A Ghost in Your Ear

Let’s hear it for A Ghost in Your Ear, a two-character/one-set thriller now at Audible’s Minetta Lane Theatre. Written and directed by Jamie Armitage, the play is a collaboration with Ben & Max Ringham, who contribute the sound design, which almost becomes a third character in the show. When you enter the theater, you put on a pair of (extremely good) headphones, which do a creepy sound check, voiced by someone who learned a trick or two from Vincent Price. You wear those headphones for the duration of A Ghost in Your Ear, and the brilliance of the sound design comes through loud and clear.

Also creepy: the dummy-head binaural microphone that stands front and center of the recording studio, giving “head mike” new meaning. It’s eerily visible from the audience as a ghostly reflection in the glass wall of the sound booth; foreshadowing much?

In that studio, Lucas (Lucas Iverson, in a total-body knockout performance), an American actor living and working in England, has taken a last-minute job as a voice talent, recording a ghost story. His friend Sid (a terrific Owen Campbell) a recording engineer, hired Lucas in a hurry, because the client wants this project done overnight. Sid’s also about to become a first-time dad, which becomes an important plot point.

Lucas, although American, is a one-take wonder, ready to read the script right from a teleprompter, with no prep. And he really needs this job. So Lucas reads on and on, despite the frightening things he alone can hear and see. Iverson himself is a similar prodigy; he may be familiar to you from his role in HBO’s The Pitt, but he took on this role just a few weeks ago. That makes his performance as Lucas, who disintegrates into the horror story, all the more remarkable.

The somewhat cliche ghost story of a man who goes to clear the remote estate of his recently deceased, estranged father turns into a Poe-worthy mindgame. Generational father/son issues play out in the story-within-the-story as well as in Sid’s impending fatherhood. No spoilers, but the father/son thing is crucial in A Ghost in Your Ear. Crucial.

Lucas’s reading becomes gradually more terrifying and terrified; Sid pushes him to continue, to “use it,” in the parlance of acting classes everywhere. But things go past acting, eventually. Let’s just say: in the fully-soundproofed studio, nobody can hear you scream…

It’s not the jump scares and things that go thud in the night that terrify, here, but the lead-up to them. It’s the combination of story, sounds that Lucas (and we) can hear that Sid cannot, and some inexplicable scary events.

As a director, Armitage knows his way around a stage, and A Ghost in Your Ear is as cleverly mounted as a single-set play can be (scenic design by Anisha Fields, who also did the costumes). So clever, the way Lucas turns the head/mike into a character, picking it up, moving it around, caressing it, nearly kissing it, and with the sound ringing in our ears, it’s as immersively intimate as can be. So well done, the lighting that goes from sterile fluorescents in the recording studio to jump-scare in a moment (really terrific lighting design from Ben Jacobs).

So clever, the way the Lucas’s story, Sid’s story, the story Lucas reads, and the one we hear all meld together despite everything trying to keep us apart. Each of us is isolated: Sid in his booth, Lucas in the studio, us in our headphones in our seats, hearing only the show, not the coughs, rustles, and phones that usually plague live theater performances.

An artful and beautifully constructed a piece of theater masquerading as a horror story, A Ghost in Your Ear turns that 400-seat theater on Minetta Lane into a perfectly Halloween-worthy 90 minute show. Go see – and hear – it.

A Ghost in Your Ear
At Audible’s Minetta Lane Theatre
18 Minetta Lane
Running time: 90 minutes, no intermission
Through December 12, 2026