What moves at a faster pace: “The White Lotus” Season 3 or a play that Henrik Ibsen wrote over 140 years ago? The clear winner is this new revival of “Ghosts,” which opened Monday at LCT’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center.
The HBO series has the advantage of always beginning with a murder(s), and then flashbacking a week to tell its story of homicide very slowly. There are no murders in “Ghosts,” but psychologically it is the much better thriller with its intimations of debauchery, substance abuse, insanity, incest, assisted suicide and venereal disease, as well as the total perversion of Christianity.
Jack O’Brien directs Mark O’Rowe’s taut adaption of the Ibsen classic, which runs just under two hours without intermission. In many ways, O’Brien’s work here is an antidote to what Jamie Lloyd did with Ibsen’s “A Doll House” on Broadway and starring Jessica Chastain two years ago. Lloyd directed a production geared for the movie camera. At times, the actors would turn their back to the audience and whisper to each other. Thanks to the over-amplification, we could hear their every word. O’Brien sees Ibsen differently, and takes a very big approach to what are operatic emotions. Lloyd pared down; O’Brien elevates and expands. It’s the difference between going to a movie at the local Cineplex and being thrilled by live theater at its grandest.
Of course, this all or nothing approach only works if you have great actors, and O’Brien has assembled the best ensemble now performing on the New York stage. What is especially satisfying is that Billy Crudup and Lily Rabe are that unique mix of oil and water that produces combustible moments on stage. Crudup’s Pastor Manders is a busy, petty man who changes his moral convictions faster than a Republican senator. Where Crudup is giftedly mannered, Rabe takes the opposite approach to portray Helena Alving, a woman who has dedicated her life to protecting a son, Oswald (Levon Hawke), from a dissolute husband, the deceased Captain Alving. Rabe turns Helena into the drama’s black hole. Her every utterance, glance and gesture is a master class in minimalism. Yet, her gravitas sucks the other characters’ life force into her quietly, fiercely swirling orbit.
Rabe’s performance is not a radical reinterpretation of the role. Judi Dench offers something similar in the very starry 1987 British TV version of “Ghosts,” directed by Elijah Moshinsky. To her credit, Rabe finds considerably more humor in the character. Crudup’s is a radical departure, on the other hand, and the beauty of his performance is how relatable he makes this fussy pastor. In Moshinsky’s “Ghosts,” Michael Gambon plays the pastor as a towering tyrant, who, in the end, is little more than a stock villain. Crudup’s pastor is an everyman, and there’s real tragedy at play in watching his broken moral compass fall apart.
“Ghosts” is the ultimate sins-of-the-father play. In O’Brien and Tate’s take, it is also the story of the rotten apples not falling far from the family tree. Levon Hawke makes for an extremely callow Oswald, not at all the great lost innocent hope that is the typical interpretation essayed by Kenneth Branagh in the Moshinsky film. As played by Hawke, syphilis isn’t the only thing the son inherited from his father. This Oswald is Captain Alving before he married Helena.
Rounding out this wonderfully jaded take on “Ghosts” is Ella Beatty’s flirtatious maid Regina and Hamish Linklater’s completely zonked-out handyman Engstrand.
“White Lotus” keeps interrupting the action with cutesy shots of monkeys, lizards and other critters in the jungle. Are we supposed to see them as witnesses to the human crimes taking place? This production of “Ghosts” has its own far more effective witness, and that is designer Japhy Weideman, whose lighting never interrupts the action and only enlivens it with dazzling expressionistic effects.
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