Word: regina
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...husband to a life of rural seclusion. She protects her infant son Oswald from his brutish father by packing him off to boarding school at an early age. When the Captain impregnates the maid, Helene quickly marries her off to a carpenter named Engstrand and raises the child Regina in her own home. If she can't save the man's conscience, she can at least salvage his reputation; Helene busies herself with philanthropy while her husband garners the glory...
Ghosts opens several years later. Regina and Oswald are full grown, the Captain is ten years dead. Mrs. Alving has cemented her late husband's outstanding reputation by financing an orphanage with his estate. On the eve of the dedication ceremonies, Pastor Manders has come to preside at the affair, and Oswald has come home after several years absence...
...play continues in a series of shattering revelations. The Pastor is crushed by the lifelong depravity of the Captain. Oswald and Regina discover that their incipient affair borders on incest. Mrs. Alving realizes that despite her effort, her son has been maimed by the evil deeds of his father...
...central relationship in the play is a vaguely sexual one between the strong, cruel father. Marcus, and his even stronger, even crueler daughter, Regina--who twenty years later will have taken over his role as the major destructive force in the family. Perhaps Hellman was thinking of her own close relationship with her father--it's easy to get Freudian here--whom she knew to be unfaithful to her mother, a fact which may have repelled her and attracted her at the same time. But a more obvious parallel to the Regina-Marcus affair would be the relationship Hellman...
...uneven, in the sense that it veers from comedy to tragedy, and it is often difficult for both the audience and the actors to keep up with it. As far as the acting, it calls for deft switches from mocking subtlety to intense passion. Ann Marie Beigel, who plays Regina, remains at a level of intense passion, posturing so much that she becomes a caricature: Steven Gilborn, who plays Ben Hubbard, the sly son who plots his father's destruction, settles for mocking subtlety, so it comes as something of a shock when he threatens his father with...