A Ghost In Your Ear - Audible’s Minetta Lane Theatre

October is the ideal month for the arrival of A Ghost in Your Ear, the entertaining spookfest written and directed by Jamie Armitage that just opened at Audible’s Minetta Lane Theatre. Overly nervous theatergoers should likely give this one a pass, but for those daring souls looking for more than the weather to make things a bit chillier, this show will be as satisfying as receiving a full-size candy bar when trick-or-treating.

As with Armitage’s effective An Interrogation, A Ghost in Your Ear is a gripping two-hander set in a confined space. Sound technician Sid (Owen Campbell, persuasive) has called in his actor friend Lucas (the charismatic Lucas Iverson, who played the wildly ambitious and overconfident James Ogilvie in the most recent season of The Pitt) for a project for which Lucas has not seen a script. Instead, he’s told to just read from the screen in front of him, that the client is “some binaural start-up experimenting with classic ghost stories”, and that all he needs to do is “pretend to be scared and get paid.”

Sid heads back to his booth, leaving Lucas alone in the recording studio to perform a story by one A.C. Pritchitt — A Ghost in Your Ear. Soon, he doesn’t have to pretend he’s scared: odd things start happening as he delves further into the story, and as the yarn grows ever more frightening, so does the studio. By the time Pritchitt’s tale has been fully told, Lucas…

Well, that you’ll have to see for yourself. No surprises will be spoiled herein.

Horror-thrillers on stage usually thrive or die on their sound and lighting designs, and A Ghost in Your Ear thrives. Lighting designer Ben Jacobs excels at constantly changing what can be seen and what can’t, with darkness creeping into unexpected places. Sound designers Ben & Max Ringham, appropriately given similar billing to Armitage in the program, have created a terrific binaural experience for audience members, who wear headsets throughout the show. As Lucas performs and interacts with a binaural microphone shaped like a human head, the audience hears every tap, every gulp of water, and every change in his breathing as his terror amps up.

Effective as A Ghost in Your Ear is, it would be more powerful if it were shorter. Even at just 90 minutes, the tension inevitably flags, and the production would pack a considerably harder punch at 75 minutes. Nonetheless, Iverson never fails to hold the audience in thrall, and after the show has ended and the headphones have been taken off, it’s great fun to watch attendees stumble into the street, dazed and bewildered by the intensity of what they’ve just experienced.