The world of Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit is a rather far cry from the world that we are familiar with today. As such, a dedicated portion of our dramaturgical work for this production focused on helping the creative team become more comfortable and familiar with this brief look into the 1930s.
To accomplish this, we hosted a little dramaturgical soirée in the style of a 30s dinner party as we see featured within the play itself. We invited the team to rehearsal that evening to enjoy some treats with us while learning a bit about the era that Blithe Spirit takes place in.
In addition to serving food, we also had a variety of ingredients available to the members of our cast to create mocktails that they thought would be a good representation of their character. To assist everyone in the creation of these representative drinks, we gave everyone a quick rundown of the character and stereotypes associated with various spirits that are referenced in the play as well as a couple of other popular spirits of the era, and provided non-alcoholic stand-ins in the form of sodas and fruit juices for our team to experiment with. This allowed everyone the chance early on in the rehearsal process to explore their characters through a unique lens while simultaneously becoming more familiar with the world that these characters exist within.
In addition to the food and drink, we also treated our creative team to a couple of party activities that were common during the 30s. Parlor games were incredibly popular to play at gatherings such as this one, so we divided everyone into teams for a game of charades followed by a session of solving riddles – another popular form of entertainment during social events – that turned surprisingly competitive before we wrapped things up to prepare everyone for the surprise we had for the end of the evening.
To wrap up our evening of character exploration and learning more about the true spirit (pun intended) of the play, we took our creative team on a spooky walk through the halls of the old Provo High School to give everyone a unique opportunity to immerse themselves in the more spooky and unsettling elements of the play. We ended our walk in a dark room near a ghostly mannequin that we, as dramaturgs, had prepared ahead of time as an inanimate guest for the conversation.
We invited everyone to think in-character and to share an experience that their character may have had that reflects their views on the more spiritualistic and supernatural elements of the script As a result, our cast ended up having quite interesting character conversations that in the end gave many members of the creative team insights into the nature of their characters that they likely would not have had otherwise.
At the end of the evening, our actors came together to discuss their newfound understandings, both of their respective roles within the show and of the world that they will be interacting with as part of this production. Especially with a number of the elements of this show existing outside of what many members of our LDS demographic may be more intimately familiar with, this exploratory opportunity opened the doors to a number of artistic options for our creative team further down the line in the rehearsal process.
