Lily Rabe and Billy Crudup in Ghosts (Photo: Jeremy Daniel)

Playwright Henrik Ibsen is known for writing some remarkable women for the stage including Nora Helmer and Hedda Gabler. While his play Ghosts might be less well-known, it boasts of another unique creature faced with terrible choices in a world stacked against women. Irish playwright Mark O’Rowe’s new adaptation of Ghosts distills Ibsen’s vision further along with Lily Rabe’s resilient and caustic performance.

O’Rowe’s version of the play is more minimalist in language than Ibsen’s so the tragic moral hits come flying at us one after the next—infidelity, debauchery, pregnancy payoffs, incest, and venereal disease. While director Jack O’ Brien’s intermission-less production can be puzzling at times, and not all the cast members are as strong, there is satisfaction in seeing Ibsen call out the societal hypocrisies of his day which do not feel as far removed from our own.

Dwelling on what we inherit from the generations before us—familial duty, wealth, reputation, religion, and the structural oppression of women—in a dark, rainy Norway, these characters gather and hash out an interconnected history full of secrets, lies, and betrayals.

Helena Alving (Rabe) lives isolated on an island far from town. She is building an orphanage to honor her late husband, Captain Alving. She has enjoyed a life of wealth and status but, in her own words, a marriage filled with misery.  She confides to Pastor Manders (Billy Crudup), who was once the object of her affection in her youth, that her marriage was a nightmare. She tried to escape it early but the Pastor sent her back to her husband at that time telling her she must follow her marital duty. So, she endured years of her husband’s licentiousness and depravity. To protect her son from his father, she sent him away when he was young. Now she is unburdening herself. Spending all her husband’s money on the orphanage and speaking the truths she has held inside for so long.

Now her son, Oswald (Levon Hawke), is a painter in Paris and he has returned for the opening of the orphanage.  Doting upon Oswald is house maid Regina (Ella Beatty). Regina’s father Engstrom (Hamish Linklater) has been working on building the orphanage. Engstrom is trying to convince her to leave her job and come work for him as he intends to build a “home for sailors.”  He insists this will be “a classy place” but with his questionable morals she does not believe him.

O’Brien begins the production with a stage manager placing scripts on stage and the cast collecting them and standing on stage. In the sound design, there is the hum of a pre-show audience chatter recreated. Linklater’s character has a limp and he goes about strapping a wooden block to his shoe with tape. In this preamble, Beatty and Linklater appear to “run lines” from the start of the play and then begin performing with some blinks of the lighting they reset and start over a couple of times. The scripts return briefly but for the most part this “we are actors performing a play” gambit disappears. I honestly could not grasp the intention behind this artifice.  Maybe there was a desire to toy a little with Ibsen’s naturalism but visually the production didn’t seem to stray all that far.

The overall design of this production was a bit lackluster. Admittingly, Richard Eyre’s production of Ghosts which played BAM in 2015 was hard to shake from my mind where the stage design there so critically fed into the storytelling.

Here, John Lee Beatty’s elegant parlor with tall wooden doors and windows and omnipresent bad weather outside was a utilitarian vessel for the play.  The whole production is loose about time so it could be 19th century Norway or it could be an old house today.  Jess Goldstein’s costumes hint that the production is set closer to Ibsen’s period with Helena in a long black skirt of eyelet but Regina in ballet slippers and stretchy material suggests otherwise. Everyone living in Norway wears black save Oswald in a white bright woolen sweater and white pants. The costumes mimic the oppressive darkness that the folks all just accept and live in—this judgmental society and heavy rain that never seems to stop.  Yet, Oswald is a source of light and even when he returns he craves the sun.

O’Rowe’s adaptation is sharp and clarifying.  He cuts down some of Ibsen’s verbiage but it never sounds overly contemporary. He shaves away some of the one-the-nose-ness and excess from Ibsen.  He lets the actors and performances fill in where Ibsen might explain.

For example, the 1881 translation by William Archer is written as this:

MRS. ALVING:  Have you forgotten how infinitely miserable I was in that first year?

MANDERS: It is the very mark of the spirit of rebellion to crave for happiness in this life. What right have we human beings to happiness?

Whereas O’Rowe streamlines it to this:

HELENA: You know how unhappy I was.

MANDERS: And who ever said you deserved to be otherwise?

The dynamics between the characters just become ever so much more direct. The intimate staging at the Newhouse also brings us close to these relationships. O’Brien keeps the push and pull between Helena and Manders understated.  But the play escalates later when Oswald’s health struggles become more present and unnecessary, heavy-handed music gets inserted. Frustratingly, Hawke, in his New York stage debut, is less effective.

Lily Rabe and Levon Hawke in Ghosts (Photo: Jeremy Daniel)

He is fine as the randy youth with wandering eyes for the maid, but he cannot quite carry the heavier burden as Oswald’s health starts to deteriorate. The play’s finale falls a bit flat because of it. Beatty fares better with her wistful, floating Regina who imagines a future for herself and will not be dragged down by her father, only to find her plans ruined anyway.

Ultimately, this play belongs to the older generation. Crudup and Rabe go head-to-head with force.  Though Crudup was a bit too quick to whiny tears and his narcissistic (slightly buffoonish) take on Manders ends up a little one-note. Engstrom is a wily opportunist always claiming either the utmost moral intentions or a false humility. Linklater’s Engstrom is oily and overeager and honestly, I missed his delightfully creepy presence when he was not on stage. His shape-shifting drive keeps you guessing.  But the production belongs to Rabe.  Her acerbic line delivery as Helena burns with the embers of her frustration as she pushes back against Manders presumptions and moral lecturing. Helena’s process of self-discovery writ through Rabe’s thoughtful and desperate performance blossoms. She voices reason in the face of mindless tradition meant to keep women trapped. Her fight to survive may be obliterated by circumstances, but I will remember that she fought.