It has been 10 long years since Lily Rabe last graced the New York stage. In the early aughts, the daughter of actress Jill Clayburgh and playwright David Rabe gave a stream of luminous performances that culminated with a Public Theater production of “The Merchant of Venice” in which, as Portia, she more than held her own against Al Pacino’s Shylock.

Ms. Rabe has since earned praise in a number of television and film projects; she also became a mother, which is relevant to the play and the role that now bring her back to theater audiences with a bang. In a new Lincoln Center Theater production of Henrik Ibsen’s “Ghosts,” she is cast as Helena Alving, a widow who after making great sacrifices for her only child is confronted with news — and a decision — that no mother should ever have to face.  

The bleakest of Ibsen’s classics, “Ghosts” was first produced in 1882 and created a scandal for its scathing indictment of moral hypocrisy during the Victorian era. Topics addressed include venereal disease, incest, and even euthanasia, each rearing its head as a result of social and religious oppression. 

This oppression is articulated, if not entirely personified, by the character of Pastor Manders, who arrives at Helena’s rural estate as she’s preparing to open an orphanage dedicated to her husband’s memory. While nothing we’ll learn about the late Mr. Alving will recommend him as a spouse, father, or human being, Manders helped prevent the marriage from dissolving at a crucial early juncture — both for the sake of superficial propriety and, we’ll discover, for more personal and selfish reasons.

Under Jack O’Brien’s predictably muscular direction, another stage and screen veteran making a welcome return to the boards, Billy Crudup, emphasizes the foolishness and fear underlining the pastor’s pompous prescriptions for decent living, which are made clear as water in Irish playwright Mark O’Rowe’s new, no-frills adaptation of Ibsen’s text.

Manders’s world view is particularly condescending and punishing where women are concerned, positioning “Ghosts” — introduced not long after “A Doll’s House” and several years before “Hedda Gabler” — among the works that established Ibsen’s enduring feminist bona fides, not to mention his abiding humanism.   

Helena isn’t the only woman who suffers in the play; there’s also her nubile maid, Regina, who is stoking a mutual flirtation with her employer’s son, Oswald, an artist freshly returned from Paris. 

Regina’s father, or the man she believes to be her father, Engstrand, is a carpenter, and a drunkard, who wants her to help him establish him a home for wayward sailors; Manders, whose narrow-minded sense of family duty allows no skepticism about putting an attractive young woman in such a situation, thinks it’s a swell idea.

Regina and Oswald are played by young actors who, like Ms. Rabe, have well-known parents: respectively, Ella Beatty, one of Warren Beatty and Annette Bening’s daughters, and Levon Hawke, the son of Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman. The role of Engstrand falls to Hamish Linklater, who happens to be Ms. Rabe’s longtime partner (and frequent collaborator), and father to her own children.

Mr. Linklater delivers a nuanced and ultimately wrenching performance, letting Engstrand’s broken humanity seep through. His exchanges with Mr. Crudup, whose Manders can be almost comically glib at points, are particularly moving as developments in the play reveal the pastor’s own repressed vulnerability. 

Ms. Beatty is for the most part charmingly coquettish, though after other revelations prove even more unsettling for Regina, the actress adapts with chilling finesse. I was less taken at first with Mr. Hawke, who in his earlier moments on stage projected a languid, almost detached quality that made him seem a bit out of place.

Granted, the secret Oswald carries through much of “Ghosts” would be enough to distract anyone, and Mr. Hawke grows more compelling as we learn more about his character. It helps, surely, that his most frequent interaction is with Ms. Rabe, whose Helena is every bit as witty and heartbreaking as you would expect; the actress captures the sorrow and indignation that has simmered under a lifetime of denial without striking a single false note.

Even in the play’s excruciating final scene, as Helena wrestles with that unspeakable choice, Ms. Rabe makes her desperation and exhaustion and sheer horror as accessible as it is overwhelming. It’s almost too painful to bear, but it leaves us grateful to have this exquisite performer back, and in such an ideal vehicle.