Ghosts, Penfold Theatre Company and Breaking String Theatre Company at Hyde Park Theatre, October 13 - November 5 (ALT Review 2)

by Michael Meigs

The Penfold-Breaking String joint production of Ghosts is a moody, beautiful piece. Its honesty to Ibsen's 1881 text is almost a disadvantage, for among we twentieth-first century chrononauts will be some who find inexplicable and inherently comic the restraint of his language. How quaint not to name the evils: prostitution, syphillis, debauchery, incest, spouse abuse, addiction, wifely duty, madness, social convention, obligatory purity for women, licensed libertinism for men . . . .

By retaining Ibsen's approach of creating in our minds the unnamed spectres which polite company will not name, director Graham Schmidt takes us back to the sharp blacks and whites of brittle European morality of the 19th century. Never mind that in our own day we indulge and are indulged by broad fields of gray and we celebrate the colors of experiment and diversity.

The subtle set designed by Ia Ensterë captures that world, with a sort of spider web of threads along the walls, wrapping the proper 19th century living space in an evocative indefinition. Costuming by Buffy Manners gives visual reinforcement to time and place -- from Mrs. Alving's gown to the opposed masculine visions of Pastor Manders' Norwegian cleric black and Oswald's muted extravagance.

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Ghosts, Penfold Theatre Company and Breaking String Theatre Company at Hyde Park Theatre, October 13 - November 5 (ALT Review 1)

by Hannah Bisewski

Penfold Theatre Company and the Breaking String Theater joined forces to stage Ghosts, producing a well considered work that breathes a fresh vitality into a familiar story. Revolutionary reevaluation of old convention is precisely the theme of Ghosts.

Settling into their seats in the cramped, angular space of the Hyde Park Theatre, the audience sees a dusty, dirty, though elegant, Victorian-era living room. A dim chandelier hangs from a cobweb-lined ceiling. Given the play’s title, an uninformed audience member could reasonably guess that the cast will present a horror story.

Attractive young housemaid Regina Engstrand enters to clean the room, only to be interrupted by her scheming unwelcome father.One has no idea how entangled even the maid is in this family’s self-destructive legacy. Only during the confrontational conversation between the house’s matriarch Helene Alving and the family pastor, Manders, prompted by estate affairs following Captain Alving’s death, do the family secrets begin to spill forth. There are many, further complicated by Helene’s attempt to keep Osvald, her recently returned only son, from discovering any of them.

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Upcoming: Hedda Gabler, Classic Theatre, San Antonio, May 12 - 29

Mr. and Mrs. George Tesman return to Norway after six months of honeymoon in Europe. In their absence family friend Judge Brack has arranged the purchase of a city mansion at great expense and furnished it lavishly. Ibsen's Hedda Gabler opens on the morning after their arrival at the new residence and a new domestic life.

Allan S. Ross designed this set with meticulous detail. The audience has the time to study the heavy furniture, carpets, framed engravings, views into three additional rooms and a barely glimpsed horizon through the windows. As one listens to a querelous duet between piano and cello, the roseate illumination brings out the reds and purples. At stage right, rear, in his own pool of light, bearded and wearing his military decorations, the late General Gabler stares serenely out from his portrait.

This is a house, not a home. Everything is in its place, according to good taste, discreet expenditure and bourgeois standards. In the action that Ibsen unfolds for us, Hedda Gabler as the new mistress of the house is guarded in her reactions to everyone in these new circumstances. Having passed the age of coquettery, she married George Tesman for lack of anything better to do; now, having involuntarily made her nest with a passing comment about this particular manor, she finds herself obliged to live in it.

Asia Ciaravino is haunting in the title role. That quiet, watchful oval face is almost unblinking, She has the unconscious beauty of a woman who little cares whether others look at her or not.

In one sense, in Hedda Gabler Ibsen wrote a great thumping melodrama and resolved all the conflicts with a couple of pistol shots. One occurs far from the house and is described for us as the Greeks used to do at the conclusions of their tragedies. The second takes place in the final moments just behind a curtain in one of those alcoves as Hedda takes her own life. That's hardly giving anything away -- although the program states that Hedda Gabler was first presented in Dublin in 2008, that's referring to this adaptation by Brian Friel for the Gate Theatre. Hedda has been putting the pistol to her head since 1891, and many spectators echo the scandalized reaction of Judge Brack: "But people just don't do things like that!"

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