Haunted

Ghosts reconciles the present with the past

by Johnette Rodriguez

GHOSTS. By Henrik Ibsen. Directed by Ed Shea. With Rufus Tureen, Bonnie K. Schiff-Glenn, Paul Grellong, Annie McNamara and Michael Crane. Directed by Ed Shea. At Brown University's Leeds Theatre through April 19.

Joseph Campbell has written that "what we're seeking is an experience of being alive . . . so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive." Even as the characters in Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts unearth the ghosts of their pasts and try to settle old accounts, they awaken to the importance of "the joy of life," as they phrase it, in their present and future.

In a marvelous collaborative production of Ghosts currently at Brown University Theatre, senior Joel Tompkins, along with cast, crew and directors, have arrived at a very fluid, very cogent adaptation of Ibsen's words. And director Ed Shea, with designers Emily Jan (set), John R. Lucas (lighting), Phillip Contic (costume) and William C. Roche (technical), have created a deceptively simple staging for the play, which transforms what could be a talky and melodramatic script into an edge-of-your-seat drama.

The costumes set the period (19th century); the dozen or more windows hanging at odd angles over the stage suggest the conservatory where the unfolding of family secrets takes place (perhaps also windows to the soul); house lights fade ever so slowly through the first scene of each act, implying the 20th-century audience's close connection with the psychological conflicts on stage; props consist of only a wine glass here or a book there -- no furniture whatsoever. By far the most effective aspect of the staging is the use of ramps extending out from four corners of the bare, hardwood-floored stage.

Shea and his players employ these ramps to add movement to the characters and emotional nuance to Ibsen's words. For example, throughout the conversations between the mistress of the house Helen Alving (given a quiet dignity and resolve by Annie McNamara) and her old friend Pastor Manders (played with firm confidence by Paul Grellong), she walks out one ramp, back to the center and then out another while he speaks, essentially turning her back to him and to the audience. But the impression is that she is thoughtfully listening, taking in what he has to say and measuring the words she will use to respond to him. This carefully choreographed technique puts us inside her head as the play proceeds.

For Helen Alving is a complementary character to Nora in The Doll House. In that piece, the wife reaches a decision to leave her husband and children behind to seek a new life; in Ghosts, Helen leaves her philandering husband after their first year of marriage but is advised by their good friend and pastor (Manders) to return to her wifely duties. She spends the next three decades covering up his infidelities, to society at large and very purposefully to her son Oswald (portrayed with fervent intensity by Michael Crane).

The play opens on the eve of the grand opening of an orphanage which will be named for and dedicated to Captain Alving, who had died 10 years before. It is Helen's final attempt to prove to the outside world that her husband had been an upstanding citizen and not the promiscuous rogue he was rumored to be. But Ibsen throws the Alving family a more fatal curve than just the suppression of a woman's spirit. The sins of the father are visited upon his son as hereditary syphilis (comparisons to present-day HIV infection from husband to unsuspecting wife to children are inescapable).

Indeed, much of the soul-searching by the characters (including Regina, the eager young housemaid at the Alvings, played by Bonnie K. Schiff-Glenn, and her father Jakob Engstrand, a carpenter at the orphanage and long-time friend of Manders, played by Rufus Tureen) sounds remarkably contemporary. Credit Ibsen's insight, credit this adaptation and direction, credit the young actors for making believable the characters they play, even though three of them are at least as old as their parents.

Whatever dust had been clinging to the heels of this drama or to the antiquated English of its translations has been kicked off by director Shea and the cast and crew of Ghosts.

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A matter of time

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