Oct 20. the SCHS Playhouse put on a production of Noël Coward’s classic play Blithe Spirit. The comedic play is set in London and focuses on a writer, who is in preparation for his next book, and takes part in a seance and accidentally summons the spirit of his first wife. In preparation for the play, the performers and everyone behind the scenes had to put in a lot of hard work over 2 months.
“A lot of the students were pretty excited, they hadn’t really done a show that involved ghosts before and it’s been a long since we did a show where they had to learn new accents so it was all very exciting,” Director Mason Cargile said.
The performers luckily had a lot of time to get down their accents, stage directions, and had time to get to know each other better.
“We did certain activities together, we did accent work in groups,” junior Brynn Lipham said. “We also had cast bonding which I think is an underrated form of preparation. “It definitely helps to improve your chemistry with other actors.”
The three-act play is decently long as well so getting down the script and the exact details of it took time to learn and rehearse on stage.
“A lot of late nights, looking at my script and memorizing it,” junior Nhedrick Jabier said. “I watched a lot of productions of it on Youtube to get prepared.” “The role of Charles is definitely a hefty one with a lot of lines and with a lot of preparation.”
This play had a lot of firsts for the crew too. It’s a play with ghosts and British accents, but for actress Kennedi Cox, it was her first time performing on stage.
“I came from being a technician, this was actually the first time that I’ve acted, so a lot of what I had to do was get out of my head, out of the techy side of things and into the acting side,” said senior Kennedi Cox.
Blithe Spirit is a comedy as well, which meant that getting the timing of jokes down and making sure not to laugh was a harrowing task for the performers.
“We have a really funny cast so it was definitely very hard but it comes with just trying to be serious,” said sophomore Emma Forbes. “It’s like a sport, it’s funny until it comes down to it and you are actually performing, you feel the intensity of the moment,”
The director of the play, Mason Cargile, starred in the same play in college and had a really interesting experience now directing it.
“It was really neat being able to see it from a different perspective,” Cargile said. “As an actor, you just have to worry about it from the one part but as a director I have to worry about literally everything. It was really neat to get to worry about that and to see a production that was completely different from the one I was in.”
