An Enemy of the People, A Doll’s House, and Hedda Gabler are to Henrik Ibsen what The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof are to Tennessee Williams–cash cows milked frequently for revival, allowing his descendants to go yachting in Norway’s fjords. (Or, whatever; I’ve no idea what his heirs are up to 119 years after the great playwright’s passing.) It’s always welcome, then, when a relative rarity like Ghosts materializes, as it has Off Broadway at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse. I wrote a paper on it at college but had never seen it, though an acclaimed West End production did appear in Brooklyn a decade ago (also “pro-shot,” it’s available on Prime). After almost forty years I can’t remember what aspects of the play I looked at; I can, however, pronounce this the most fun anyone has ever had at Ghosts.
Which is at odds with what Ibsen was trying to convey, and has more to say about contemporary adaptations and audiences and their reaction to 19th century drama than anything else. A broadside against conventional morality and a plea for more enlightened attitudes about marriage and sexuality Ghosts was hugely controversial when first staged in the 1880s (“An open drain; a loathsome sore unbandaged; a dirty act done publicly” fumed The Daily Telegraph in London). It’s what’s called a “problem play” and, indeed, the protagonist, Mrs. Alving (Lily Rabe), has problems. She’s about to open an orphanage dedicated to her late husband, a seafarer with a sterling reputation among the townspeople, not least Pastor Manders (Billy Crudup)…or, at least, a reputation protected by town fathers like Manders, who turned a blind eye to his debaucheries and urged his wife to look the other way for her sake and that of her son, Oswald (Levon Hawke). Oswald, a gentle painter most at ease with bohemians, had been sent to Paris by his mother but has returned for the festivities, and will in time share with her a mortifying family legacy passed onto him by the captain. The double whammy is that Oswald confesses his love for the family maid, Regina (Ella Beatty), who aspires to be more than the daughter of the drunken carpenter Jacob Engstrand (Hamish Linklater). But Mrs. Alving, keeper of too many secrets, has concealed her true origins until this flashpoint revelation. She is both a victim of her censorious society (she yearns to taste the freedom briefly enjoyed by her son) and a perpetrator, knowingly if unhappily enforcing its cruelties, and a conflagration that burns everything down leaves her and her son marooned.
Like I said it’s been a long while since I’ve read Ghosts. I do know that Ibsen is a blunt-force instrument, not one for flowery language and beating around the bush. The intimations of “worm-eaten” syphilis and incest shocked theatergoers in his time, and the financial double dealing and emotional blackmail the “good” Pastor Manders indulges in probably didn’t sit too well either. He tells it like it was. But this adaptation, by Mark O’Rowe, tells us too much. While we can figure out for ourselves that Mrs. Alving is a victim and a perpetrator, weighed down by “the sins of the father,” we know she is because she tells us she is, in one of the intermissionless production’s frequent info dumps. Every turn is spelled out for us and heavily underlined; worse, they become comic. “You don’t know what I know,” Mrs. Alving says to Oswald and Regina at one point, and the audience (which knows, too) laughs. And not for the first time: Linklater, who comes on strong in the smallish part of Engstrand, is too ingratiating, and Crudup, likewise playing Manders for hypocritical comedy, falls short when the enormity of the character’s actions becomes clear. We’re amused by these guys when we should be troubled.
The main trio is intriguingly cast. They’re all what the tabloids call “nepo babies”–Rabe the daughter of playwright David and Jill Clayburgh, Hawke the son of Ethan and Uma Thurman, Beatty the daughter of Warren and Annette Bening (she sounds just like her mom when she speaks). It’s very “meta,” and how it informs the play I can’t really say, but the sense of a fractured bloodline is conveyed. Only Rabe, however, convinces in this modern-dress staging; this veteran paid her dues long ago and, owing no one anything, gives a sharp, no-nonsense performance for all the lightening, intentional or not, that’s gone on. Her onstage kin are too green for Ibsen, and rather amateurish. The final sequence with Mrs. Alving and Oswald, where she contemplates the unthinkable regarding her seizure-wracked son, should devastate. It does not.
I’m grateful that Lincoln Center mainstay director Jack O’Brien hasn’t gimmicked up Ghosts, like last season’s Tony-winning (natch) An Enemy of the People. I couldn’t quite figure out what the backdrop was supposed to be (a plunging neckline? A fabric tear?) but John Lee Beatty’s set is handsomely austere and lighting (Japhy Weideman) and sound (Mark Bennett and Scott Lehrer) convincingly render an offstage fire. But I wish O’Brien and O’Rowe were more willing to lash us with this lacerating material. I’m glad to have seen a production of Ghosts. Now I’d like to see a better one.
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