A ghost merrily haunts her husband and his second wife in Noel Coward's famed comedy, "Blithe Spirit," which the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay theater program will present in six performances starting Friday.

Guest director is Gail Childs Daly, text coach at Milwaukee Shakespeare and a teacher at UW-Parkside.

"Blithe Spirit" is an escapist comedy that Coward wrote during the grim days of World War II, when England was under siege from Nazi aircraft. The play borrows its title from "To a Skylark," a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley.

A simple plot leads to farce: Hoping to gather grist for his next book, novelist Charles Condomine (Derek Sklenar, Prairie du Chien) invites Madame Arcati (Katie Pugh, Antigo), an eccentric medium, to a dinner party in his home.

A seance conducted by Madame Arcati unleashes the ghost of Elvira (Meg Tresedder, Weston), Charles' temperamental first wife. Elvira is determined to disrupt her husband's marriage to his priggish new wife, Ruth (Alison Tyler, Waukesha), who cannot see or hear the mercurial spirit.

Also in the cast as Mr. and Mrs. Bradman are Zach McLain, Florence, and Jessica Breest, West Bend and, as Edith, the maid, Alyssa Falvey, Waukesha.