‘Ghostlight’ Review: An Illuminating Look at Performance, Theatrical and Otherwise

Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson imbue the paradoxes of performing arts so deeply into their film Ghostlight that it even extends to the title. In a poetic sense, the light stand that illuminates an unpopulated theater isn’t for human eyes. It’s to appease or rebuff spirits, depending on who’s asked. But in a practical sense, the ghost light exists to help the living—mostly to avoid a fate like falling into the orchestra pit and joining the dead.

Life subsumes legend for O’Sullivan and Thompson in a worthy follow-up to their previous collaboration on the small-scale humanist triumph, 2020’s Saint Frances. Their ambition broadens significantly in Ghostlight, though their firm footing in sincerity and simplicity isn’t diminished in the slightest. The creative and life partners deliver a moving apologia for the value of theater by exploring its central contradiction: a performance is an act of honesty, not deceit.

Their explanation for this powerful paradox always proceeds from an emotional rather than an intellectual truth. At its core, Ghostlight tells a tale of catharsis and community that a middle-aged construction worker, Dan Mueller (Keith Kupferer), finds after stumbling upon a community theater rehearsal of Romeo & Juliet and becoming a member of the troupe. His growing involvement in the staging of the production provides a conduit for a grieving father to confront a familial tragedy whose logic eludes him on its own terms. While he can’t rewrite reality—or Shakespeare—he can reinterpret it. That proves enough.

Yet Dan’s unlikely assumption of the part of Romeo in the scrappy community play is only the most obvious application of theatrical principles in Ghostlight. O’Sullivan and Thompson are extraordinarily perceptive in highlighting the instances where stagecraft informs everyday life. They litter grace notes, not winking Easter eggs, throughout the film. With a little help from an orchestral overture, Dan drawing the blinds in the morning is his domestic version of opening the curtain at the top of a show. When he gives a sworn deposition, he sits in front of a photo backdrop while trying to stick to a script previously rehearsed with their lawyer.

Ghostlight, though, never falls into the triteness of one of the Bard’s most repeated maxims, “all the world’s a stage.” Theater is everywhere, in form but more so in function. O’Sullivan and Thompson recognize that imaginative empathy is the ultimate destination in the search for sense amid the senseless. Art is but one door through which to reach it. For Dan’s wife, Sharon (Tara Mallen), it’s finding ways to reestablish ritual and routine.

Meanwhile, Dan and Sharon’s daughter, Daisy (Katherine Mellen Kupferer), begins in a more traditional therapeutic channel before joining the production of Romeo & Juliet alongside her father. O’Sullivan and Thompson don’t pit theater and therapy against one another. The guidance that Daisy’s therapist (Cindy Gold) provides—“Why don’t you tell your dad how you feel using the language we’ve been working on?”—could just as easily apply to the way that Dan improves his communication style by incarnating Romeo on stage.

The film isn’t shy about spotlighting parallels and resonances between life and art, but Shakespeare’s tale of star-crossed lovers is more than just a mirror through which Dan can see himself and others. It’s the means through which he can be himself and understand others.

Graciously, O’Sullivan and Thompson allow for a shared experience of Dan’s transformation by providing an extended look at the Romeo & Juliet production. It’s amateurish yet never less than admirable—as if the grand finale of Waiting for Guffman aimed for tears as well as laughs. Repeated cutaways to Sharon’s realization of just how profoundly Romeo & Juliet helped her husband and daughter process their grief underscore what the crowd takes away from the production. The real joy of the show, though, comes from the interactions of the cast backstage as they feel the giddy rush of their involvement in something both cooperative and compelling.

“The audience lives through us,” Dolly De Leon’s Rita advises an acting partner who struggles to break a scene. “We owe them something real.” Perhaps, then, it’s time to admit that criticism is another form of performance—of authority, of knowledge—and the audience for this review is also owed something real. While watching a scene in which Daisy once again embraces her theatrical side by singing “I Cain’t Say No” from Oklahoma! at karaoke, something happened to me: I felt the urge to perform theatrically again for the first time in over a decade. By engaging instead of repelling something I presumed dead within my spirit, O’Sullivan and Thompson fulfilled the true meaning of their title. The glow of this Ghostlight is life-sustaining indeed.