A dozen years ago this reviewer saw Joanne Woodward play Mrs. Alving in a summer stock production of Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts, and her performance had nothing on Valerie Haugen's at the Thunder River Company's production of the Scandinavian tragedy. Haugen's preference for underplaying serves her beautifully as Mrs. Alving, a woman described in the playbill notes as "a heroine of Aristotelian proportions."

The widow of a man whose debaucheries she felt compelled by the strictures of her society to conceal at terrible cost to herself, Mrs. Alving's sufferings are such that they are best related in the soft key Haugen has selected. She paces her drawing room wrapped in old sorrow and in her shining determination to act on a harshly won wisdom. Her final cry of unendurable anguish is more of a whisper reverberating through the audience's heart.

Director and scenograper Lon Winston has staged the play in perfectly rendered late-Victoriana, and paced it with an energy appropriate to "the first great tragedy about middle class people written in plain prose (in which) Ibsen laid the foundations for a new theatre of realism" that would see its fulfillment in Shaw, O'Neill and Tennessee Williams.

Richard Lyon plays the pompously self-righteous Pastor Manders with the vigor of a man who never doubts his certainties. Compared to Manders' propriety-at-any-price and to the deceased Captain Alving's twisted proclivities, the working-class Engstrand, whose goal is to own a waterfront saloon with his teenaged daughter servicing the sailors, seems a moral giant. Tim Rafelson plays the limping, scheming Engstrand with gusto.

As Regina, the Alvings' adolescent maid, Haley Thompson is suitably sturdy and ambitious while Chris Fuller's Oswald portrays a sensitive young man's indignation over a heartbreaking fate against which he rages in vain. Ghosts is a searing tragedy through which can be viewed the percolating modern culture that was born when the old taboos were broken down. The play both depicts those taboos and foreshadow their demise. When Mrs. Alving speaks so movingly of the "ghosts" in her tormented home, it is instructive to recall that this was the period in which Freud was formulating his theories of personality and repression, and that the daughters of men like Captain Alving were among his earliest patients. Ibsen intended for Ghosts to elicit a powerful emotional response and to stimulate thought. The Thunder River Theatre production worthily serves the playwright's goals.

An in-depth study guide is available and includes thematic discussion, biographical and critical information, and recommended discussion questions. An interactive discussion facilitated by TRTC will directly follow the performance.