Review: In Ibsen’s Ghost, Charles Busch Plays the Widow of a Famous Playwright

It probably won’t end like The Notebook. Should you manage to avoid divorce, the likeliest outcome of “till death do us part” is death — either yours or his. And what happens to the surviving spouse, having given so much of her time and energy to another person? It’s a question the widow Ibsen struggles to answer in Ibsen’s Ghost, the “irresponsible biographical fantasy” by Charles Busch, now being presented by Primary Stages (in association with George Street Playhouse) at 59E59. While not the playwright’s best work, it is by miles more enjoyable than much of the dreary fare that crosses New York’s stages these days.

Busch is the reigning queen of a certain style of theater steeped in bygone culture and buoyed by antique acting styles. Seeing him (Busch appears in most of his plays) is like stumbling across a live taping of a film that might be shown on TCM at 3am — tortured faces mugging for the camera as an orchestra swells beneath. It’s totally ridiculous, and that’s the point.

Here, Busch stars as Suzannah Ibsen, wife of game-changing Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen. It’s 1906 and the playwright has just died. His former protégée, Hanna Solberg (Jennifer Van Dyck), has resurfaced with a diary that proves she was the inspiration for Nora Helmer in A Doll’s House, a claim Suzannah has always made for herself. Further, Solberg kvetches that the Ibsens spurned her in her hour of need. She intends to publish. Meanwhile, a handsome sailor named Wolf (a goofily charming Thomas Gibson) arrives in Oslo and Mrs. Ibsen experiences a strong urge to invite him into her harbor. Maybe, she schemes, she can enlist her new lover to destroy this incriminating evidence against her dead husband.

A half-baked satire of Ibsen, with his desperate women haunted by slimy blackmailers, Ibsen’s Ghost features a plot that is only partially coherent, with a resolution that is nakedly contrived and all too convenient. But pristine dramaturgy is not why one attends a Charles Busch play. We attend for uproarious lines like “With his demise, I lost, along with everything else, a conjugal partner of inexhaustible pyrotechnics.” There’s also the wistfully delivered howler, “I can still hear the ghosts fucking in the lower chamber.” Sorry Jamie Lloyd, but this is about as sexy as Ibsen will ever get.

Having cooked them up himself, Busch succeeds in making a meal out of these lines, biting into every syllable with the voraciousness of a famished cougar. Just a flick of his eyes or a twitch of his lips is enough to send the audience into gales of laughter.

The other performers rise to meet the high bar Busch sets, with Van Dyck making a particularly manic turn as Solberg. Judy Kaye is slyly naughty as Suzannah’s stepmother, Magdalene. Jen Cody delivers high slapstick and an unplaceable accent as Gerda, Suzannah’s faithful maid. And Christopher Borg is reliably hilarious in the twin roles of Ibsen’s publisher and the Rat Wife, a kind of fairy tale exterminator.

Director Carl Andress brings an admirable sense of order to this nutty tale, which takes place in an appropriately Ibsenian parlor framed by an old-timey proscenium (set by Shoko Kambara). Little shifts in the lighting (by Ken Billington) and overwrought symphonic underscoring (sound by Jill BC Du Boff and Jen DeNio) undergird the play’s cinematic qualities. Naturally, the MVP award goes to Gregory Gale for his eye-catching and detailed period costumes, which emphasize the subtle bondage on turn-of-the-century women’s wear.

Longtime Busch fans will find much to like about Ibsen’s Ghost, a comfort-food comedy that exists well within the tradition that Busch has upheld for four decades. Several critics have recently hailed Cole Escola, writer and star of the off-Broadway hit Oh, Mary! as Busch’s successor (I was one of them). But with Ibsen’s Ghost, Busch proves that it’s not time to pass the torch just yet, because the old girl’s still got it.