quite equal to the explanatory challenge. At any rate, investigators like Stanley Milgram, Harry Harlow, Joseph Wolpe and Philip Zimbardo might take exception to any opinion that they were not dealing in their studies with strong emotions. And a long tradition in physiological psychology investigating arousal states from anxiety to penile tumescence is rich in precisely the kind of knowledge Dyson seems to be maintaining is off limits to its methods.   

   

    

 

 

‘Blithe Spirit’ a treat at Brewster

 David Begelman

Theater Critic

While Director Debbie Levin of the Brewster Theater Company is convinced that Noel Coward’s comedy, “Blithe Spirit” was written in 1941 to distract London audiences from merciless German bombings, there may be another element in its creation .

The play is about arranging the return of Charles Condomine’s deceased wife, Elvira, from the dead with the help of a medium, Madame Arcati. It’s no secret that the British have long had a thing for spiritualism and séances, and if the avidity with which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle pursued the interest—much to the dismay of Harry Houdini—is any indication, the English appetite for the paranormal runs pretty deep.

Perhaps there’s a lesson to be learned about the departed forever haunting dark corridors of homes and castles, as in Oscar Wilde’s “The Canterville Ghost.” The conceit may be a metaphor for keeping an imperial past alive in an empire that fears the sun is fast setting on everything old and honored. And just maybe a bit of a hankering for the past is haunting “Blithe Spirit” as much as is Elvira.

The real delight in the comedy is the eccentric antics of Madame Arcarti (played with the requisite measure of ditziness by Jody Bayer in the new, enjoyable Brewster production). Her rituals preparatory to raising the dead are so outrageous, they even put off the ghost who is summoned up.

No moviegoer can forget the portrayal of Madame Arcati by the incomparable Margaret Rutherford in the 1945 David Lean film. She carried her flair for delicious dottiness into subsequent roles, like Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple.

Charles Condomine (the versatile Bruce Tredwell) arranges a séance in order to come up with material for his novel about a psychic charlatan. He and his wife Ruth (well crafted by Dianna Waller), together with Dr. George Bradman (Brian DeToma) and Mrs. Bradman (Suzanne Ochs) are confirmed disbelievers until their convictions are shattered by knockings and table shakings during the séance.

To the surprise of all except Madame Arcati, these premonitory signs leave everyone visibly shaken, just like their séance table. The Condomine maid, Edith (Kristen T. Casey) seems to be especially vulnerable to the goings on, reacting to them as though panic attacks were coming around every corner. 

 The comedic thrust of “Blithe Spirit” are the complications that ensue as Charles has to deal simultaneously with the wraith of his dead wife and the wrath of his living one. Since Ruth doesn’t see Elvira, Charles is at his wit’s end convincing her of her presence, and things get to be short of the breaking point as comments meant for Elvira are taken to heart by Ruth who feels they are directed at her.

The dialogue is enlivened by the customary sharpened wit we have long come to expect from Noel Coward, although the three-act play has a running time of three hours with short intermissions, a virtual red-flag in overdoing a good thing.

“Blithe Spirit” runs through April 28 at Brewster Theater Company, Melrose School, 120 Federal Road, Brewster. Performances are Friday and Saturday 8 p.m. Tickets are $15 adults and $13 seniors and students, and may be purchased by calling the box office at 845-598-1621 or online at www.brewstertheater.org.