Lily Rabe, the gifted actress last seen on the New York stage in the 2015 Shakespeare in the Park production of Cymbeline, is a natural choice to play Helena Alving, the wealthy, long-suffering, and free-thinking widow at the center of Henrik Ibsen’s 1881 dramatic provocation Ghosts. In the new revival that opened Monday at the Mitzi E. Newhouse at Lincoln Center Theater, she carries herself with a grace and composure of a woman who’s spent decades maintaining appearances in a tight-knit community that would be quick to judge her for her late husband’s string of infidelities, but who harbors a quiet rebellious side in her embrace of modern thinkers like Charles Darwin. When that mask of indomitability inevitably cracks in the show’s final moments, she reveals a still deeper layer of her character’s complex mix of resilience and defiance.

Alas, Rabe is less well served by Mark O’Rowe’s clunky new adaptation, which includes a superfluous framing device with the actors initially reading from scripts and a number of literal-minded tweaks that have the confounding effect of over-explaining some elements of the plot while obscuring others. She’s also let down by a cast that all too often seems ill-suited to the material. Levon Hawke, the willowy son of Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman, brings a weirdly wan and genial presence to Oswald, Helena’s artist son who returns home after years abroad with a terminal case of inherited syphilis. We’re told he’s devoted to the father whose obscene and lascivious exploits were hidden from him and yet the 25-year-old actor presents himself here as a doe-eyed mama’s boy. Ella Beatty, daughter of Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, brings a confoundingly anachronistic spunkiness to the role of Regina, the Alving family servant who flirts up a storm with Oswald until she learns that he’s actually her half-brother and the result of one of Captain Alving’s many dalliances. Despite some effective individual moments, both young performers seem mostly out of place here — and ill-served by a script that muddies their motivations. (Oddly, O’Rowe’s streamlined new version even excises the word ghost.)

Rabe’s real-life husband, Hamish Linklater, gives a typically sturdy performance as a rough-edged local working man who’s raised Regina as his daughter, and who willingly accepts the role of scapegoat to help his social betters keep up appearances. Meanwhile, Billy Crudup brings a priggish and weaselly energy to Pastor Manders, who’s shocked to learn of his buddy Alving’s many moral indiscretions but who never once seems to contemplate a slackening of his knee-jerk dogmatism. That’s a legitimate approach to the role, but it also undermines the scenes in which Helena reminds him of their own flirtations before she accepted Alving’s marriage proposal. With Crudup’s preacher denying even the possibility of reciprocation or a second chance at love for both of them, his scenes with Rabe feel flattened and schematic. He’s reduced to being just a narcissistic hypocrite.

There’s nothing to fault in director Jack O’Brien’s physical production, from John Lee Beatty’s window-walled set to Jess Goldstein’s understated costumes to Japhy Weideman’s lighting. But perhaps my disappointment stems in part from the fact that it’s only been a decade since BAM mounted Richard Eyre’s riveting and ingeniously staged version, in which Lesley Manville gave a transfixing performance as a woman living in a literal glass house, barely able to maintain her composure in the face of an onslaught of setbacks. (That production also used a streamlined, 90-minute adaptation of Ibsen’s original three-act play.) Rabe faces those same storms of misfortune, and she does so with astonishing poise and skill, but the effect here is too muted to haunt us. ★★★☆☆

GHOSTS
Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center, Off Broadway
Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes (no intermission)
Tickets on sale through April 26 for $98-$183