Cato and Leverett’s adaptation does not try to move the action along any faster. Instead, Cato focuses on the visual impact of the story through his creative staging. Lee Savage’s set design is utterly drained of life and color, with only a black sofa and black table and chairs on a pale white set. The actors are dressed in muted shades, with the mistress of the house in a rich, chocolate brown satin and her maid in elegant black.
The gray weather - Savage’s design accommodates a nearly constant rainstorm - adds to the emotional gloom permeating this fractured family. Most provocatively, Cato occasionally makes the ghosts the characters refer to appear and disappear unexpectedly behind a scrim upstage left, almost as if they’re visible only out of the corner of the characters’ eyes, just out of reach.
The bleak Alving household includes a wealthy widow, Helene Alving (Mia Dillon); her grown son Osvald (Randy Harrison), who recently returned home to die after living as an artist in Paris; the family maid Regine (Tara Franklin), who hopes Osvald will take her away and marry her; and Regine’s father, the carpenter Engstrand (Jonathan Epstein), a man eager to turn any situation to his advantage.
The arrival of Pastor Manders (David Adkins) sets the drama in motion as he journeys to the Alving home to settle some legal paperwork regarding an orphanage Helene Alving has underwritten in honor of her late husband. Manders, it turns out, is a self-righteous prig, lost in his own hypocrisy and hiding behind his sense of duty. Adkins is wonderfully innocent, even as he spouts contradictory ideas and ideals.
It would be easy to turn the pastor into a stock character, but Adkins’s ability to feign shock, and panic about the possibility of public approbation, make him the focus of our attention throughout the play.
The simple act of signing over the papers leads to revelations that send the carefully constructed images of each of these characters literally up in smoke. Helene Alving’s sense of betrayal by both her pastor and her husband, and all the dutiful efforts she made to cover up the shame, come back to haunt and ultimately destroy her.
Scott Killian’s sound design is unsettling and evocative, opening the play with a child singing, and culminating in a dramatic soundscape of a fire that consumes the newly built orphanage, along with all the hopes for burying the past. But even though Ibsen’s understanding of the danger of deceit has a contemporary ring, Cato can’t create the sense of urgency need to make “Ghosts’’ dramatically compelling today.
