Old Sins Cast Long Shadows

Ghosts – Redtwist Theatre

 

Ghosts, by Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, had its world premiere in 1882 – in Chicago, of all places. Like Ibsen’s other works, it’s a skewering of rigid morality codes and the damage they cause. At the time, its themes caused quite the scandal. Adapted by its director at Redtwist, Erin Murray, the play remains no less incendiary now than it was then.

As always, when entering a show at the Redtwist’s small space, you are enveloped in the set – in this case, Helen Alving’s sitting room. The walls are a hastily and unevenly painted stone gray and above the fireplace is an empty portrait frame that the characters all see as a portrait of her late husband. The effect is that of sitting in a mausoleum. The show also doesn’t have a discrete start. The lights don’t dim and accompany a polite reminder to silence your cell phone and unwrap your candy now. A maid simply enters the room and starts about her business. For the first few minutes there is no dialogue, only the ticking of a grandfather clock. The maid leaves and the stage is empty. The silence continues until it is just this side of unbearable. The blurred edges between the beginning of the show and the rest of the world achieve something remarkable in the opening minutes: we all stopped talking, and stayed silent, even when nothing was happening, because we all understood that was expected of us. So when the maid comes back and play begins in earnest, we’re all one step closer to understanding the other silences that pervade this house.

The story takes place on the eve of Mrs. Alving dedicating an orphanage in her late husband’s memory. We quickly learn, however, that her memories of him are anything but kind, and that this bequest is not to honor his memory but bury it. In doing this, she can leave her son with memories of a good father, whether he had one or not. She hopes that in cementing the image of a good man who never existed in the mind of her community, she can finally fully detach herself from the man he actually was. We also learn that very early on in her marriage she left her husband but was persuaded by her friend and pastor to return to him in the name of duty. In the name of duty, she went back to him, and endured another ten years of an unhappy marriage. In the name of duty, she made sure that her son never knew who his father really was. Now, as she is poised to finally free herself from those obligations once and for all, she’ll find that doing so is not so straightforward.

I don’t want to say more than that, for fear of giving too much away, particularly about the material that is part of Murray’s adaptation. Suffice to say that at the start of the show, it is very easy to sympathize with Mrs. Alving and the choices she has had to make and the things she endured in the name of keeping the men in her life happy. By the end, we see those choices have had some unintended consequences for the people around her, and maybe her motivations were not as clear-cut as they first appeared. The line between genuinely having no choice in a bad system and making the easiest choice to protect one’s position in that system is a lot thinner than Mrs. Alving, or maybe any of us, would like it admit. The places Murray has altered or added to the script reinforce those themes in a way that felt organic and relevant, no small feat for a play that is more than a century old. The changes encourage the audience to examine our own society, not just that of the 19th century setting.

Leading the cast is longtime Redtwist company member, Jacqueline Grandt.  She is amazing as Helen, full stop. Having fallen hard for her Martha in Virginia Woolf and been recently impressed by her stellar performance in Six Degrees of Separation, I was expecting something great, and I was not disappointed. A common thread in all the performances is a married woman chafing against the constraints of what her society thinks marriage should be, and that conflict has to mostly play out inside the character. Grandt is fantastic at conveying the impression that still waters run very deep, and it makes the explosive breakdown you just know is coming feel earned and heartrending.

I also want to single out Devon Nimerfroh as Helen’s son Oswald and Sophie Hoyt as her maid Regina for praise. Without giving anything away, both handle their characters’ breaking points with ease. Oswald’s will make you sad. Regina’s will make you angry. Both serve to add color and consequence to Helen’s choices.

Ibsen was apparently unhappy with the English translation of the title as ‘Ghosts.’ A more literal translation of the Norwegian would be ‘revenant’ – literally that which returns. Given that the show is 136 years old, the fact that its themes about hypocrisy and society’s expectations, particularly for women, feel so relevant today certainly evokes the image of a shambling zombie slowly but surely coming for us.

Highly Recommended

Reviewed by Kevin Curran

 

Presented November 10-December 10, by Redtwist Theatre, 1044 W, Bryn Mawr, Chicago.

Tickets are available by calling 773-728-7529 or by going to www.redtwist.org.

Additional information about this and other area productions can be found by visiting www.theatreinchicago.com.