Review: A Ghost in Your Ear, the Curse of Daddy Issues in an Audiobook

Stories are a powerful kind of magic. The politicians currently vying for control of Congress know that as they incant sharply contrasting tales about America, hoping they resonate with voters. Anne Washburn certainly understands that in her new play Anon, about the internet fables that have become scripture for so many. And in Jamie Armitage’s A Ghost in Your Ear, an audiobook sound engineer named Sid (Owen Campbell) intimately understands the unique power of one story, and how it needs just the right voice to tell it.

He’s found his man in Lucas (Lucas Iverson), a struggling American actor living in London. Sid needs Lucas to record the story for a mysterious client in an all-night session at a secluded sound studio outside the city. It’s the tale of a man who travels to a remote village in the far north of England to clean out the home of his recently deceased father, a hermit from whom he had been estranged for decades. On his first and last night in the house, he gets the unsettling feeling that he is not alone.

Lucas gets that feeling too as equipment in the studio crashes to the floor. It starts to freak him out. “Use it,” Sid urges him on, the impish twinkle of a sadistic stage director in his eyes. And because work is work, Lucas reluctantly proceeds.

Armitage, who wrote and directed A Ghost in Your Ear, has delivered a nifty little thriller just in time for Halloween. It’s a perfect match for Audible, which is producing this New York premiere at its Minetta Lane Theatre, following a world premiere in London last December.  We experience the show through individual headsets, so we can hear exactly what the story will sound like in stereo as Lucas speaks into the eerie dummy head binaural microphone and fantasy stealthily creeps into reality.

Sound designers Ben and Max Ringham have created a roller-coaster ride with live audio, inching us up to the peak with tales of dark shadows whispered directly into our ears, then sending us on a plunge with unseen voices and jarring notes of horror that will make you jump in your seat.

Set designer Anisha Fields has transformed the stage into a realistic sound studio fun house, full secrets hidden in plain sight, all masterfully revealed and concealed through Ben Jacobs’s finely calibrated lighting design.

The biggest surprise is Iverson’s fully developed and completely enthralling performance. The actor only took on the role three weeks ago, when the originally announced Harry Richardson departed the production (Armitage changes the name of the voice actor depending on who is playing him, so “Richard” became “Lucas”). Iverson fully commits to every beat, tickling our ASRM as he gently confesses family secrets into the microphone, and conveying genuine fear as he guides us through his terrifying night. It tells the story of an actor who really needs this job, yes, but also one who falls under the script’s dark spell. It’s an incredible off-Broadway debut and the thing every director dreams about.

He has a strong foil in Campbell, who deploys his stage-crew dork charm and friendly northern accent to excellent effect, lulling the character Lucas and the audience into a false sense of security. He’s Andy Burnham with a sound mixer.

If Armitage can be faulted for anything, it is explaining too much as the 90-minute play nears its conclusion. Horror is a kind of burlesque. What you don’t reveal is scarier than what you do (the creators of Paranormal Activity really understand this). Armitage could have spelled out less and trusted his audience to fill in the unsettling blanks as they stared at the ceiling in bed that night, trying to sleep.

But he smartly grounds his horror in something real, that most of the men in the audience will feel in their stomachs: the generational trauma passed from father to son, which is itself the result of a fear of not living up to expectations. That’s something that will undoubtedly keep millions of men awake tonight.