Ghosts

Mrs. Alving has spent decades maintaining a lie. Her late husband was respected in their small Norwegian town, a model of bourgeois virtue. But when she prepares to dedicate an orphanage to his memory, the truth comes pouring out, and it is grotesque. Her husband's private life was a swamp of disease and debauchery. The family servant knows everything. And worse, her son Oswald has returned home, visibly marked by his father's inheritance. Ibsen strips away the thin veneer of respectability to expose what lies beneath: corruption passed down like a blood disease, sins of the father visited upon the children, and the terrible cost of living a lie. The original Norwegian title means "the ones who return" and the play asks an unbearable question: how do we escape the past when it keeps coming back? Ghosts was considered so shocking at its 1882 premiere that critics called it "a dirty deed done in public." It still burns.