Theatre in Review: Ghosts (Lincoln Center Theatre/Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater)

	Lily Rabe, Levon Hawke. Photo: Jeremy Daniel

The acting in this revival of Henrik Ibsen's famously thorny play is often good enough to make one forget the fuzzy production concept framing it. Director Jack O'Brien is bent on pulling Ghosts -- its plot loaded with hot-button items that inflamed genteel sensibilities in the 1880s -- into a contemporary context; whether that is possible is a question left unanswered here. It's a strangely bifurcated staging, often assured in its understanding of the devastating consequences of its character's hypocrisies yet unsure how to express itself to an audience in 2025. Its time is out of joint.

Lily Rabe is elegant and sphinxlike as Mrs. Alving, the wealthy widow who is determined, once and for all, to bury the dreadful legacy of her marriage, pouring her dissolute late husband's money into an orphanage while reclaiming the son she long ago sent away for fear of moral contamination. Billy Crudup radiates piety and fatuity in equal measures as Pastor Manders, who once forced Mrs. Alving to stay with her husband, insisting it was her duty, never mind his suppressed love for her. Hamish Linklater, limping around, hungover and aggrieved, is properly wheedling as Engstrand, the no-account carpenter who has come to claim his daughter Regina, a maid in Mrs. Alving's home. As Regina, who has ambitions far beyond her station, Ella Beatty enters and exits with catlike grace, carefully deploying rehearsed French phrases and saucily wiping a table to catch Pastor Mander's eye. As Oswald, Mrs. Alving's son, a painter of some note facing an appalling medical diagnosis, Levon Hawke is a little boy lost in a man's body, dumbfounded that death is drawing near and desperate to make final arrangement before it is too late.

If all five characters are bound up in Ibsen's sins-of-the-fathers plot, Rabe's wised-up Mrs. Alving, a survivor of unspeakable humiliations, dominates. "You have such an innocence in you, Pastor," she says, turning a potential compliment into a chilling assessment. Her account of life with a drunken, unfaithful abuser is almost clinical in its exactitude. And her horrified reaction to Oswald's request to help to end his life is properly wrenching. But the others have moments, too: Crudup's Manders, anxiously convincing Mrs. Alving to pass on insurance for the orphanage lest anyone think they don't put their trust in God and Hawke's Oswald shamefully admitting to the failing mental powers that have halted his career. Mark O'Rowe's version is generally speakable, revealing the lines of a drama in which the lies propagated by the older characters -- done with the best intentions in the name of morality -- rain ruin down on the next generation.

Still, Ghosts is an exceptionally tricky property. Reviled in its time for speaking frankly about such then-unmentionable topics as syphilis and incest, it has, to a degree, outlived itself. Its treatment of venereal disease as a genetic inheritance isn't medically sound; more likely, it was passed to Oswald by his mother. But Ibsen has nothing to say about Mrs. Alving and Regina (Mr. Alving's illegitimate daughter) being in harm's way, too. (Overall, the treatment of Regina, whom everyone wants to claim as a servant or nursemaid, is shockingly callous; see the virtual shrug with which Mrs. Alving greets the prospect of Oswald marrying his half-sister.) And, in the tradition of the nineteenth-century well-made play, the climactic orphanage fire happens a little too neatly on cue, as does Oswald succumbing to his illness just in time for an ironically deployed sunrise.

Trying to skirt such issues, O'Brien wraps the action in a concept that leaves the play in a temporal vacuum. John Lee Beatty's attractive interior, with an enormous upstage window that reveals a forbidding landscape, including the lamplight on the large center stage table, seems strictly of the 1880s. But Jess Goldstein's costumes seemingly straddle two centuries, combining modern-ish silhouettes with details that nod to an earlier era; they're neither here nor there. As if trying to assert its relevancy, the production begins with the actors entering, their scripts in hand. Linklater ties a wooden block to one shoe, to imitate Engstrand's limp. We get three versions of the first page or two of dialogue -- an argument between Engstrand and Regina -- first murmured, then delivered fast and unemotionally (like actors running their lines), and, finally, the scene proper. O'Rowe's dialogue contains occasional jarring anachronisms, such as Regina exiting, muttering to herself, "What the hell," like an outraged millennial.

The production has other assets, including Japhy Weideman's stunning lighting, which contrasts warm, lamplit interior looks with chilly exterior washes (his final sunrise effect is also gorgeously realized), and Mark Bennett's original music and sound (co-designed with Scott Lehrerwhich uses such effects as ship's horns, rain, and surf effects to suggest the life of the isolated island where Mrs. Alving lives.

Strangely, however, this Ghosts doesn't properly live anywhere; at times, it feels stranded between centuries. It's still a stageworthy piece, the cast provides plenty of incisive moments, O'Brien's direction has a solid grasp on the ugly tangle of emotions afflicting Mrs. Alving and her circle. Still, it needs a stronger rationale than it gets here. --David Barbour