Ghosts

A Pittsburgh Theater Premiere

Written by: Henrik Ibsen
Adapted by: Virginia Wall Gruenert
Directed by: Simm Landres

“I am half inclined to think we are all ghosts…it is not only what we have inherited from our fathers and mothers that exists again in us, but all sorts of old dead ideas and all kinds of old dead beliefs and things of that kind. They are not actually alive in us; but there they are dormant all the same, and we can never be rid of them. Whenever I take up a newspaper and read it, I fancy I see ghosts creeping between the lines. There must be ghosts all over the world. They must be as countless as the grains of the sands, it seems to me. And we are so miserably afraid of the light, all of us.”  Henrik Ibsen – Ghosts

The sins of the past are at the heart of Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts, one of the most controversial plays of the late 19^th century and a scathing commentary on the morality of the times.  Mrs. Helen Alving has accepted her pastor’s counsel and endured her husband’s many infidelities in silence.  Ten years after Alving’s death, she is to dedicate an orphanage in his memory.  Her son Oswald, kept innocent of his father’s profligacy, returns home for the dedication.  His attraction to the housemaid conjures up the ghost of his parents’ unhappy marriage.  This disastrous romance, along with Oswald’s increasing symptoms of the venereal disease inherited from his father, force Mrs. Alving to confront her own “ghosts.”