In Ghosts, Studio Arena Theatre has elected to take on one of the greatest and most important plays in all of dramatic literature. By the time the first lines are spoken, the dice have already been cast for tragedy to explode in Henrik Ibsen’s play. As the play begins, Mrs. Alving is commemorating the tenth anniversary of her husband’s death by building an orphanage in his memory. The late Captain Alving, it would seem, was a great man and a pillar of the community. But nothing in this play is what it seems to be on its surface. Quickly, the ghosts of Mrs. Alving’s past return to haunt her present, and the cloth of social respectability that she has spent a lifetime weaving begins to unravel. What begins as a story of duty, social propriety, and loyalty, quickly evolves into a tale of deceit, infidelity, venereal disease, incest, and euthanasia. To its original 1881 audience, the play was shocking—like opening up a public sewer, one critic famously wrote.

Ibsen was unable to flinch away from the concerns that he saw at the center of contemporary life, and his work would, as much as that of any other playwright, herald the arrival of the Modern Drama. 19th century audiences were accustomed to sensational stories as recounted in countless melodramas of the era, replete with purloined letters, secret wills, runaway marriages, and evil landlords. But in Ghosts, Ibsen cut directly into some of the most frightening and ugly truths about the consequences of the social values of the era. In his tragedies about ordinary bourgeois families whose lives become grist for the mill of middle–class social propriety, Ibsen achieved true greatness as a playwright, and so earned his place, alongside Shakespeare, Sophocles, and Chekhov, as one of the greatest dramatic writers who ever lived.

Ghosts begins previews on Friday, February 10.

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