Ghosts

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Written in 1881 immediately following A Doll’s House, Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts was very controversial because it dealt with the taboo subjects of venereal disease, incest, euthanasia, promiscuity, and religious hypocrisy, none of which were spoken about in polite society. Although the play isn’t much revived today as these topics aren’t as shocking as they once were, it can still pack a wallop with its tight Greek tragedy structure and startling conclusion. Jack O’Brien’s revival for Lincoln Center Theater at the Mitzi E. Newhouse is compelling theater due to Ibsen’s script but does not ratchet up the play to that next level. Heavy on the melodrama inherent in the play, the cast made up of star actors and the sons and daughters of world famous stars is a bit ham fisted by having been allowed to be rather one-dimensional in a play that requires better handling.

The new version by Irish playwright Mark O’Rowe uses contemporary and spare language but has made several events more literal as if not trusting modern audiences. The director has made the same mistake starting the play as a rehearsal in which we see the opening scene three times ranging from devoid of emotion to accomplished, which is both ineffective and pointless as it does not help us into the world of the play. The thrust stage by set designer John Lee Beatty (a room in unpainted wood, a single dining room table and mismatched chairs and a wall of French doors into a conservatory) is as stripped down and as spare as the language, a fitting place for a drama of tragic proportions, but does not offset the one- dimensional acting. The bland costumes mainly in black or white by Jess Goldstein straddle both the 19^th and 21^st centuries, seeming to want to have it both ways, but suggesting neither.

The title refers both to family secrets as well as the past repeating itself. The message may well be “the sins of the father shall be visited on the son” which is quoted in the second act of the play. Living in a mansion on an island off the coast of Norway, Mrs. Alving, widowed ten years before, has built an orphanage as a tribute to her late husband, the admired captain. As a result, the family’s spiritual and legal advisor, Pastor Manders, has visited for the first time in decades for the opening on the following day. In addition, Oswald Alving, the son has returned from Paris for the first time in two years where he has been working as an artist.

When Manders chides Mrs. Alving for being a bad mother and wife for having sent Oswald away to school when he was quite young, she tells him the secret she has kept all this time: she wanted to keep her son away from being corrupted by his father who was a depraved, drunken reprobate. However, little do they both yet know that Oswald has come home as he has discovered he is in the final stage of syphilis which he thinks he acquired from his own limited but loose behavior, but in fact inherited from his father.

He attempts to woo Mrs. Alving’s maid Regina not yet knowing that she is the offspring of his father’s dalliance with their previous maid years ago. When he is told the truth, Manders is at first furious with Engstrand, the carpenter who brought her up, for letting him think Regina was his own daughter, but changes his tune when Engstrand explains that he was raising a fallen woman by marrying his wife when she came to town pregnant, though he was never told who the father was.

The levels of hypocrisy go very deep. Manders criticizes Mrs. Alving’s advanced reading (Charles Darwin, Gustave Flaubert and Mark Twain) but admits he has not read any of these books but knows them only by reputation. He criticizes the unmarried lives of Parisian artists, but Oswald points out that his friends and colleagues cannot afford to get married but live very conventional bourgeois lives without the sanction of the church or state.

Before Manders knows the real story, he suggests that Regina go back to town to live with her father, but she refuses claiming that he often calls her a bastard child when he periodically gets drunk, without explaining why. Manders only now realizes that Mrs. Alving built the orphanage in her husband’s name both to dispel rumor about his profligate behavior and in order to use up his original fortune that she sees as blood money. Ultimately, the play proves that the sins of the father are visited on the son, and that those dark things that society refuses to face will surface again and again in worse ways while everyone looks the other way.

The team of Lily Rabe and Hamish Linklater are appearing together on the New York stage for at least the sixth time (the Off Broadway productions of The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado about Nothing, and Cymbeline and the Broadway productions of The Merchant of Venice and Seminar) but ironically do not have too much stage time together in Ghosts. While the cast is made up of very fine actors, they are all playing one aspect of their characters making them seem rather diminished. Rabe in the central role of Mrs. Alving is wry in her delivery but stiff and unbending in every other way, without much variety. Linklater as the working class Engstrand is deviously subservient, while Billy Crudup as the oily Pastor Manders seems to be too naïve to be believed, without playing up his own sanctimoniousness.

As the younger characters, Levon Hawke, the son of Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman, making his New York debut, has a great deal of charm as the tall handsome Oswald but fails to show his deteriorating condition before his ultimate collapse in the final scene. As the ambitious and social climbing Regina, Ella Beatty, daughter of Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, who has already debuted on Broadway in last season’s Appropriate, is rather one note as she makes her materialism and greediness obvious.

Aside from the unnecessary opening to the performance, the ending has been made more melodramatic by the lighting designer Japhy Weideman, along with the adapter of Ibsen’s original who has added lines not in other translations. There are also other dramatic moments that are underscored by a sudden shift in the lighting. In a play that dramatizes inherited traits but not in a good way, it is ironic that four of the five actors (including Rabe who is the daughter of Tony Award winning playwright David Rabe and Oscar and Golden Globe nominated actress Jill Clayburgh, and Linklater, son of famed Shakespearean acting teacher Kristin Linklater) are descending from theater royalty. Was the casting director making a comment of his own?

Ghosts (through April 26, 2025)

Lincoln Center Theater

Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, 150 W. 65^th Street, in Manhattan

For tickets, call 212-501-3100 or visit http://www.lct.org/shows/ghosts

Running time: one hour and 50 minutes without an intermission