Gwydion Theatre’s “Ghostx,” with Ellie Thomson/Photo: Sam Bessler
RECOMMENDED
Gwydion Theatre’s pared-down, gripping production of Henrik Ibsen’s “Ghosts” at the Greenhouse is a homecoming of sorts: oddly enough, the play premiered in 1882 in Chicago, in an auditorium on Milwaukee Avenue at Huron. There it was performed in its original Danish (then the written language of both Norway and Denmark) to an audience of Scandinavian immigrants. It opened here rather than the playwright’s native Norway because no theater in that country would risk putting on a play so iconoclastic and potentially scandalous. Touching on such taboo topics as venereal disease, incest, suicide and the sexual double standard, the work was simply too hot to handle.
Almost a century-and-a-half later, the play still hits hard, not just in terms of its unrelentingly downbeat storyline, but also the harshness of its writing, with characters that do not so much converse with as verbally maul one another. With its theme of family and community breakdown—treated not as the product of individual moral failings but rather symptoms of a corrupt and collapsing patriarchal order—the play will continue to agitate and provoke as long as human beings are torn between their own emotional and spiritual needs and the demands and expectations of the larger society.
Director Jimmy Piraino gives us a well-paced, tightly controlled, brutally intense version of Ibsen’s dark tale of how old secrets–the ghosts of the title–continue to haunt the beleaguered Alving family. It takes place in the home of Helen Alving, ten years after the death of her husband Captain Alving, whose predatory nature lay concealed under a benign, family-man persona. The captain, gone but far from forgotten, is represented by his faceless, seriously creepy portrait in the parlor. The painting graces designer (and Gwydion artistic director) Grayson Kennedy’s grayish set, which is as blank and unfilled-in as the background of a dream.
Returning to the family nest on this ten-year anniversary is Captain Alving’s son Oswald, a painter in his twenties who has spent much of the past few years in France and Italy. Suffering from ill health, he surrenders himself to the smothering care of his mother, who is guilt-stricken over her semi-abandonment of her son as a child, for reasons that emerge over the course of the evening. Oswald is more glad to see Regina, a blossoming young woman who is employed as Helen’s maid, but who may have deeper connections to the family. Her scheming, unctuous father Jacob, a carpenter who has helped Helen build the town’s orphanage with her husband’s money, is an unwanted visitor to the tensely unhappy Alving domicile. Rounding out the cast of characters is Pastor Manders, a priggish churchman lacking in sensitivity or discernment, who appears to have some kind of history with the widowed Helen.
Gwydion Theatre’s “Ghosts,” with Jeanne Scurek and Phil Aman/Photo: Sam Bessler
What Ibsen gets at here—and this production underscores—is that for haunted families like the Alvings, life moves backward and inward, anchored always to some unnameable, inescapable trauma. Over the ninety intermissionless minutes of “Ghosts,” agonizing, life-changing secrets are revealed, relationships are tested and reordered, and a terrible favor is requested and perhaps granted. Under director Piraino, Ibsen’s dense, involuted plot unspools with admirable clarity, leading toward a climax (unnecessarily altered somewhat from the text) that’s beyond tragic—it’s almost apocalyptic. It’s also mesmerizing, snaring the audience in a web of dread. In his own time, Ibsen was known as the Colossus of the North. As this evening of theater demonstrates, he’s still colossal.
As the dignified but burdened and conflicted Helen Alving, Jeanne Scurek is a revelation; it’s difficult to imagine a fuller, more convincing portrayal. Ellie Thomson is also terrific as the self-possessed, mature-beyond-her-years servant Regina, especially in the second act as she becomes aware of the wrongs done to her and the fact that she is on her own in a world that offers no safe harbor. Veteran actor Stephen Fedo excels as her rapscallion father, playing his rank opportunism for much-needed laughs in this play, which is otherwise as dark as the Norwegian winter. Tommy Thams, although too hale and hearty to convey Oswald’s physical and psychic sickliness, captures all of the character’s bitterness and anger—and his entrance, wearing drawstring pajamas more reminiscent of the 2020s than the 1880s, is memorable. As the vacuous, image-conscious Pastor Manders, Phil Aman is all hot air, as he should be. His specialty is ladling out bad advice and delivering off-kilter lines like, “May the spirit of law and order descend upon this house.” But Aman’s take on Manders lacks both tell-tale gestures and a nineteenth-century feel.
The recurrent phrase in “Ghosts” is “joy of life,” the thing so conspicuously lacking in the rain-soaked provincial town limned by Ibsen. Helen Alving has ruined her own life and the lives of others in order to gild the reputation of a husband she hated—and Pastor Manders, instead of consoling her for her suffering, chastises her for not having done even more to support the spouse who had undermined everyone around him. The point is that a resolutely joyless existence in a world perceived as a vale of tears doesn’t build character. Rather, it generates falsity and despair, which Ibsen, the bard of bourgeois unhappiness, depicts masterfully.
“Ghosts” isn’t a cheerful play, but there is a real pleasure in seeing this grimly cathartic fable about the return of the repressed done so powerfully and so well. The play stings, because that’s what truth does. But it pricks the viewer in a healthy way, forcing us to ask what truths we ourselves have buried and attempted to finesse.
This is good, strong, fundamental theater, crafted by a young company that’s really beginning to feel its oats. See it if you can.
Gwydion Theatre Company’s “Ghosts” runs through March 9 at the Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 North Lincoln. Showtimes are Thursday-Saturday at 7:30pm; and Sunday at 2:30pm. Tickets are $32, available by calling the Greenhouse box office at (773)404-7336 or visiting greenhousetheater.org.
