Theatre in Review: A Ghost in Your Ear (Audible Theater at Minetta Lane Theatre)

	Lucas Iverson. Photo: Matthew Murphy

It's official: The UK is now the world's biggest exporter of theatrical hokum. And it's a cash crop: On Broadway right now, Paranormal Activity is spooking audiences to the tune of $1 million-plus per week. Last season, the walk-through experience Viola's Room, with its baying-at-the-moon heroine, had an extended run at The Shed. Coming up in November is 2:22 A Ghost Story, another haunted-house epic. Rounding off the ghost-happy agenda is the above title, which delivers its shivers directly to audiences via headsets.

Well, what do you expect from a theatrical culture that produced the hardy perennial The Woman in Black, with its thirty-three-year West End run? And, to be fair, A Ghost in Your Ear is slickly produced and well-acted, its main technical gimmick flawlessly executed. Who cares that it is all a load of nonsense?

Jamie Armitage's script, set in a recording studio, brings together Lucas, an actor who could use a little cash, and his longtime colleague Sid, a sound engineer. The gig: Record a short story for a well-heeled client. (The early dialogue rather pointedly notes that Lucas isn't interested in having children. Put a pin in that thought; it is more important than you might think.) It's an odd gig, to be sure, but quick and lucrative, and, honestly, what could possibly go wrong?

Lucas quickly throws himself into the work, sight-reading the text with hilarious skill, as if he had been rehearsing for -- oh, I don't know -- four weeks or so. The story's narrator, a young man, is tasked with cleaning out his late (and long-estranged) father's ramshackle house. Apparently ignorant of all horror stories and films, he arrives at Dad's rambling, remote mansion, with a snowstorm in the offing, intending to spend several days (and nights) doing his filial duty in total solitude. Before you can say, "Blumhouse," however, weird phenomena -- creepy voices, mysterious shapes, and, most alarmingly, a noose -- appear, all connected to an appalling family secret.

But as Lucas gets psychologically caught up in his reading, the story begins manifesting itself in the studio, causing some decent jump scares, although nothing as good as you'll find in Paranormal Activity. Too afraid to stop, and later virtually a prisoner, he forges ahead, visibly disintegrating until a shocker (well, sort of) twist reveals what is really happening. One of the production's weakest aspects is the lack of a real capper: The final effect produced little more than mild titters from the audience at the performance I attended.

The best thing about A Ghost in Your Ear is Lucas Iverson (providing fans of The Pitt with yet another theatrical opportunity) as Lucas, the actor, who really, really gets into his work. There's something genuinely creepy about having his intense, whispery delivery delivered next to one's eardrum, courtesy of Ben and Max Ringham's expertly engineered sound design. (The Ringhams are technical whizzes; virtually every one of their productions is a sonic experiment; they were involved in Blindness an early post-pandemic production and also an exercise in headset theatre.) Working the onstage binaural mic for all it is worth, Iverson leaps past the production's audio technology (not to mention the glass wall separating the audience from the stage) to establish an undeniably weird presence. The Ringhams juice the action with deftly rendered effects, some barely detectable and others wielded like stun guns. This is, of course, an Audible Theater production and will soon be available in recorded form; it is easy to imagine it might be more effective when heard but not seen.

Indeed, the work of Armitage and his designers often feels intrusive. Anisha Fields' recording studio set is solid enough, and I guess the glass wall is necessary to get the full sonic effect, but the supposedly scary thingamajig that appears in almost subliminal flashes of light looks like a gussied-up tailor's dummy. Ben Jacobs' lighting quickly slips into stylized mode, making Iverson's face hard to see. Everyone collaborates on big shock moments that feel too obviously calculated to be effective. A preshow message urges audience members to leave the theatre if they get too frightened; fat chance of that.

It's all harmless fun, I suppose, less jittery than Paranormal Activity but less expensive, too, and with a real TV star to boot. (The only other cast member, Owen Campbell, is fine as Sid, whose friendly manner is not to be trusted.) The script is filled with overripe statements like "The fear tightened around my neck like a rope," or "With each step, my breath caught in my throat. I dreaded what I was about to see," which, depending on your taste for camp, can be amusing. (Nobody actually says, "It was a dark and stormy night," but they might as well.) The really scary thing -- it's enough to keep me up at night - is why so many talented British theatre artists are more interested in storytelling techniques than having anything substantial to say.

Oh, well, Halloween is on the horizon, and if the British theatre wants to refashion itself as the Hammer House of Horror, I guess it's their business. (This, too, shall pass.) But, like its predecessors,A Ghost in Your Ear is pure ectoplasm. It might startle at first sight, but it vanishes into the darkness without a trace. --David Barbour