“Ibsen’s Ghost” at George Street Playhouse



Christopher Borg and Charles Busch. Photo by T. Charles Erickson

(NEW BRUNSWICK, NJ) — George Street Playhouse is presenting the World Premiere of Ibsen’s Ghost, a promising new comedy by Charles Busch. The play deals with the days following the state funeral of Henrik Ibsen when two women are seeking to have memoirs involving the legendary playwright published. The literary legacy of who inspired Ibsen’s legendary characters lies in the balance.

The cast is led by Busch (an award-winning actor, playwright, cabaret performer, and drag icon) who plays Suzannah Thoresen Ibsen, wife of the playwright. She is attempting to have 50 years of letters between her and her husband published, but the letters strike Ibsen’s publisher as rather mundane. The opposite is true of a book being pitched by Hanna Solberg – a woman who Ibsen took under his wing as a protégée.  She seeks to fill in the gaps of literary history by revealing herself as the inspiration behind Ibsen’s most famous character as part of her tell all book.

Busch is the author of The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife, which ran for nearly two years on Broadway and received a Tony nomination for Best Play, and Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, one of the longest running plays in Off-Broadway history. The production includes two actresses who have worked with him before: Jen Cody who plays Gerda, a housekeeper with a wayward pelvis who steals nearly every scene she is in and Jennifer Van Dyck who plays Hanna Solberg who was a true force of nature during her monologues. The production is directed by Carl Andress who has been part of over 15 plays written or starring Busch.

Two-time Tony (R) Award winner Judy Kaye (shown above) plays the author Magdalene Kragh Thoresen; Christopher Borg tackles two roles – the publisher George Elstad and an enigmatic rodent exterminator known as the Rat Wife; and Thomas Gibson plays Wolf Dahlquist, Ibsen’s long-lost illegitimate sailor son who grew up learning about and idolizing his father from his writings.

The play has been described as a mix of high brow references and low brow comedy, which I think is spot on. In a way, the play was like watching Saturday Night Live sketch spoofing Masterpiece Theatre. Some scenes work much better than others and the accents will occasionally be difficult to follow, but the main idea behind the play is a good one. When Suzannah learns that a book will soon be published that could tarnish the legacy of her husband, she decides it must be destroyed.  She enlists her husband’s long-lost son in the plan. Will they succeed? You’ll have to find out in the second act.

Thomas Gibson and Charles Busch, photo by T. Charles Erickson

I have to say it was refreshing to see a play broken up into two acts again. It seems like the majority of plays I see these days are single acts, which eliminate the intermission period, brief discussion of the play, and anticipation of how things will play out.  This setup worked especially well with the play being a period piece.  It just seems more natural this way.

The play is set to move on to Primary Stages at 59E59 Theaters (March 2 – April 14, 2024) in New York City, but I think it’s still a work-in-progress.  In my opinion, there are too many inconsistencies right now.  One example is the way the second act involves a few rather surrealistic scenes while the first act has none that I recall. Another example is the way several people take leaps from one thing to another, seemingly missing a step along the way.  At times I felt there was probably a line or group of lines that originally filled in the gaps that were removed. It’s not that the play needs much more to eliminate the leaps – just a line or two would normally suffice – and hopefully it will get tightened up along the way.  Likewise, adding a little surrealism in the first act will help balance things out.

Performances take place in the New Brunswick Performing Arts Center (11 Livingston Avenue) through February 4, 2024.  For more information or to purchase tickets, click here.

Photos by T. Charles Erickson

Gary Wien has been covering the arts since 2001 and has had work published with Jersey Arts, Upstage Magazine, Elmore Magazine, Princeton Magazine, Backstreets and other publications. He is a three-time winner of the Asbury Music Award for Top Music Journalist and the author of Beyond the Palace (the first book on the history of rock and roll in Asbury Park) and Are You Listening? The Top 100 Albums of 2001-2010 by New Jersey Artists. In addition, he runs New Jersey Stage and the online radio station The Penguin Rocks. He can be contacted at gary@newjerseystage.com.