"GHOSTS" at LCT: All About Parentage
I can’t remember the last time I saw Ibsen’s Ghosts live onstage, but it must have affected me deeply because I don’t usually draw such a blank about my theatrical comings and goings, no matter how far back. Ghosts plainly wiped me out.
I will remember the Lincoln Center Theater production I just saw. I can’t precisely say why. It isn’t that this Ghosts is especially well cast, but the casting is, nevertheless, memorable. It isn’t that this Ghosts is epically long; in fact, it is here shorn to a disorienting brevity. It isn’t that I really liked this Ghosts, actually. Though I sort of did.
Such is the alchemy of live theater. Sometimes great elements add up to a great nothing, and sometimes less than great coheres into something pretty good. Even as I was sitting in LCT’s intimate Mitzi E. Newhouse sub-theater, with the action and the actors right there where I could touch them, I found myself thinking about this; often instead of the play.
Okay. Let’s focus. Frederik Ibsen’s Ghosts is his taboo-shattering 1881 drama of dark family secrets disgorged, with consequences that are physicalized in the slow (or not so slow) death from syphilis of the family’s young son, Osvald Alving. I can only imagine the shocking impact of this unremitting melodrama on 19th Century audiences. Certainly, the playwrighting impact was game-changing; without Ghosts, I doubt we would have had the Eugene O’Neill we have come to revere, and all the viscera examiners who came after him in the theatrical pantheon.
What separates this LCT production from its predecessors? The text, for one, is “a New Version” by the Irish playwright (and tele-scenarist for the terrific TV series Normal People), Mark O’Rowe. O’Rowe’s is not a new translation but rather his re-write of Ibsen. For Mr. O’Rowe, the dire plot points of Ghosts — the fire, the brimstone, the incest, the disease — transpire with head-snapping alacrity, until many members of the audience (myself included) began to giggle. You gotta pace devastation of this magnitude. Surely, Ibsen did, erring on the side of the too-slow reveal, perhaps, at least for 21st Century audiences. Mr. O’Rowe has gone very, very far in the opposite speed direction.
As for casting, LCT has seen fit to hire some very fine actors in roles that somewhat go against type: the inescapably sensuous Billy Crudup as the bone-dry and oblique Pastor Manders; the invariably elegant Hamish Linklater as the slovenly alcoholic Engstrand; the glamorous Lily Rabe as the homebound widow, Helena Alving. I appreciate the innate courage of a good actor endeavoring to stretch a little. The results here are mixed, as they often are in such endeavors, but I enjoyed watching these three charismatic pros bat Ibsen around.
The youthful subsidiary roles upon which so much hinges in Ghosts are a more distracting casting saga. Regina — the young maid whose ancestry is very much up in the air — and the young Osvald, who turns out to be her half-brother, are each played by offspring of the very famous: Regina by Ella Beatty, daughter of Warren, and Annette Bening; Osvald by Levon Hawke, son of Ethan, and Uma Thurman.
Well, come on, you try and watch Ghosts while filtering out that ancestral data.
It’s impossible. It was also fun — I kept catching notes of Annete Bening’s distinctive intonation in her daughter’s line readings, just here and there. Hawke’s death scene with his onstage mom (“Give me the sun, mother!”) glimmered in the increasingly brilliant stagelight with flecks of his real mom’s glinting hair shade. I swear. (Was this a directorial choice? A colorist’s? Or simply natural law.)
Ghosts at Lincoln Center Theater, in this sense, was unforgettable. Offstage facts of parentage intruded upon onstage questions of parentage. Ms. Beatty and Mr. Hawke were adequate, if under-experienced; both of their characters were supposed to be naifs, to a degree, and so they clearly are.
For me, it all somehow added up to a giddy good time. Which probably never has been said of any other Ghosts production, before this one.