'Blithe Spirit' is full of comic gusto

Noël Coward's Blithe Spirit is farce with an edge of darkness, a 1941 confection that suggested to wartime Londoners both the enduring bonds between the dead and the living and the trials of matrimony. Even then, the play was something of a throwback, evoking the Victorian fascination with séances and communication with the spirit world.

In the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Company's sturdy revival, the writer Charles Condomine (Ian Merrill Peakes), a stand-in for Coward, doesn't at first take any of this seriously: He's just trying to learn enough jargon and "tricks of the trade" to lend authenticity to his latest novel, about a homicidal medium.

To that end, he calls on a daffy spiritualist, Madame Arcati (Linda Thorson), who unwittingly invites the ghost of Condomine's first wife, Elvira (Eleanor Handley), into his ménage - to the understandable dismay of his current wife, Ruth (Karen Peakes, Ian Merrill's real-life spouse).

Coward's somewhat repetitive gags rely largely on the conceit that only Condomine, and the audience, can see or hear the "ectoplasmic" Elvira, clad in an ethereal silver gown. As a result, Ruth takes umbrage at insults that her husband directs at Elvira - and Condomine can alter Elvira's remarks in order to placate the increasingly jealous Ruth.

This could all grow tiresome, especially given the massive suspension of disbelief required to accept the play's basic premise. Occasionally the energy of the ensemble (which includes Carl N. Wallnau and Joyce Cohen as Dr. and Mrs. Bradman, Condomine's friends; and Ally Borgstrom, as the household's bullied maid) flags, and Cohen is not always clearly audible. Director Anne Lewis gives Thorson, as the bicycle-riding, red-meat-avoiding medium, plenty of goofy stage business. Quoting Hamlet and foreshadowing the play's surprises, the insouciant Madame Arcati informs the skeptical Mrs. Condomine that "There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

But Peakes' physically magnetic and comically precise performance as the besieged writer, especially his interaction with Handley's charmingly malignant Elvira, keeps the production aloft. (Peakes and Handley are starring as Petruchio and his reluctant bride Kate in PSF's Taming of the Shrew, running in repertory with Blithe Spirit.) Together, they own the stage - and the more earthbound Ruth seems, perhaps deliberately, overmatched. What, after all, can compete with the reincarnated memory of a prematurely deceased first wife of surpassing beauty and flair?

Although the play's title is drawn from Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem "To a Skylark," Coward is no romantic. Blithe Spirit, with its vaguely misogynistic undercurrents, eschews any conventionally happy ending. In keeping with the whole, the final plot twists make little sense. But the effects are wonderfully staged on David P. Gordon's sumptuous, retro set, with its neoclassical columns, Chippendale-style chairs, brass chandelier, embroidered pillows, and floral curtains. Charlotte Palmer-Lane's costumes, which range from wispily elegant frocks to casual wear, are especially noteworthy, and Thom Weaver's lighting conveys the requisite spookiness and mood changes.