As if under the weather, Jack O’Brien’s production of “Ghosts,” the 1881 Ibsen drama about medical and moral contagion, coughs three times to get started.
First, as work lights illuminate a handsome study representing the home of Helena Alving, the cast arrives in rehearsal mode: Lily Rabe carrying a slouchy bucket bag and Billy Crudup a copy of The New York Times. Levon Hawke grabs a mint-green script from the library table as Hamish Linklater and Ella Beatty run the opening lines of the play — tonelessly, as if feeling all of its 144 years.
Then comes a restart. Now the scene between Linklater (playing Engstrand, an alcoholic carpenter) and Beatty (playing Regina, Mrs. Alving’s maid) seems less perfunctory. They look at each other a little, instead of just their lines.
Finally, as the work lights disappear into the flies, the scene is repeated and we are given the real, often remarkable, thing. The play’s opening argument — for Regina is not just Mrs. Alving’s maid but Engstrand’s estranged daughter — is now fully polished: lit, costumed and performed, in the Lincoln Center Theater manner, to a high upper-middlebrow sheen.
I don’t know why O’Brien chose to place such a stock contemporary frame around the timelessly alarming 19th-century action. (The device returns briefly at the end of the show.) Perhaps he means his version of “Ghosts,” which opened Monday at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater in an adaptation by the Irish playwright Mark O’Rowe, to honor the process of repetition and refinement by which old ideas become new again as they are brought to life by succeeding generations.
Certainly his casting suggests that. Rabe is the daughter of the playwright David Rabe, whose work has frequently been produced in this building. Linklater, her partner, is the son of the theatrical vocal coach Kristin Linklater. Hawke’s father, Ethan, played Macbeth and Hotspur here; his mother, Uma Thurman, played Mrs. Alving at Williamstown. Crudup has been a house star since “Arcadia” in 1995. And if Beatty’s connection to the company is less clear, well, she’s a daughter of Warren Beatty and Annette Bening. Enough said.
But productive inheritances are the opposite of Ibsen’s story.
Written just after “A Doll’s House” and before “An Enemy of the People” — each recently revived on Broadway — “Ghosts” is in some ways the most unsparing, neither offering its heroine escape nor, in the end, leaving her a heroine at all. Instead, it dramatizes the moral turpitude that, with the dour assistance of church and society, represented here by Crudup as the oily Pastor Manders, is passed inescapably from parent to child, pulpit to pew, century to century.
Even Mrs. Alving, who in Rabe’s riveting performance is a fierce advocate for freethinking, is ultimately, and with Ibsen’s apparent approval, brought low by it. The scandalous books on her library table — “Madame Bovary,” “On the Origin of Species” and, anachronistically, the “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” — cannot protect her from the kaleidoscope of ambient hypocrisy we call convention.
Give her credit for trying, though. Forced as a girl to marry a wealthy pillar of the community who was secretly an incurable reprobate, she finally, as a widow, freed herself from his grip. His money she has diverted to an orphanage being built in his name, as if to forever perfume his reputation. Their son, Oswald, has likewise been diverted; she sent him abroad when he was 7, thus sparing him his father’s depravity.
Or so she thinks. But as the play begins, Oswald (Hawke) has returned, now 25, with the depravity having found him anyway. Knowing nothing of his father’s infidelities, he has inherited their fruit in the form of congenital syphilis.
Oswald is thus one of the play’s living ghosts, restless and doomed. But even with just five characters, Ibsen invokes many others, spun out in an astonishing feat of dramatic construction. Oswald falls for Regina, Regina rebuffs Engstrand, Engstrand all but blackmails Manders, Manders blames Mrs. Alving for everything. Incest, euthanasia and fire insurance come into it.
Some of this tips dangerously close to melodrama. But especially in the scenes between Manders and Mrs. Alving, the crackling argumentative heat of Ibsenism dries out any dampness. That you root for her and disdain him, even as you learn of their own secret past, does not make the fight feel unfair. He has the weight of society on his side; she has merely her wits. Saying things like “I think you are, and will always be, a great baby, Manders,” she voices something we still want voiced today, if less to priests than politicians.
Except that she doesn’t say it here. That line, from the first English translation of the play, by William Archer, is fatally softened in O’Rowe’s adaptation as “You have such an innocence in you, Pastor.” Nor is that example an outlier. Of society’s rigid, stifling morals, O’Rowe has Mrs. Alving complain, “You only have to pick up the paper and there they are confounding and blinding and overwhelming us.” Though I don’t read Danish, I do read English, and Archer’s version is much richer: “Whenever I take up a newspaper, I seem to see ghosts gliding between the lines. There must be ghosts all the country over, as thick as the sands of the sea.”
That O’Rowe’s is a prosy “Ghosts,” avoiding even the word “ghosts” itself, might not have mattered on its own. But in favoring the play’s (iffy) logic over its (haunting) poetry, and denying Manders the vigorous invective of a petty tyrant, it creates an imbalance that Crudup can only finesse. Rabe’s Mrs. Alving is clearly the winner on points, even if Ibsen undermines her in the final scenes, suggesting that she, not her husband, brought disaster upon everyone, by prioritizing her will over the world’s.
Distasteful though that is, it’s good drama, and “Ghosts” remains a provocative, engrossing work, to which O’Brien’s production does justice.
It also does justice to the idea of provocative, engrossing work in the first place. “Ghosts” is the 14th and presumably final collaboration between O’Brien and André Bishop, Lincoln Center Theater’s producing artistic director, who is stepping down at the end of this season after 33 years with the company. Their notable productions of Hellman, Stoppard, Shakespeare and others have earned them this warm valedictory moment.
And yet not totally valedictory. As “Ghosts” demonstrates, men’s imprints do not fade so easily. And nothing is ever as haunted as a stage.
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