By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Few stage effects are harder to bring off for modern audiences than a manifestation of the supernatural. Try as directors may for some Freudian hallucinatory explanation of Macbeth, for example, the story makes little sense unless the witches are actual witches. This doesn't mean the supernatural must be portrayed as exotic: the most chilling thing about those women might be their normality, as if they were plump, middle-aged matrons nattering across a backyard fence about their ability to conjure spirits. That very perception of character seems to have guided Geraldine Page in a less malevolent but equally necromantic role, the ghost-summoning Madame Arcati in Noel Coward's larkish Blithe Spirit, which was revived on Broadway last week. The cast includes Richard Chamberlain, Blythe Danner and Judith Ivey, all in good form, but this is Page's show. In a career including eight Oscar nominations, culminating in a 1986 Best Actress award for The Trip to Bountiful, and countless memorable stage performances, Blithe Spirit stands as a highlight.

Page's tics, fidgets and exaggerated nasalities, which have overdecorated many a characterization, here serve to heighten a shrewdly earthbound interpretation. Her Arcati is not dotty or otherworldly. She is a coarse, calculating businesswoman, a vulgar social climber, a tiresome, self-absorbed frump who just happens to be a medium with the gift of raising the dead. Her manner is so much the grasping fraud that the audience is stunned when she delivers the goods. Indeed, she is stunned herself: there are few funnier sights than Page striding across the stage in pursuit of a ghost whose presence she senses but cannot see, snuffling at the wraith's ectoplasm like a spaniel who just knows a squirrel is somewhere nearby.

This decidedly common touch is in keeping with Director Brian Murray's sour vision. At the center of Blithe Spirit is a love triangle: smug, conventional Ruth Condomine (Ivey) is in love with her novelist husband Charles (Chamberlain); so is hoydenish Elvira (Danner), his late wife, whom Madame Arcati accidentally materializes; and all three of the Condomines are passionately in love with themselves. Most productions of Coward tend to be as glittery and brittle as spun glass. Murray brings the proceedings down to earth: these are not natural aristocrats but peasants with money and a veneer of polish, and when they mockingly meddle in the supernatural to gather color for one of Charles' books, they bring chaos crashing down upon themselves.

By making Charles, normally a beau ideal, just as petty as his wives, Murray helps diffuse the unattractive misogyny shot through virtually all of Coward's works. Still, this intelligent approach baffles some theatergoers and irritates others. It muffles many of the play's laughs and, more troublesome at the box office, keeps Chamberlain from maximizing his easy charm. Yet audiences who come to see him may depart delighted at having seen Page in full cry, sloshing her drinks onto people, cramming her mouth with sandwiches, then abruptly divining where her seance went wrong with a fierce delight that would surely have bewitched Coward himself.