If the characters in “Before the Meeting” are furiously trying to outrun their tragedies, Ibsen’s more unsparing vision does not give his characters that option. “Ghosts” introduces us to the Alving family and its hangers-on already in a state of near disaster. The question is merely whether they will submit to it honestly or make a worse mess by failing to.

At the center is Helene Alving (Ms. Thurman), a youngish widow whose only child — an artist named, like his father, Oswald (Tom Pecinka) — has just returned to Norway after renouncing the bohemian life in Paris. Though Oswald (like the rest of his hometown) believes that his father was a great man, Helene knows better; he was, in fact, a syphilitic debauchee whose extramarital offspring had to be soothed with poultices of lies and cash.

The tightest and swiftest of Ibsen’s 12 canonical prose plays, “Ghosts,” seen here in a clean new translation by Paul Walsh, has only five characters. A sanctimonious pastor (Bernard White), an ambitious maid (Catherine Combs) and the maid’s skeevy father (Thom Sesma) provide all the additional rope needed to fashion a pile of nooses. And though Oswald faces the most excruciating fate — his father’s syphilis has returned to possess him, like one of the title revenants — the ghosts of inherited morality are what Ibsen is most interested in exorcising.

As such, he lavishes his worst ironies on the pastor, a figure so compromised by hypocrisy that he winds up agreeing to help finance a whorehouse with parish funds. It is Helene — the first to see through society’s depraved priorities — who passes for a heroine here, but only at the expense of blaming herself (with Ibsen’s approval) instead of her husband. If Nora hadn’t escaped from “A Doll’s House,” Helene might have been the result.

Ms. Thurman, who made the best of a bad deal in “The Parisian Woman,” her 2017 Broadway debut, brings similar qualities of intelligence, poise and integrity to this “Ghosts.” That she feels passionately enough about the play to justify such a lavish production is all to the good.

But the lavishness of Ms. Perloff’s staging is actually part of the problem. With its glass-box solarium and steep grass roof, the Alving manse looks like something from Architectural Digest. The period clothing is so gorgeous it burnishes everyone. (Sets and costumes are both by Dane Laffrey.) When anything ghostly happens, we get tickly music (both recorded and live, by David Coulter) for vibraphone, saw, wine glasses and such.