Lily Rabe and Levon Hawke Photo by Jeremy Daniel

What keeps Ibsen fresh is his themes dealing with the hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie class and the pressure to conform, regardless of the individual price. Appearances matter now as they did then and, as many a long-running reality TV show and gossip-spreading social media blasts can attest to, the airing of dirty laundry has never lost its appeal.

Both recent productions of A Doll's House and An Enemy of the People benefited greatly from having been adapted by Amy Herzog, who has been dubbed an "Ibsen whisperer" for her ability to keep one foot firmly planted in the master's time and place while still speaking to modern audiences. Turns out to be quite a skill, one that playwright Mark O'Rowe's "new version" of Ghosts does not quite measure up to. The result is an overall style that mixes potentially engrossing drama with a more modern-day soap opera vibe, an effect that is abetted by Jack O'Brien's fuzzy direction and varying acting styles that dance across the centuries.

The thing about successful soap operas is that they are gripping guilty pleasures. Even if their plot lines stretch credibility, we get caught up in the stories, root for the good guys, and hiss the villains. The "soap opera" aspect of Ghosts in built into Ibsen's plot, which encompasses such provocative subject matter as sanctimonious clergy, incest, violations of marital vows, out-of-wedlock births, venereal disease, arson, and maternal filicide. That's a lot of ground to cover, even for Ibsen, whose three-act play has been squooshed into a straight-through 110 intermissionless minutes.

With this production of Ghosts, it is difficult to fully buy into any of the performances other than that of Lily Rabe's compelling Helena Alving, a woman who is at least as interesting to watch as Nora in A Doll's House, a role that, interestingly enough, Rabe performed in a 2011 production at the Williamstown Theatre Festival.

In a sense, Helena's journey is the polar opposite of Nora's, so much so that you almost wish the two were intimate friends, because they could learn a lot from each other. In A Doll's House, we watch the gradual awakening of Nora, leading her in the end to a most radical change in her life. In Ghosts, however, the reverse happens. Throughout her life, Helena has been outspoken, enamored of "radical" views, and has stood up for herself for many years during and after a terribly dysfunctional marriage. Her greatest triumph has been in keeping her beloved son Oswald (Levon Hawke) away from the influence of his corrupt father. Yet in the end, she finds that she is trapped by the very pressures of societal conformity she has long opposed.

Kudos to Lily Rabe, who manages to give us all of Helena's complexities, so that she is both of Ibsen's time and of ours. She is the production's saving grace. On the other hand, the two young actors, Levon Hawke and Ella Beatty (playing Helena's maid Regina, who carries a significant plot element), give us modern Gen Z acting styles, while Billy Crudup as the moralizing, mealy-mouthed Pastor Manders and Hamish Linklater as the unreliable Engstrand give us 19th century melodramatic performances. All told, the mish-mash of styles, along with some odd directorial choices at the very beginning, the overly drawn-out ending, and John Lee Beatty's bland set design make for a confounding production overall.