GHOSTS

Henrik Ibsen wrote Ghosts in 1881. A mother devotes nineteen years to building a monument for a husband who never earned the marble, only to watch the inherited sickness rise up in her son and demand its final payment. In those last shattering moments the boy begs her to end his suffering, and audiences once stormed out of the theater because the mirror Ibsen held up felt too cold, too honest, too close to the lives they were living.

That same unflinching honesty strikes deep in Wisconsin today. Fentanyl threads its way through families like a quiet rumor that turns deadly, slipping into pills never meant to carry such poison. It has become one of the leading takers of young lives in this state, arriving without ceremony in bedrooms, in bathrooms, in cars parked beneath ordinary streetlights. Parents find themselves standing where Mrs. Alving once stood, cradling a still-breathing child and asking in the silence what mercy actually requires when love and release have become the same unbearable question. Ibsen knew how society punishes the woman brave enough to speak that question aloud. Here we still circle the same debate in hushed, careful language, heavy with things left unsaid, while the voices of those who are dying rarely get the final word.

Yet out of this hard soil something vital has grown. WCS Actors Studio has been the fierce training ground where this company was forged, a place dedicated to building a true repertory ensemble through rigorous discipline and the raw joy of devising together. For two full years our actors have moved through Ibsen and Chekhov, through Greek tragedy and Shakespeare, while their bodies learned the demanding physical truths of Viewpoints and Suzuki. They returned again and again, imperfect, stubborn, and hungry, until a shared language began to pulse at the center of everything we do. This production of Ghosts marks the explosive culmination of that long journey, the moment when all that disciplined, slightly reckless thinking finally catches fire and walks onto the stage.

Tonight we release the play into an open parking lot beneath a sky that will still be holding light when Osvald speaks his last desperate line. Ibsen closes the story with a son begging his mother for the sun. We wanted you here, under this same wide Wisconsin sky, to see it for yourself.

Step into the space between what was and what still haunts us. The ghosts are waiting. Welcome.

As of the moment I’m writing this, on July 9, 2026, tens if not hundreds of millions of people worldwide are buzzing about the unlikely success of a man who grew up in a small town in western Norway and, against all odds, became a dominant figure in his field. I’m referring, of course, to the Norwegian striker Erling Haaland, most recently the author of two goals that booted perennial football power Brazil out of the 2026 World Cup. I contend that Haaland and his teammates are drawing inspiration from the fact that Wisconsin Classic Stage is producing their most famous countryman’s play Ghosts in a church parking lot in Milwaukee.

Henrik Ibsen, like Haaland, was an unlikely candidate to join the pantheon of some of the most storied figures to work in his chosen field. Norway in Ibsen’s day had even less of a tradition of producing great theater and drama than it did as a football power when Haaland was coming up through the ranks. But unlike Haaland, Ibsen struggled to gain significant recognition until well into his thirties, when his verse drama Brand (1866) won awards and brought him widespread acclaim. His epic poetic dramas Peer Gynt (1867) and Emperor and Galilean (1873) soon followed, and in 1877 he began creating the cycle that would include most of his best-known plays, starting with Pillars of Society and ending with his last play, When We Dead Awaken in 1899.

The dozen plays in that cycle are often referred to as “realistic” works, but that description does not bear close scrutiny. Plays like Ghosts (first published in 1881) quiver with the power of forces beyond human control. The literal trolls of Peer Gynt have become metaphors in these later works, but their presence can often be felt nonetheless, as can the power of Norway’s often forbidding landscape and climate, and the continuing presence of people and ideas from the past on those who are still living. That is the central metaphor of Ghosts, a concept suggested by the play’s title. That metaphor is even more evident in the original Norwegian, for Gengangere translates more literally to “the ones who return.”

Dramas like A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts made Ibsen the darling of many who recognized his remarkable talent for reshaping modern drama and for giving voice to important ideas about many of the key issues of the day, and made him a pariah among critics repulsed by those same ideas, which they often considered to be beyond the pale. Team Ibsen won that argument long ago. Not only did he exert an earth-shattering impact on Western drama, but modern theater and drama are unimaginable without him. Yet even his champions did not always assess his impact accurately.

Ibsen’s noted contemporary George Bernard Shaw was one of his earliest and most energetic supporters, going so far as to place him above Shakespeare as the greatest of all playwrights. “A Doll’s House will be as flat as ditchwater when A Midsummer Night’s Dream will still be as fresh as paint,” Shaw famously wrote, “but it will have done more work in the world; and that is enough for the highest genius.” Neither the social issues that permeate Ibsen’s later plays, gender roles, attitudes toward sex, courtship, and marriage, religious versus secular ideas, and so on, nor the ostensibly naturalistic frames of these plays led them to become dated.

For better or worse, the topics that divide characters like Nora and Torvald in A Doll’s House, and that Mrs. Alving, Osvald, and Pastor Manders debate so heatedly in Ghosts, continue to command our attention. And I share director Josh Pohja’s contention that Ghosts is not, at the end of the day, a naturalistic play. For starters, a theatrical production is by definition an act of artifice, “an imitation of an action,” as Aristotle indelibly called it. And I hope that you, the audience, will be haunted, in meaningful ways, by these eternally vibrant characters, this still-powerful story, and these carefully crafted performances.