Review of 'Ears on a Beatle'

In the movie Forrest Gump, one of the title character's encounters with famous people occurs when he is a guest on The Dick Cavett Show alongside John Lennon (whom he unwittingly inspires to write "Imagine"). Several things in Ears on a Beatle—a new off-Broadway play about the FBI's surveillance of Lennon in the 1970s—may bring that scene to mind: Lennon's actual appearance on Cavett is watched closely by the FBI agents trailing him, and Dick Cavett is one of the celebrities who have provided news-reporter voiceovers for the play.

Ears on a Beatle is also reminiscent of Forrest Gump in its frequent connecting of characters' personal lives to political/cultural events of the day. By cramming in so many hot-button names and issues, however, playwright Mark St. Germain shifts attention away from his storylines and sociopolitical commentary. The feds' persecution of John Lennon because of his opposition to the Vietnam War has—as publicity for Ears on a Beatle suggests—much relevance in a Patriot Act-governed America. Yet the themes of criminalizing dissent and abrogating civil liberties get relatively little airtime in the play.

The ideas that are bandied about relate more to conspiracy theories and the government's withholding facts to "protect" the public. Parallels to today's news can still be drawn. But really, the heart of Ears on a Beatle is its fiction. John Lennon was indeed the subject of FBI surveillance (Richard Nixon wanted him deported), but the two agents on the case in the play, young Daniel McClure and middle-aged Howard Ballantine, are St. Germain's inventions. And though neither the pairing of a volatile, undisciplined rookie with a dour, straitlaced veteran, nor their inevitable transference of personalities, is novel, their relationship is winningly enacted by Bill Dawes and Dan Lauria. In a well-rounded performance, Dawes' Agent McClure matures from slouchy and loose-limbed to the very model of a stiff-backed G-man. The change is not merely physical: the actor also conveys emotional maturity, as we see McClure's thoughts and impulses grow more measured and serious.

Dawes has a very natural rapport with Lauria, who, after playing the father for five years on TV's The Wonder Years, fits comfortably into the role of an old-school authority figure staring down the '60s youth movement. Their sympathetic onstage personas help smooth the bumps of occasionally facile dialogue and other hokey aspects of the script. The scene near the end where the once-assured Agent Ballantine quivers in tears is too melodramatic, and the two men's epiphanies feel contrived.

Then there's all that gratuitous name-dropping. References to John Kerry, spokesperson for Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and Ralph Nader (purportedly urged by John and Yoko to run for president) seem to be included just to elicit a chuckle. In a discussion about Robert Kennedy's assassination, the mention of Darryl Gates—remembered today as one of the villains in the Rodney King case—comes off as an unsubtle way of telling the audience: "This information is not to be trusted." Instead of the video montage blaring Watergate-to-Reagan headlines that we're all familiar with, a simple "Eight Years Later" projection would suffice before the play's coda. And Roe v. Wade is clumsily interjected into the plot (and inaccurately, since abortion was legal in New York state before Roe).

Ears on a Beatle does have time on its side—it's briskly paced at 80 minutes, without intermission. And timelessness, too, since curiosity about the Beatles never vanishes. But for all the political and pop-culture touchstones it entails, it's most affecting as a portrait of friendship and personal growth amid turmoil.

At the DR2 Theatre, 103 E. 15th Street; call 212-239-6200 for tickets.

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