A 'Ghosts' that indicts cowardice, hypocrisy in parenting

People's Light & Theatre Company has given us a phenomenal production of Henrik Ibsen's

Ghosts

. It has so much resonance for our time that it could almost have been set in 2014 - except for the prominent place in

Ghosts

of syphilis, as both fact of life and metaphor. There is no effective treatment for syphilis and for its intergenerational legacy of infection - as there is no treatment for the legacy of moral decay.

Henrik Ibsen's 19th-century Norway lacked antibiotics to treat Europe's raging bouts of syphilis, a disease that took down many artists, writers, and prominent citizens (Gauguin, Baudelaire, Winston Churchill's dad). So for Ibsen in 1881, congenital syphilis worked as a physical manifestation of a once-biblical idea Freud had repopularized in psychology: The sins of the father are passed on to the son.

With this unavoidable historical footnote aside, Lanford Wilson's 2002 translation/adaptation turns Ghosts into a modern play. Oswald Alving (Keith Conallen) returns from Paris to help dedicate an orphanage built to honor his late father. He's unaware that Mrs. Alving (the excellent Kathryn Petersen) funded the orphanage so that Oswald would not inherit anything from a man who spent the bulk of his marriage cheating, drinking, and abusing. When she tells Pastor Manders (Ian Merrill Peakes) the truth of the last 20 years - which his guidance forced her to endure - the entire fabric of the family unravels.

In Ibsen's original script, the play indicts convention, Victorian ethics, herd morality, and spiritual authority. In Wilson's adaptation, and under Ken Marini's sharp - if too sexualized - direction, Ghosts becomes more an illustration of what paves the road to hell and an indictment of cowardice, hypocrisy, and mendacity in what parents teach, and keep from, children.

Where Manders once occupied the role of villain, he now appears as a man of integrity who erred, but on good principle. Mrs. Alving now shares blame for her purposely misleading parenting. The dynamic among the characters intensifies, enabling contemporary audiences to focus on the ruin produced by lies and ignorance, and perhaps finds its only solution in euthanizing a terminal illness.

People's Light stages the play so superbly, and with such dedicated passion from every actor, that Ghosts haunts us in period attire on an antique set, but yields a new perspective: that we, the audience, are no less in danger of becoming the "again-walkers" of Ibsen's original title. Even with our more scientifically informed eye to seeing sins inherited from centuries past, we still possess no medicine to remedy them.

Ghosts

Through Feb. 9 at People's Light & Theatre Company,

39 Conestoga Rd., Malvern. Tickets: $26-$46. Information: 610-644-3500, peopleslight.org

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