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The Lyric pins Ears on a Beatle
BY STEVE VINEBERG
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Ears on a Beatle
By Mark St. German. Directed by Paula Ramsdell. Set and costumes by Robert M. Russo. Lighting by Eleanor Moore. With Steven Barkhimer and Michael Kaye. At the Lyric Stage Company of Boston through November 20.
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Mark St. Germain’s Ears on a Beatle is a two-hander with a third off-stage character. That’s John Lennon, whom two federal agents, the experienced Ballantine (Steven Barkhimer) and the novice McClure (Michael Kaye), have been assigned to keep tabs on. Lennon’s file is opened in 1971 and closed the following year, after J. Edgar Hoover’s death, but the play doesn’t end until 1980; St. Germain provides a coda that brings the two former partners back together for a drink in New York, where they happen to wander by the Dakota just in time to witness Mark David Chapman’s shooting of their celebrated subject. It’s a clever idea for a play, even with the suspension-of-disbelief requirement for the final episode. Unfortunately, though, Ears isn’t a very good piece of writing. From the beginning, St. Germain sets up the two feds as foils. Ballantine’s years in the bureau and the unsavory info he’s garnered on heroes like Martin Luther King have made him cynical; McClure, whose youth and looks fit him to infiltrate the counterculture, is still nursing his heartbreak over Bobby Kennedy’s assassination. The son of a general, and the kid brother of a soldier fighting in Vietnam, he’s caught between a fervent wish to please his dad by serving his country and his susceptibility to some of the revolutionary ideas he’s supposed to be recording for an institution that views them as dangerous. McClure admires Lennon, and he’s swept up by the people in the anti-war movement that Lennon is at the center of; he falls in love with one of them and, over his partner’s protests that he’s "personalizing" his work, moves in with her and fathers her child. At first, this scenario is played for comedy, with McClure’s earnestness and increasing befuddlement poised against Ballantine’s sarcastic quips. It’s cut-rate comedy, but it’s a lot better than the dialogue we get when the tone turns serious and the older fed comes out with lines like "Stick a flower in a gun barrel; it won’t stop a bullet" and "Conspiracy is replacing baseball as the national sport." Then there comes that predictable time when the two men switch points of view. Ballantine, posing as a Bell repairman so he can bug Lennon’s phones, finds himself invited into the singer’s apartment, where over beers they commiserate about their struggles as divorced men feeling estranged from their kids. The monologue in which Ballantine, discombobulated by this unexpected experience of intimacy with his subject, reports the incident to his partner is easily the best thing in the play, funny and loopy and rather sweet, and Barkhimer does a nice job with it. McClure’s perspective-altering episode is another story. At Jerry Rubin’s home when the 1972 election returns come in, he sees Lennon unleash his infamous fury — which somehow all these months of shadowing the man haven’t brought to light. What really tears McClure up, though (aside from Nixon’s landslide victory), is seeing Lennon feel up a young woman in front of everyone and take her into the bedroom for a quickie: suddenly he’s wishing that the Beatle might get washed out to sea with the garbage. Can this guy really be that naive? What did he think rock stars get up to on the road? That night changes McClure, who was ready to resign and join the anti-war movement for real, into an establishment clone with an unpleasant edge in his voice, whereas Ballantine trades his beat for Florida and narcotics. The point is that rather than relegate Lennon to the category of "subject," both these men fall, in one way or another, under his influence; he shapes their lives. Ears on a Beatle is awfully schematic, and St. Germain is speaking from a soapbox. Of the two actors, it’s Kaye who really suffers from the way the script is structured, because Barkhimer has Ballantine’s wisecracks to fall back on and he gets his laughs. Kaye is stuck with the big disillusionment speeches, and either he isn’t a shrewd enough actor to play against the melodrama or else the director, Paula Ramsdell, has encouraged him to go for broke. Whatever the reason, his performance lacks modulation, and so does the play.
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