Ghosts – 19 March 2025

Henrik Ibsen‘s Ghosts tells the story of a family caught between its past and its future trying to discern the difference between right and wrong by objective societal standards, who are unable to do so when their passions and feelings get involved. Though told in a specific time and place, the story takes somewhat linear journey through the order of events leading up to this moment. After a brief quasi prologue with a maid (Ella Beatty) rejecting a broken man (Hamish Linklater) who turns out not to be her father, the story progresses through a pastor (Billy Crudup) and the woman (Lily Rabe) whose true thoughts he has been repressing for years, to her seemingly perfect son (Levon Hawke, later revealed to be dying of consumption), winding through to the truth about her husband/everybody’s father. Just as the story finally catches the secrets up to the present moment, the pastor has a hotheaded moment and burns down the orphanage he’d been helping the lady of the house acquire and the sailor who has been pretending to be the father of the maid proves himself a good man in volunteering to take the blame for the incident. Oh – then the half siblings’ not-so-secret love is ended by the discovery that they are related and the lady’s son dies in her arms as a new day dawns on an empty world.

Within the unraveling of these events are some some thematic questions. What does it mean to be a good man? Is there a correlation between being a good man and a man of God? Can a good woman ever measure up to the worth of a man? What is knowledge, and what is the best source of it? What is love, and can it truly be defined by anything other than the loss of it?

LCT‘s production of Ghosts is stunning despite Ibsen‘s rambling text, particularly in the emphasis it puts on how Ibsen wrote women. Juxtaposing an older woman who is basically dead inside with a young woman full of hope and vivre is most poignant when they are compared by a man – the son/half brother. Toward the end he mistakenly characterizes his half sister‘s love as stronger when really it is the distance and ability to weather a loss that might ultimately make her better able to help him end his life. She is not, in fact, stronger. He’s just less significant to her, as best demonstrated by his mother‘s previously entombed pain gushes out as she begins to lose him. In this case, a man’s estimation of the world is wrong. Looking around the rest of the world of Ghosts, the pastor’s estimation of the world seems morally wrong. And even the tool/false father’s noble resignation to taking the blame and suffering of other people’s consequences upon himself, though an incredible sacrifice, also seemed somewhat wrong. In this production, it seems both women strike a reasonable balance between their knowledge and their emotions, while the men utterly failed to do so.

The story wouldn’t be what it is without its incredible design elements, particularly lighting (Japhy Weideman). Lighting served in  an unusual function as a mode of emphasis that was almost a character. Other than moments of conveying the weather and the closing sinister sunrise, lighting played an enormous part in showing which moments resonated with the characters and therefore warrant thinking about for the audience after the fact. In particular, they were isolating and lonely, often cruel. Despite seemingly close connections, everyone felt inescapably alone, and ultimately made their decisions based on that feeling, ignoring all facts.

It was beautiful. It was devastating. It was gut wrenching. It was art.

I attended this performance on a press pass from LCT.