The production opened with a stutter. Entering through the aisles of the Mitzi Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center, five actors in Ibsen’s Ghosts made their way to the stage and picked up bound scripts that were waiting for them on what would become the Alving family’s dining table, as if getting ready for rehearsal. Ella Beatty and Hamish Linklater began to play the first scene as Regine, the Alvings’ socially ambitious housemaid, and her father Engstrand, a drunken carpenter whom she is doing her best to leave behind. But they spoke in a barely audible monotone, as if they were “marking,” going through the lines while sparing the voice. After a few exchanges, they started over from the beginning, now speaking quietly, conversationally. The third time was the charm: after restarting the scene yet again, Beatty and Linklater finally became Regine and Engstrand, and Ghosts was underway. This framing device mostly left critics cold. Was it necessary to remind us that we were watching actors in a play? After the last scene, did we need to be dismissed back into real life by having the cast return with their scripts and slap them down on the table? But the warming-up makes more sense if it is understood as a reminder of the difference not between life and art, but between the present and the past. To leap over the chasm that separates 2025 from 1881, when Henrik Ibsen wrote Ghosts, it may be necessary to back up a few times and build up speed. Starting with its title, the play itself insists that the division between past and present is an illusion. Ordinarily, a ghost is what we call a dead person who intrudes into the world of the living. But Ibsen inverts this supernatural definition. For him, it is the living who become ghosts, as they reenact the behavior of the dead and blindly follow their commandments. The first such apparition in Ibsen’s play comes at the end of the first act, just after Mrs. Alving has finished explaining to Pastor Manders that her late husband, the locally revered Chamberlain Alving, was in fact a drunk and a womanizer. She realized this early in their marriage, when she overheard him making advances to their maid: “Oh, it still rings in my ears, so dreadful and yet so ridiculous — I heard my own housemaid whisper: ‘Let me go, Chamberlain Alving! Leave me alone.’ ” A few moments later, she overhears her son Osvald doing the same thing to Regine in the same room. “Ghosts,” Mrs. Alving shudders. “The couple in the conservatory — they walk again.” At the Mitzi Newhouse, a small theater, there was no conservatory; the seduction took place at the lobby door, where it could be heard but not seen. It was an austere production all around, directed by Jack O’Brien, with a functional set and costumes. Only the lighting design by Japhy Weideman aimed for expressionist extravagance. In the final scene, when Osvald collapses into a syphilitic stupor and can only murmur to his mother over and over again, “Give me the sun,” the glare was dialed well past the “bright sunshine” that Mrs. Alving had promised him, as if the world was being erased along with Osvald’s mind, in the way that intense light can obliterate everything. For Ibsen himself, writing for and about the late-nineteenth-century European bourgeoisie meant well-upholstered stages teeming with furniture and objects. His stage directions tend to be lengthy and detailed, as in Hedda Gabler: “Towards the center of the room is an oval table covered with a tablecloth and surrounded by chairs. Further forward, by the right-hand wall, are a wide porcelain wood stove, a tall armchair, a footstool with a cushion and two stools. In the right-hand corner, at the back, is a corner sofa and a small round table.” And so on. Early in his career, Ibsen worked for a decade as a theater manager in Bergen and Kristiania (as Oslo was then called), and had his own ideas about how his plays should be produced. He left these instructions for future productions and continued to include similar descriptions in play after play, as if it were a necessary step in priming his imagination. Realism meant presenting life on stage exactly as the audience lived it at home, so that they could be confronted with the ugliness of that life, which they worked so hard to ignore. 
Ibsen’s contemporaries found Ghosts the ugliest of all his plays. Two years earlier, in 1879, A Doll’s House had been a huge success, selling out a large first edition of seven thousand copies in Scandinavia. (Ibsen’s practice was to publish each new play as a book before it was produced on stage.) It went on to become a hit across Europe, turning Ibsen into one of the most important writers in the world, a position he kept until his death in 1906. The fuel of its success was controversy. Everywhere A Doll’s House was staged, audiences debated whether Nora Helmer was right to leave her husband and children, whether Ibsen was a prophet of liberation or a symptom of moral decay. The timing of his provocation in the history of European mores was perfect. For Ghosts, the book, Ibsen’s Copenhagen publisher raised the print run to ten thousand, but this time there was no controversy: everyone agreed the play was grotesquely immoral, and almost no copies were sold. Two years had to pass before it was staged in Norway. Even many of Ibsen’s former champions were revolted by a play whose message seemed to be that marriage, family, and Christianity are wicked, while adultery and incest are admirable, as long as they are products of what the Osvald calls “the joy of life.” “The joy of life? Can there be salvation in that?” Mrs. Alving wonders. Her own life has been spent in the service of the opposite principle: duty. Urged by her relatives to marry the wealthy Chamberlain Alving,
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