Where Ibsen meets Ntozake Shange

David King with Giovanna Henson in the opening moments of “Ghosts,” performed by the Hudson Guild Theater Company.

The Hudson Guild Theater Co.’s offbeat repertoire

By Vivienne Leheny

The ambitious little Hudson Guild Theatre Company seems to prize the offbeat. How else to explain it’s twinning of two radically different plays by groundbreaking playwrights working 100 years apart? Last Friday, the Guild began presenting Henrik Ibsen’s “Ghosts” in rotating repertory with Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf.” Unlikely double-bill partners, yes; but very much in line with Hudson Guild’s spirit.

The theatre itself is off the beaten path, located within Hudson Guild’s inviting arts and education center that is tucked back into the block between W. 26th and 27th Sts., just east of 10th Ave. The entire facility underwent a major renovation in 2005 and the result is a testament to aesthetically informed community planning.

Offering day-long early childhood education, a wide range of after school programs for elementary students, teenagers and young adults, as well as counseling and adult services programs, Hudson Guild remains philosophically committed to its roots as one of the city’s original progressive settlement houses. The Guild primarily serves Chelsea’s low-income residents, but it also has an eye to reaching the greater New York City community, and this is especially evident in the professional and amateur art exhibitions selected to run in its two galleries and in the performances presented in the Guild’s smart-looking, 94-seat theatre.

“Eclecticism is the order of the day here,” says Jim Furlong, Hudson Guild’s Theatre & Gallery Director. “One of our goals is to expose our community to a great variety of work that speaks directly to their lives, and we try to balance the offering of classic and contemporary work.” The pairing of ‘Ghosts’ and ‘Colored Girls’ is a case in point: “These are two plays that seriously discussed difficult issues as they’re experienced by young people. Each examines how a young adult deals with tragic circumstances.”

In Ibsen’s “Ghosts,” the character of Oswald finally breaks through a lifetime of closely-held family secrets to discover that the woman he hopes to marry is, in fact, his illegitimate half-sister. He’s also been keeping a secret of his own and he eventually reveals to his mother that he’s been diagnosed with syphilis, passed on in utero by his philandering father. He desperately pleads with his mother to help him end his life once the pain and his deterioration become too impossible to bear. In ‘Colored Girls,’ the Lady in Red shares her experience at the hands of a violent husband, while the Lady in Green reveals the difficult decision she made to abort her teenage pregnancy.

Thanks to their unblinkered, unsentimental approach to their then-taboo subjects, both plays took some time to find their way to the mainstream. “Ghosts” was almost universally reviled when first produced in 1881, and ten years elapsed between its world premiere in Chicago and the eventual staging of the play in Ibsen’s native Norway. Almost a century later, “Colored Girls” batted around counter-culture cafes and women’s bars in San Francisco for several years before it was plucked up by the visionary Joseph Papp and given a critically-acclaimed run at the Public Theatre.

For the Hudson Guild Theatre, this shared thread of courageous exploration is exactly the appeal of this double bill. The company is mostly populated by gifted amateurs drawn from the immediate community, and they benefit from working with Hudson Guild’s talented professionals. The director of “For Colored Girls,” Marvin Kazembe Jefferson, also directed the Guild’s recent production of August Wilson’s “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,” and Furlong directs “Ghosts.”

Furlong favors an extended rehearsal period — both plays have been in rehearsals since the first week of November — because it gives the actors a chance to “get the play in their bodies.” The cast reads through the work several times and discusses major themes, character development and how the play has relevance to their daily lives. “It’s an important part of our process; we’re all learning as we’re doing.” Using the Lanford Wilson translation of “Ghosts,” Furlong has further updated the play by setting it in the mid-1930s — the last decade before antibiotics for syphilis became widely available. He also had his cast watch the 1935 film “The Bride of Frankenstein.” “I wanted them to get that stylized sense, the melodrama. We’re not shying away from that. I think if you avoid the melodrama, Ibsen can be deadly dull. And that’s not what we’re after.”

While the lifeblood of a production company is its audience, the opportunity each rehearsal period presents for them to learn and grow is what really thrills Furlong and confirms his sense of Hudson Guild’s purpose. Which is not such an offbeat mission after all.