The Baker University theater department will open its season Sept. 27, performing the play “Blithe Spirit” by Noel Coward.

“It’s an improbable farce in three acts,” Director Rachel Roberts said. “It’s a great way to start the season.” (Story continued below.)

Watch KNBU-TV's interview with cast member Denver Little, part of Inside Baker.<a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/KNBU" target="_blank">Inside Baker.</a> Inside Baker.

The play will start at 7 p.m. Sept. 27 in Rice Auditorium. It will also be showing at 7 p.m. the following Friday and Saturday, and at 2 p.m. Sept. 30.

Roberts said “Blithe Spirit” is a story of a novelist, Charles, who holds a séance to get firsthand information for a new story he is writing. When the novelist’s dead wife, Elvira, is brought back from the dead, hilarity soon ensues from the fight between his dead wife and his current wife, Ruth, over his affections for the two women.

“Elvira, his first wife, wants to get Charles back,” Roberts said. “But Ruth has long since laid claim to him. It’s (about) a man stuck between two wives.”

Junior Kyle Dyck said “Blithe Spirit” is a comedy of manners. He said the play satirizes the upper social class and the humor stems from the reactions and relationships of the characters.

“It’s funny, but it’s not just slapstick,” he said. “It’s intelligent humor.”

Roberts said the comedy in “Blithe Spirit” isn’t the only draw for the play.

“It’s a classic,” she said. “It has a very stylized way of acting and moving and speaking.”

Roberts said the stylized writing of Coward allows for many different approaches to the play.

“With actors coming from many different experiences and backgrounds each actor brings a different bag of tricks,” she said. “It’s really a triumph for the students of Baker.”

Sophomore Megan Nelson, portraying Edith, said each actor’s different experiences and backgrounds bring the play together.

“Everyone has their own little quirks that they can add to (the play),” she said. “It’s real and everyone can get into it.”

Roberts said the cast and crew are facing many difficulties to make the play come together.

“We have less than a month to put it together,” she said. “And it’s set in Kent, England, giving us the added challenge of a British dialect.”

Senior Hali Jewell, the actress playing Elvira, said even with the challenges ahead of them, the actors are up to the task.

“The script allows for a lot of fun,” she said.

Nelson said the actors are allowed to be creative with their characters while following the script.

“We make these characters our own but it’s still Noel Coward,” she said.

Along with Dyck, Nelson and Jewell, senior Ashley Pike, junior Claire Norland, sophomore Denver Little and freshman Courtney West will comprise the cast for “Blithe Spirit.”