ABET | Atlantic Beach Experimental Theatre

 

THE BEACHES LEADER | January 2010

Serious drama in dead of winter

“It is strange how history repeats itself in different forms like variations on a musical theme.” – Henrik Ibsen in an 1866 letter to John Grieg

By JOHNNY WOODHOUSE
ASSOCIATE EDITOR

There’s nothing like a good dose of serious stage drama in the dead of winter. And “Ghosts,” Henrik Ibsen’s psychological masterpiece, fits the mid-January bill.

The powerful three-act play opens at 8 pm today at the Atlantic Beach Experimental Theatre, 716 Ocean Blvd. Tickets are $15 and $12 for students, seniors and military.

Set in a coastal town of Norway in the late 1880′s on a dreary night with a somber fiord landscape serving as its backdrop, “Ghosts” is a classic tale of past transgressions coming back to haunt the present.

The early 20th century critic James Huneker called the 1881 play “the strongest of the 19th century and also the most harrowing.”

Ibsen is known as the founder of modern prose drama, and many of his plays can stand alone as works of literature.

“Ghosts” delivers that kind of literary punch.

“It’s not only what we inherit from our fathers and mothers that keeps on returning in us. It’s all kinds of old beliefs and dead doctrines . . . and we can’t get rid of them,” says Mrs. Helene Alving, the play’s central character, to her minister, Rev. Manders.

In “Ghosts,” Helene has spent the past 20 years burying the past. She suffered through a failed marriage to a free-wheeling ship captain and, as the play opens, is intent on righting several wrongs in her life by building an orphanage.

But Helene’s beloved son, Oswald, who has recently returned from Paris, where he was studying to be a painter, is keeping a hideous secret from his mother.

Two other characters in the play, Regina, Helene’s attractive servant girl, and Regina’s father Jacob, a local carpenter and drunk, represent apparitions that continue to haunt the duty-bound Helene.

With its dramatic subjects of promiscuity, incest and sexually transmitted disease, Ibsen’s controversial play turned Victorian values on its head in the late 1880′s.

“Ghosts” lacks the shock value of its time, but it more than makes up for it with several dramatic twists and turns, including a fiery revelation at the end of the second act.

In 2001, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lanford Wilson (“Talley’s Folly”) penned a new translation of “Ghosts,” and this is the version ABET is staging.

Wilson trimmed down Ibsen’s two-hour play to an intermission-less 90 minutes and pumped up the repressed sexuality between Helene and Manders that was only hinted at in the original work.

ABET’s “Ghosts” is being directed by Erik DeCicco, a theatre professor at Jacksonville University.

Deborah Jordan, head of JU’s acting and directing program, assumes the role of Helene. The cast also includes Richard Sheffler as Manders, Scott Peeler as Jakob and Lesley Nadwodnik as Regina.

DeCicco, who plays Oswald, said the timeless play, first produced in 1882, still engages social questions that remain relevant today.

“This particular version, translated by Lanford Wilson, pushes the envelope even further, drawing special attention to the transgressions of each character, not one or two,” DeCicco said.

“The action of this play sends the characters through multiple journeys, which force all of them to change and adapt. It is within this growth that the ghosts of past generations are unknowingly awakened and the ghosts of future generations are unwillingly created.”

“Ghosts” runs through Jan. 30. For reservations, call 249-7177.