Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts might have scandalized audiences after its 1882 premiere—tackling as it did sexually transmitted diseases, illegitimate children, euthanasia, incest and religious hypocrisy—but it’s far milder stuff for today’s audiences, so directors and adapters must work harder to make it relevant. 

 

Nearly 20 years ago, Ingmar Bergman brought his celebrated Swedish troupe to BAM in Brooklyn for an incendiary staging that included bits of Strindberg and even Bergman’s own material to shore up Ibsen’s script, along with a memorable turn by the great Pernilla August as the widow Helena Alving. About a decade ago, Richard Eyre's compelling adaptation that was a hit in London also took BAM by storm with Lesley Manville as an indelible Helena. 

 

Unfortunately, in his mostly adroit staging at Lincoln Center Theater, director Jack O’Brien has saddled himself with a subpar Helena: Lily Rabe gives her usual mannered, ineffectual performance, barking out the lines wrongheadedly and coming across more Helena’s beloved son Oswald’s older sister than his overprotective mother who’s hiding a horrible family secret that will eventually come out. 

 

O’Brien does better with the rest of his cast, even though Ella Beatty is a bit stiff as Helene’s housemaid Regina, in love with Oswald—who wants to marry her and take her back to Paris, where he lives as a tortured artist. Although Oswald is played by Levon Hawke, making his New York stage debut, the actor’s lack of polish works well for Helena’s sickly son, wracked by the syphilis he inherited from his dead father; Hawke is especially convincing in the play’s shattering final moments, when he—now blinded by the disease—begs his mother to put him out of his misery.

 

Regina’s estranged father Engstrand—helping to build the orphanage Helen has planned in her husband’s memory—is played with his customary intensity by Hamish Linklater, while Pastor Manders—Helena’s long-ago paramour who embodies the hypocrisy of the church—is a role tailor-made for Billy Crudup, who’s expert at playing complicated characters who alternate being cheered for and sneered at.

 

Mark O’Rowe provides a lucid adaptation of Ibsen’s masterpiece; if he and O’Brien falter in a needless framing device of the performers walking onstage and picking up scripts that—after Beatty and Linklater act out the play’s opening lines in differing ways as if they’re rehearsing—they don’t look at and which are immediately jettisoned, Ibsen’s morality tale moves swiftly until it arrives at its inevitably tragic conclusion.

 

John Lee Beatty’s aptly minimalist set, Japhy Weideman’s incisive lighting, Jess Goldstein’s spot-on costumes and Scott Lehrer and Mark Bennett’s evocative sound contribute handsomely to this story of a family haunted by unseen but always present specters, culminating with a metaphorical but very real destructive conflagration that might be a sign from the almighty about the family’s immorality, something Manders—who convinced Helena to forego insurance for the orphanage because God would take care of things—ruefully opines. It may be singleminded, but Ghosts remains potent theater.