Triad Stage’s production of Ghosts by Henrik Ibsen was certainly one of the better performances I’ve seen this season. Ghosts was a pleasant departure from the less engaging works that have been produced recently. Perhaps my imagination is playing tricks on me but it seems as if there has been a tendency toward much lighter fare over the last few years with fewer plays dealing with more substantive content. Were this shift of focus a more recent phenomenon one could certainly be more sympathetic particularly when one regards such change in the context of current global economic difficulties; however, the trend has longevity and indicates movement from live theater to a hybridized form of entertainment more closely emulating popular media broadcasts which are likely to attract a larger contingent of paying customers.
The theater was alive with the sounds of ghosts–no sign of Julie Andrews; no trace of Demi Moore or Patrick Swayze hovering translucently to the Righteous Brothers‘ Unchained Melody. Even before the play commenced the audience was treated to unctuous cooing sounds emanating, it seemed, from a collage of blurred images projected on a part of the set at one end of the stage. For a few surrealistic moments, I expected a cadre of inebriated old men clad only in raincoats and sneakers to wander in and settle surreptitiously into the back rows of the theater while the canned orgasms of a porn flick droned in the background. Is it really possible to confuse Damiano and Ibsen?
Almost every time an actor mentioned either the word ghost or ghosts the sound effects guy perfunctorily pushed the slider on his control panel labeled Cue Dumb Rumbling Sound To Insult The Intelligence Of The Audience. I became so distracted after the first rumble or two that I found myself trying to anticipate which utterance of ghost would trigger the wrath of the theater thunder god. There are times when Preston Lane is unable to refrain from the superfluous, and Ghosts was one of those occasions. And more’s the pity since Ibsen’s play provides ample content and opportunity to challenge any actor, director, or audience. All five actors gave very creditable performances: Jeffery West and Gloria Biegler were simply exceptional; Blake DeLong and David McCann gave solid portrayals although I felt Pastor Manders was just a little wooden even at the moments when his inner struggle should have been more conspicuous; Rebecca Nertz’s interpretation of Regina was rather forced and uneven at times but I must confess to a tainted perspective that lingers insuperably since seeing Tobacco Road. Despite some media endorsements to the contrary, I thought the play was an appalling failure–certainly not a production that would encourage continued support.
Although syphilis was ostensibly the unnamed subject of Ghosts and Ibsen transgressed social taboos by simply including references to the disease in public, his work should not be mistaken as merely one dimensional; he demanded that we scrutinize the role (perhaps plight would not be too strong a word) of women in society as well as the toxic effect that organized religion (in this instance, Christianity) could have when it lost its vitality and became ossified and shut off from the simple compassion of its eponymous inspiration. Ibsen ventured even further onto darker terrain as Regina and her father’s interplay at the beginning of the play suggests that there is a forbidden element in their relationship; however, as the characters are developed the maze of the play’s complexity is amplified and revealed. Osvald’s syphilitic seizure in the last scene was protracted and melodramatic; the young man’s anguish and pain were onerous enough and did not require the deus ex machina conclusion (actually, both a confusing and an annoying distraction) whipped up by the fever-pitched rumbling of sound effects and the single shaft of light illuminating the morphine pills clutched in his mother’s outstretched hand; his misery was as complete and ironic as certain aspects of his character were innocent. Yet, pleasure is never a solitary traveler, pain is its companion. Ibsen and the Alvings knew this, and, when we are not distracted by the subterfuge of reality shows, sound effects, or our own armory of defenses, we know it too.
