A Ghost in Your Ear seems like the perfect choice for Audible’s Minetta Lane Theatre. Was there ever a more audio-forward ghost story for the stage? The narrative follows a struggling young American actor (Lucas Iverson, The Pitt) who lands an audio recording gig at a remote studio outside London. Sound engineer and expectant father Sid (Owen Campbell) has hand-picked Lucas for the assignment of acting out a first-person ghost story. But writer-director Jamie Armitage has a twist — even before the show begins.
The action all takes place at that recording studio, with a wall of apparently sound-proof glass panels separating the actors from the audience. And theatergoers all wear individual headphones, which cradle the seatbacks on arrival and pipe out in-stereo audio of Lucas and Sid and the various sound effects that crop up during the performance. The sound design, by Ben and Max Ringham, ingeniously re-creates a 360-degree sense of the sounds produced by performers circling a high-tech, location-based microphone that even includes a stylized human face. We hear Lucas’s voice in our left ear, or right, or both, as he makes real-time choices while reading the text.
After some initial banter about Sid’s impending fatherhood and very-much-single Lucas’s gratitude at the work opportunity, Sid retreats to an upstage sound booth and Lucas begins reading from an unseen prompter just over the heads of the audience. The story is a well-crafted, suitably creepy first-person account of a recently dumped young man who heads to the remote childhood mansion of his estranged, recently deceased father. There, he hopes to sort through old family belongings and perhaps learn a bit about the man who abandoned him and his mother when he was a young boy.
Iverson, who plays an annoying, know-it-all medical student on The Pitt, has an endearingly personable presence here — and shows a flair for creating distinct voices for the handful of characters who pop in the story, including an ominously terse lawyer who drives his character from the train station to his father’s house and repeatedly urges him to call if there’s any trouble. Of course there’s trouble almost immediately, and inexplicable noises and voices that emerge from corners of the house. They also begin to emerge not from Lucas’s lips but from corners of the studio, with mic stands clattering suddenly to the ground and nooselike cables dropping suddenly from the ceiling. Iverson masterfully handles the swings from confident to creeped-out.
Armitage ratchets up the tension with clever use of Ben Jacobs’s shadowy light design and Anisha Fields’s deceptively simple set and costumes. Before long, we find ourselves searching the dark corners of the set for hints of the next manifestation of the otherworldly that seems to have jumped from the pages of Lucas’s script to the studio itself. Is it all in his mind? Or is there something more sinister really in play?
Rather than just coyly teasing these questions, A Ghost in Your Ear addresses them head on — in a way that is both satisfying and unsettling. The effect is heightened by how the headphones accelerate the speed of sound: Lucas’s storytelling and the various bumps in the night arrive directly into our ears, as if they are being whispered to us alone. The show skillfully plays on the viral quality of ghost stories, how the first tingly goosebumps of fear can escalate into full-blown terror, and the way that we almost instinctively want to share this experience with others. This theatrical ghost story becomes like a super-spreader event, a spectacular, specter-filled sensation may infect your waking and sleeping consciousness for days. ★★★★★
A GHOST IN YOUR EAR
Minnetta Lane Theatre, Off Broadway
Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes (no intermission)
Tickets on sale through December 12 for $47 to $111