It is right and fitting that Jack O’Brien be part of Lincoln Center Theater’s 40th-anniversary season: his productions here of Tom Stoppard’s plays alone have attracted ample audiences and awards. Yet his LCT career – his career in general -- has always had variety and the latest proof is Ibsen’s Ghosts, now in the Newhouse, in a version by Mark O’Rowe. Why?
“I often think that plays choose me,” O’Brien said in a recent conversation. “That sounds ooga booga but I have enough proof of that in my life for that statement to be true.” O’Brien came to Ghosts in part because he had a previous commitment to direct something involving Lily Rabe and Hamish Linklater, who play Mrs. Alving and Engstrand. O’Brien also responded to the immediacy of O’Rowe’s version. “It’s very powerful,” O’Brien said, “and Mark and I agreed on the ways to approach the drama."
For one thing, they decided to lower the ages of the characters, to point up the sexual politics: “I’m lucky to have five very fine actors” – Billy Crudup, Levon Hawke, and Ella Beatty are the others -- “to convey this investigation.” For another, he concurred with O’Rowe’s desire to do the play without an intermission. “That heightens the intensity,” O’Brien said. He added: “When I directed the play before – at San Diego’s Old Globe, in 1993 -- “I took the breaks. But the new production bears no relation to that one. It’s an entirely different play.”
It is different not just because of the text but because of how Ibsen’s tale strikes us now. “Times have changed, obviously,” O’Brien said. “Mrs. Alving and the other characters have always been battling against poisons both real and metaphorical. But I think it’s fair to say, without needing to get specific, that some of those poisons are feeling especially virulent at the moment.”
What gives Ghosts its enduring power regardless of the era in which it is produced? “Like most great works, the answer lies in the play’s construction,” O’Brien explained. “And Ghosts resembles ancient Greek drama in that significant events take place offstage. There are two of them here: the fire at the orphanage and the night, years before, when Mrs. Alving went to Pastor Manders in a crisis and asked him to help her.”
Directors and adapters strive to decide what happened that night. “Mark thinks that Mrs. Alving may have stayed with the Pastor for two or three days,” O’Brien said. “Did they have sex? Did they sleep together without sex? Whatever happened, it was devastating.” Teasing that out takes us to the ellipses in Ibsen’s text. “There are a lot of them,” O’Brien said, “and they allow you to suggest a great deal depending how you decide to play them.”
Ibsen famously said that he wrote Ghosts to find out what happened to Nora, or a woman like Nora, after she departed her family at the end of A Doll’s House. “She finds a measure of freedom,” O’Brien commented. “Look at the books Mrs. Alving is reading. We chose three: Huckleberry Finn, which is apt right now because of the recent novel James [by Percival Everett]. And Madame Bovary. And The Origin of the Species, which at the time Ghosts was written was presenting a theory that was terrifying to people and their beliefs. But as Mrs. Alving says, when Pastor Manders chides her for such reading, ‘There isn’t actually anything in them that people don’t already think. Or suspect.’ Mrs. Alving is grateful to have the freedom to consider what’s modern.”
For himself, O’Brien is grateful to be able to do one final production at LCT before the departure of Producing Artistic Director Andre Bishop. “I feel a debt to this extraordinary theater,” O’Brien said. “They have given me things to do that no one in their right mind would have given me. So I thought: let’s go out with a bang. Give me five American actors who are worth listening to and a play that people think that they know. And let’s see what happens.”
Brendan Lemon is a freelance journalist in New York.
