Eclectic Theatre's Fair-to-Middling Ghosts

Years before, shortly after marrying Mr. Alving and discovering the charming man she fell for was burying himself in a deep, dark hole, Mrs. Alving fled the marriage to her friend and adviser Manders, with whom she shared a secret attraction. Manders rejected her advances, convincing her of her wifely duties, and sent her back to her husband. Thus unable to escape the misery of her life, Mrs. Alving went about concealing it. She hid her husband's sordid side, spent hours advancing his career, and shielded their young son, Oswald, from the horrible truth, sending him away to school before he grew old enough to catch on.

But a decade on, she's decided to put as much of it behind her as possible. Every penny of her husband's wealth is being put into the orphanage, to exorcise the last traces of the man. She comes clean to a dumbfounded (though easily misled) Manders, just as her son Oswald, now a successful painter recently returned from Paris, makes his libertine entry.

But the sins of the father are not so easily erased. Oswald, unaware of his father's lifestyle, is in a deep depression, convinced it's by his own action that his mind is being consumed by the late stages of syphilis. Unable to work, he's returned home to sulk and await his miserable end, but is reinvigorated as he falls in love with Regina, his mother's servant, who just also happens to be his illegitimate half-sister.

Ghosts is one of Ibsen's strongest plays, with great dramatic potential and a deeply critical attack on moralistic society. Designer Rik Deskin, along with director L. Nichol Cabe, sets the production in the contemporary with a minimal but pleasant and functional set, and a script lightly adapted (mostly just modernizing the speech) by Beau M.K. Prichard. (All three are founding members of Eclectic Theatre Co.)

The acting, however, is so mixed that the overall effect is often ruined. As Manders, Lee Morris delivers the show's strongest performance. The character is set in his ways and clings to his beliefs in the face of countervailing evidence, but Morris never lets his Manders become stupid; easily taken advantage of, Morris even makes his conservative, small-town priest sympathetic.

Unfortunately, Colleen Carey delivers a wooden performance as Mrs. Alving. We've seen this sort of casting mistake plenty of times before: An actor nails the audition, but turns out to lack the versatility to actually pull off the role. Carey's got a great vocal presence, it's true, and she does calm and composed well. But as the tension develops she never ramps up, until at the height of the action she goes over the top. Plus, it seems like more work could have been done on the staging; Morris creates his character's physicality well, but Carey mostly stands with her hands at her side.

Adam Standley does well as Oswald, though for our money was a little too clever and sarcastic and lacked Morris's range. Kelli Mohrbacher is passable as Regina, the illegitimate daughter and love interest, but she has no chemistry with either Morris or Allen Inman, who plays Jacob Engstrand, the man Regina was raised to believe was her father. That said, in the latter case the fault may like with Inman, who didn't seem to have finished fleshing out his character at all, and was too young for the part to boot.

And finally, the ending came off as overdone. His illusions of his father's virtue shattered, Oswald admits his condition to his mother and reveals what his great hope for Regina had been: That she'd care for him as his health failed, and when his mind was finally taken from him, assist his suicide with morphine. In Ibsen's original, the play ends with Mrs. Alving clutching her convulsing son, searching for the tablets and struggling with what to do next, which was already a bit too melodramatic and convenient (thank God he explained in the nick of time what was about to happen!). Cabe and Prichard have her administering the dose and wailing over his corpse as the lights drop, which really just makes it even more irritatingly convenient and melodramatic.

Overall, Eclectic Theatre's Ghosts isn't bad, it's just middling. Together Carey and Standley deliver strong enough performances at the end that we have to admit tearing up a bit, but the weaknesses of the production steal from its final wallop. The lesson we take away is that what the small theatres around town need are stronger, more involved directors to guide young and less experienced actors to push their boundaries and achieve their potential. There's plenty of raw talent out there, and no one in this show was a bad actor, but only one of them managed to make his character real.