The first thing Curt Columbus did when setting out to direct Noel Coward’s droll Blithe Spirit, the latest offering from Trinity Rep, was to “take out a long knife and make some judicious cuts” in the script.

The second thing was to treat it more like a hard-hitting Edward Albee or Sam Shepard play and less like a drawing-room comedy.

“I know it sounds funny to say that,” said Columbus, Trinity Rep’s artistic director. “The actors looked at me like I had two heads when I told them.

“But you [must] treat it like a dysfunctional family drama.”

Columbus is involved with two shows right now. He is doing rewrites for his musical Paris by Night, which closes out the season, in April and May, and he’s directing Blithe Spirit, which opens in previews Friday.

And he has tried to get back to the basics when it comes to Coward, to resist the tinsel and return to the text.

“The thing that’s great about the way Curt is approaching it,” said cast member Phyllis Kay, “is I think people have this awful idea of a highfalutin’ style of [Noel Coward] comedy, where everyone’s talking with a very tight jaw and holding a martini glass.

“We’re not doing that.”

But she doesn’t mean this production won’t be funny.

Kay plays Elvira, the ghost who comes back to haunt her remarried husband. It is a rare recent comedic outing for Kay, whose latest role was as Queen Elizabeth in Trinity’s dark and violent Richard III.

Luckily, she said she has not had to undo a lot of bad habits with Blithe Spirit. She had never read or seen a production of the play, “which is a good thing.”

“Probably the hardest thing,” said Kay, “was disabusing myself of the horrible idea of everyone standing around dripping satin.”

Coward, who was actually born to working-class parents and was more an observer than participant in the upper crust, claims to have written Blithe Spirit in five days. It’s the story of writer Charles Condomine, who during a séance unwittingly conjures the ghost of his first wife, Elvira, much to the annoyance of his new wife, Ruth. Ruth at first thinks her husband is bonkers when she hears him talking to a spirit she can’t see. Then she realizes she has competition.

There has been a lot of talk lately about having emotional affairs, said Kay. A wife can be angry with her husband for cheating, but if he’s still carrying a torch for his first wife and she’s dead, that’s a little hard to wrap your brain around, she said.

All this makes for some funny moments, said Columbus, as long as the characters are believable.

“Blithe Spirit is about a guy whose ex-wife shows up and says she’s going to stick around,” said Columbus. “She happens to be dead, so it’s pretty funny.

“But it’s not funny unless it’s filled with human behavior and human moments.”

“If you are true,” said Columbus, “you can say really funny things and remain true. Otherwise it’s like eating a six-course meal of cotton candy: You’re sick after the first course.”

Columbus, who spoke on the phone while driving to work early one morning — the only time he had to chat — told of going to an unnamed production of an unnamed Coward play a while back and finding the direction “nauseating.”

The cast was strolling about with “long-suffering looks on their faces.”

He learned later that the director told his actors that the play should be “frothy” and like a “soap bubble.”

“There wasn’t a shred of human behavior to be found,” said Columbus. “It was all mincing, prancing and whining.

“Why would you want to spend an hour with these people, let alone two?”

Columbus conceded that Blithe Spirit is something of a theatrical chestnut. Indeed, Westerly’s Granite Theatre is also opening the Coward play on Friday.

But, said Columbus, who had success with Coward early in his career, if you can “squeeze the juice out of them, they come back to life.

“There is something in it that everyone recognizes.”

Kay will be playing opposite Fred Sullivan Jr.’s Charles. The two actors have been husband and wife on-stage more times than they can recall.

Angela Brazil plays Ruth, the second wife, and Barbara Meek is the eccentric medium, Madame Arcati.

Columbus said it’s hard to pull off a play like this with actors who have just met for the first time. Having a resident company is a plus.

“It takes people who have been around for years and years, and who have had all these fights, both on-stage and off.”

“It really is an incredible benefit to have a resident company,” said Kay. “We get to try things and take chances in plays we normally wouldn’t get to do in New York. We can do colorblind casting, which helps everybody.”

Lately, Kay has had a lot of strong parts, like Lovey Ranevskaya in Columbus’s production of Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard.

She said Columbus saw her in The Mystery of Edwin Drood when he was a candidate for the artistic director’s job, and thought she would be perfect for the Cherry Orchard role.

“Curt seems to like my work,” said Kay. “He sees me a little differently than Oskar [Eustis] did.”

Even though Kay, who grew up in Fall River, has not done a lot of comedy of late, she started out at Trinity in 1991 acting in Christopher Durang’s Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You. Not long after that, she appeared in the farcical Lend Me a Tenor.

“I love comedy. Some people think it’s a dirty word, and I just don’t get it.

“Wouldn’t you rather see a comedy tonight than a nine-hour version of Dante’s Inferno?”

Blithe Spirit opens Friday at Trinity Rep, 201 Washington St., Providence, and runs though April 27 in the upstairs theater. Tickets are $20-$60. Call (401) 351-4242 or visit www.trinityrep.com.

cgray@projo.com