Performing Arts

Ibsen's Ghosts, one of the first great plays we can recognize as modern, looks backward and forward. WingSpan Theatre Company's rare revival successfully straddles the divide.

REX C. CURRY/Special Contributor

The characters in Ghost, (from left) Susan Sargeant as Helen Alving, Mike Schraeder as Oswald Alving and Bill Jenkins as the Reverend Manders, deal with religious skepticism, incest and sexually transmitted disease.

In the late 19th century, Ghosts was a shocker. Religious skepticism, incest, sexually transmitted disease? We've become a bit blasé, but these can still ruffle our feathers.

In Ibsen's play, Helen Alving, played by Susan Sargeant, has endowed an orphanage named for her late husband. She has put her oldest friend, the Reverend Manders (Bill Jenkins), in charge. He in turn has hired a drunken scoundrel, Jakkob Engstrand (H. Francis Fusilier), as chief workman.

Things get complicated when Helen's son, Oswald (Mike Schraeder), a painter who has returned home to Norway from Paris, begins to get interested in Engstrand's daughter, Regina (Hilary Couch). Helen has been employing Regina as a maid to get her away from Jakkob's influence, but she finds the impending liaison alarming.

The situations look back to Greek tragedy, Hamlet and even Wagner. They also seem prescient of plays written many decades later, from Long Day's Journey Into Night to this year's Pulitzer Prize winner, August: Osage County.

The Ghosts that WingSpan opened on Thursday uses the colloquialisms of Lanford Wilson's translation to good purpose. Certainly, this Ghosts avoids the musty feel of so much Ibsen.

One of our finest actors, Sally Vahle, directed the show. She has always leaned toward the formal and excelled in tragedy, so it's no wonder that her Ghosts does, as well.

Artists who revel in the texture of the medium itself are often called painterly. Is there such a word as actorly? If so, it applies to Ms. Sargeant's Mrs. Alving and Mr. Schraeder's Oswald. We see many emotions flow in and around Helen as she relives the details of her life. Her reactions do come from inside, but this is hardly naturalism. Mr. Schraeder, less a hangdog romantic than most Oswalds, emphasizes the bitterness and emotional outbursts.

Clare Floyd Devries' set persuades us we are on a remote island in 19th-century Norway, but Jason S. Foster's lighting design misses some opportunities. A sense of gray gloom through most of the play and a blinding sunrise at the end are essential to Ibsen's physically embodied symbolism, but they are nowhere to be found here.

Through Oct. 25 at the Bath House Cultural Center. Runs 120 mins. $15 to $20. 214-675-6573, www.wingspantheatre.com.

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