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Audible Theater is bringing the scares Off-Broadway with the New York premiere of A Ghost in Your Ear, an immersive horror show set inside an audiobook recording session gone terrifyingly wrong. Read reviews for the spooky new production below.
Written and directed by Tony Award nominee Jamie Armitage, featuring sound design by the Tony-nominated duo Ben & Max Ringham and starring Owen Campbell and Lucas Iverson, A Ghost in Your Ear arrives in New York following a sold-out run at London’s Hampstead Theatre Downstairs.
When an actor (Lucas Iverson) arrives late to a sound studio for a last-minute recording session, he is handed the script of a chilling ghost story to read. But as the engineer (Owen Campbell) cues the recording and the evening wears on, the horrors slowly begin to escape the page to haunt the studio itself. With audiences wearing headphones featuring groundbreaking binaural sound technology, this cutting-edge theatrical experience places everyone directly in a haunting world of sound.
Now in performances, the production will play through Saturday, December 12 only at Audible’s Minetta Lane Theatre
Stuart Miller, Theater Pizzazz: A Ghost in Your Ear is a rare theatrical treat. It’s not a comedy with plenty of laughs or a drama that stirs up emotions with nuanced characters. It is a Halloween-season yarn that combines old-fashioned spooky storytelling with an immersive sound experience to provide a distinctive adventure.
Michael Sommers, New York Stage Review: One extremely slick attraction, A Ghost in Your Ear is a yummy piece of Halloween candy aimed for date nights and families with teens, because it’s ultimately an entertaining horror show where not a dirty word is ever heard. Armitage’s well-calculated staging enhances his spooky thriller with designer Ben Jacobs’ subtly shaded and sharply cued atmospheric lighting. Personable actors, Iverson and Campbell deliver believable performances as everyday dudes whose easy semblance of reality contrasts with the increasingly weird doings materializing within a sealed-off room where no one can hear them scream.
Frank Scheck, New York Stage Review: For all its theatrical ingenuity, however, the show is ultimately more impressive for its technical rather than thematical elements. Both the ghost story being told and the framing device around it feel thinly conceived and not particularly resonant, and the very slow burn makes the production’s 90 minutes feel considerably longer. This is A Ghost in Your Ear that quickly goes out the other.
Austin Fimmano, New York Theatre Guide: Regardless, the headphone experience is a unique one, with an intimate format that gives you goosebumps. Watching an actor move from one side of the binaural microphone to the other and hearing the whisper in your corresponding ears is not only an extremely satisfying cause-and-effect, but also a way to make each viewer feel like the story is being told only to them.
Mike Dressel, Slant Magazine: Owing a debt to The Woman in Black, the script and direction are by Jamie Armitage, who keeps the pace from sagging, creating an intricate choreography between the actor and the gray human head mic. But it’s the sound design, made in collaboration with Ben and Max Ringham, that elevates the sonic scares and creates an immersive, insular world of words.
Juan A. Ramirez, Theatrely: All of the scares — and I could count them on exactly one hand — are visual. That figure is not arrived by me pretending to be above frights, but rather because they are deployed so anemically, each about 20 minutes apart in the 90-minute production, that you begin to monetize each one. That’s a losing battle: Anisha Fields’s recording studio set is lit in ghastly blue by Ben Jacobs, but the thrills are of the “lights go off, come back on and, wouldn’t you know it, something scary briefly flashes” variety. If that’s the name of the game, fine, but at least shake the coins out of our pockets with consistent, creative scares.
James Wilson, Talkin’ Broadway: Yet, what makes the evening so memorable, and dare I say, haunting, is the sensational Off-Broadway debut by Iverson. Campbell is a good counterpoint in the rather thankless role of Sid, but he wisely avoids distraction while Lucas’s largely uninterrupted monologue progresses. Iverson beautifully warms into the role of the audiobook narrator. At first, he is merely an actor plying his “Juilliard-trained” skills in assuming the various characters within the story, but he progressively becomes subsumed by the horrors as well as the presumably cursed objects in the room. For instance, his character initially treats the head-shaped dome microphone as an amusing novelty, much like testing out the features of a new Alexa or Google Assistant. Gradually, the device takes on human-like properties, and Iverson brilliantly reveals the seductiveness and revulsion the object causes.
Average Rating: 72.9%
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