Kelly teaches creative writing and scriptwriting at two colleges in Illinois. In the following essay, he examines the life of Helena Alving, the main character in Ibsen's Ghosts, in terms of one haunting, definitive moment in her past.

In any of Henrik Ibsen's plays there will be layers of characterization, complicated by the lingering presence of events that occurred to the characters years before what is seen presented on the stage. This is especially true of Ghosts with its focus on the ways in which people and events that are long gone continue to resonate, how they stay alive from one generation to the next. The most obvious ghosts are those of Johanna the maid and Chamberlain Alving. But they have been dead for years when, seeing her son, Oswald, touching Johanna's daughter Regina in the same dining room where her husband had made a pass at...