Horror is having its moment on New York stages, with recent productions like Stranger Things: The First Shadow and Paranormal Activity on Broadway, as well as the upcoming 2:22 A Ghost Story set to bow Off-Broadway. Into this cohort comes a spooky import from London, A Ghost in Your Ear, being staged at Audible’s Minetta Lane Theatre.

Working in the things-that-go-bump-in-the-night subset of the horror genre, the production hums on a simple premise: An actor, Lucas (Lucas Iverson), arrives late to a studio to record an audiobook ghost story, text unseen, with engineer Sid (Owen Campbell). Lucas is in need of work and Sid is about to become a father for the first time. As the session progresses, and the tale unfolds, the actor begins to crack. The story spills out from the page into reality, leaving Lucas to wonder if the sound effects are the work of Sid, who may not be as chummy as he appears at first, or far more sinister auditory hallucinations. The twist in the story, and rationale for the urgent recording session, is a plot point that’s best left unspoiled.

The play works by blending the most primal aspect of theater, a person on stage enacting a story and the audience’s willing suspension of disbelief, with cutting-edge audio technology. First glimpsed center stage, the binaural microphone, shaped like a human head, allows the actor to manipulate and direct sound in unique ways. The audience wears headphones for the duration, so as the recording session progresses, they’re privy to every gulp of water, swallow, and mouth sound Lucas makes. The more he invests in his performance of “A Ghost in Your Ear,” the story within the story, the mic is engaged as prop and scene partner, allowing Iverson to conjure the central ghost story while virtually alone in the glass box of the recording studio.

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.

At its most basic, this play is about telling stories. The in-text tale “A Ghost in Your Ear” is a classic Gothic yarn, with a dead father, an isolated estate, and some unsettling occurrences after sundown. It gestures lightly toward larger concerns, fears about fatherhood and what’s passed on between generations, which may or may not motivate Lucas and Sid. And should the tale lag a bit, the teller certainly doesn’t. Iverson is relentlessly locked in. For most of A Ghost in Your Ear’s 90-minute run time, it’s his show. There are of course some well-placed jump scares, which serve to jolt Lucas’s psychological shifts and descent into the uncanny.

One effect of the headphones is that they tweak the usual conventions of theatrical participation. It’s rare to be seated in an audience yet feel so isolated, as if the sounds are happening inside your own head. It’s a disorienting sensation, but one that enhances this slice of ASMR horror.

A Ghost in Your Ear is now running at the Minetta Lane Theatre.