In his diary for April 22, 1941, playwright Noel Coward wrote: “Spent the morning discussing financial troubles, which are considerable. Also discussed play as possible solution.
Title ‘Blithe Spirit.’ Very gay superficial comedy about a ghost. Feel it may be good.”
Coward underestimated its potential success. “Blithe Spirit” created a new record for nonmusical British plays of 1,997 performances, ran for 657 performances on Broadway, was adapted for film in 1945 - with Rex Harrison as the haunted husband, Charles Condomine - and has been seen in revivals in the West End and on Broadway. This weekend, it opens at University Theatre in Fayetteville under the direction of drama professor Mavourneen Dwyer.
“I myself saw a production of the play two years ago in London and thought it would be a wonderful one for the UA students to do,” she says. “Of course, I then asked for an extra two weeks’ rehearsal time in order for them to get the British accent right!”
That’s not what concerns graduate student Missy Maramara, the actress playing the comedy’s wackiest part.
“Mavourneen would be the ultimate Madame Arcati,” she says with a laugh. “She should be playing this role, if she weren’t directing it.”
Madame Arcati is a medium and clairvoyant, hired by socialite and novelist Charles Condomine to conduct a seance. The only way to portray her, Maramara says, is as one of those “women who are dignified but very interesting in terms of their kookiness.”
“The danger,” she says, “is to make her a caricature. I wanther to be a three-dimensional person passionate about something she really believes in.”
Although the character takes herself very seriously - insisting, as Broadway critic Ben Brantley described, that “we know that Madame Arcati truly believes in her mystical powers” - the joke is on both Arcati and Condomine. During the seance, she summons the ghost of Condomine’s first wife, Elvira, who sets about to torment his second wife, Ruth, turning their staid marriage into “a prickly menage a trois,” Brantley wrote.
It wouldn’t surprise Maramara.
“I personally believe in ghosts and energies and another world, another dimension, that can somehowmix in with ours,” she says.
“Life, as wonderful as it is, can’t just stop when your body stops.”
In her second year in the University of Arkansas’ three-year master of fine arts program in acting, Maramara knows her life won’t end when she graduates. She’ll keep doing she has always loved. The question is simply where.
Maramara says she was meant to act “from the moment I was born, but I was maybe 5 when I became aware of it.” After earning her undergraduate degree in her homeland of the Philippines, she “fell in love with” the UA program.
“The acting styles are so different,” she says, comparing her graduate and undergraduate experiences.
Acting in the Philippines is “so culturally rooted, so I had to detach from that to learn what I’ve been taught here. I had to find a middle ground.”
Maramara would like to take what she’s studied back to Manila, where she is already a tenured college professor.
Theater there, she says, is “not academic,” and she’d like to encourage “an educational pursuit of the art.”
But right now, she has to focus on getting Madame Arcati just right.
“She is much older than I am, much wiser than I am, so the challenge is how to get to that place where I allow her to just be herself” and still meet her director’s expectation that she’ll “deliver witty repartee and banter in a time-honored English manner.”
Whats Up, Pages 15 on 11/09/2012