There are skeletons in Helena Alving’s (a tortured yet stalwart Lily Rabe) closet whose secrets she would rather not be revealed. More devastating to Helena than these skeletons is the bevy of ghosts that will not allow her to rest until their messages and warnings from her past are heard and fully processed in the present. Helena’s reawakened trauma is the stuff of Mark O’Rowe’s new version of “Ghosts” currently on at Lincoln Center Theater’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater.

That reawakening begins with her son Oswald’s (a beguiling and passionate Levon Hawke) returns from Paris, France and when Engstrand (a demonic and disheveled Hamish Linklater) announces that he wants to take his daughter Regina (an innocent and secretive Ella Beatty) home with him. Regina is the Alving household’s maid and Engstrom was “Captain Alving’s servant at Rosenvold for nearly three years!” Now about those ghosts! Each of the five characters is “haunted” or perhaps “possessed.” Without some form of “exorcism,” none of the characters will survive. Their stories intertwine to confirm Ibsen’s prescience regarding gender equality and the hypocrisy inherent in organized religion.

Engstrand is a guilt-ridden alcoholic looking to do penance “by opening a sort of home for sailors back in town.” One of his many ghosts is the lie he has been harboring about Regina’s birth father and, in so doing, puts Pastor Manders (a conflicted and sanctimonious Billy Crudup) “party to a criminal act.”

Pastor Mullins ghosts are unbridled hypocrisy and moral values that stifle the growth of his parishioners and everyone he counsels. He is responsible for advising not to insure the orphanage that Helena Alving fully funds and who is perhaps responsible for its destruction.

Regina is perhaps the least haunted of the household. Her mindfulness allows her to express her true feelings about Engstrand and eventually to express her true feelings about Oswold. Regina wears a cross and might be the most faithful in the “family.”

Helena and her son Oswald’s ghost stories are delicately interwoven. Oswald’s return home and his apparent illness forces Helena to grapple with two “scandalous” events from their past: Oswald has inherited a disease that is incurable in the late nineteenth century. Although Ibsen never “names” the disease, he is obviously suffering from end stage syphilis. The other ghost is the confession that Regina is Oswald’s half-sister. Regina’s hope of marrying Oswald and caring for him in his illness is destroyed by this truth. Helena’s confession amplifies the play’s themes of moral decay, hypocrisy, and the consequences of hidden truths and past sins.

Regina leaves and Helena, despite Oswald’s objections, becomes her son’s caregiver at the end of his life. What Oswald demand of her is unspeakable to his mother and is best left for the audience to discover and process.

At the play’s end, mother and son sit on the floor, Oswald cradled in Helen’s arms forming a mother-son tableau that recalls the iconic “Pieta” (kudos to Japhy Weideman’s brilliant lighting). Death, dying, passion, forgiveness, and redemption finally exorcise the ghosts of the past and become the new “residents” of the Alving home. “Ghosts” is a must see.