Theatre in Review: The Encounter (Complicite/Golden Theatre)

	Simon McBurney. Photo: Joan Marcus

In The Encounter, Simon McBurney gets inside one's head, but he never penetrates one's heart or mind; the result is a fascinating, if arguably wrong-headed, technical exercise that one can admire for its achievement even if one has severe reservations about the uses to which it is put. As you may have heard, this is Broadway's first venture into headset theatre; as one of the boldest uses of sound design on record, it will be of enormous interest to readers of Lighting&Sound America. In the last few years, we've heard Broadway sound designers complain, rightly, that their role is poorly understood and marginalized, even among other theatre practitioners. Now, here comes The Encounter, a production conceived to make audio the star of the show.

It's the brainchild of McBurney, who, as author, director, and star, has fashioned a high-tech solo piece about exploration, the clash of cultures, and spiritual dislocation deep in the Amazon. It's a Conradian expedition of the soul, delivered to one's ears via digital technology. As you enter the theatre, you notice that each seat is equipped with its own Sennheiser headset. In addition to the usual preshow activities -- chatting with one's companions, perusing the Playbill, and scoping out the audience -- one has to take part in a brief sound check, donning the headset to make sure that it is live.

Then McBurney enters and goes about the business of getting inside our heads. Whether you know his work from the theatre company Complicite, of which he is artistic director -- he starred in its production of The Chairs at the Golden in 1998 -- or from films like The Conjuring 2 and Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, it is clear that he is a nimble, personable, technically gifted performer. He comes on stage pouring out a cataract of words, riffing on the theme of stories, talking about his kids, and getting a big laugh with a joke about Brexit. Soon, he urges us to don our headsets, and, with the aid of a binaural head on stage, messes with our minds, producing voices that sound as if they are in front of, beside, and behind us -- if not actually emanating from inside our craniums. In one creepily intimate gesture, he seems to blow in each of our ears, earning a wave of nervous laughter.

All of this is good fun, and some of McBurney's early remarks -- about the concepts of time and consciousness and modern man's need to record events almost before he experiences them -- will prove germane to the evening's central narrative. But then it's time to take part in the main event, which involves one man's voyage of discovery and dissolution deep in the Brazilian wilderness -- and The Encounter becomes entangled in its fundamental contradictions, its method of storytelling strangely at odds with the ideas it hopes to convey.

McBurney alternates between playing himself, acting as narrator, and taking on the role of Loren McIntyre, a real-life National Geographic photographer who, in the late 1960s, found himself 400 miles from civilization in search of a people known as the Mayoruna, or cat people. The Mayoruna, we are told, "had never been successfully acculturated -- at the turn of the century, as the rubber boom brought more intrusion and conflict to upper Amazonia, they had simply plunged into the forest and disappeared. And now they were reappearing, undoubtedly carrying memories of conflict, brutality, and bloodshed. He looked at them. They looked at him. The moment was wonderful and unrepeatable." At moments like these, The Encounter's words are so beautiful and precise that one feels certain a magical evening is in the offing.

The Encounter is a visually spare production, but the sound designers, Gareth Fry and Pete Malkin, fill the audience's ears with a flood of ambient effects -- lapping water, camera clicks, thunder, and various jungle sounds -- along with an array of human voices layered in to offer commentary on civilization and capitalism. (Among them is Petru Popescu, the Romanian author, whose book, Amazon Beaming, follows McIntyre's quest.) Every so often, a door opens and in comes McBurney's daughter, pulling us out of the story and into the details of his everyday life. The achievement of the sound design cannot be overestimated. Some have described The Encounter as "radio theatre," that doesn't begin to approach the dimensionality of the sound design and its intimacy. Remove the headset for a second and you'll be amazed at the quiet in the theatre; watching The Encounter, it's easy to feel it is unfolding for one alone.

This is also the fatal problem with the production's concept. The glory of theatre is the way it welds together hundreds, even thousands, of spectators into a single unit. The sound design of The Encounter has the opposite effect. The fundamental connection that makes theatre work, the cord between the actor and audience, has been cut, leaving each of us on a separate island, listening intently, but not relating to anyone else in the room.

These circumstances are hardly ideal for creating drama, and the text of The Encounter proves even less helpful. Although it suggests the strangeness McIntyre must have felt when dealing with a people for whom our concepts of time and social structure simply don't exist, the piece is so heavily dependent on narration that one's mind begins to wander. The people he meets are not vividly described and no attempt is made at giving them any kind of dramatic life. For all the exoticism of its premise, this is the fairly standard narrative -- derived from Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, Eugene O'Neill, and many others -- of a man of civilization becoming physically and existentially unglued in bizarre surroundings, as a savage fever sets in and maggots burrow into his arm. The main difference between McBurney's piece and its antecedents is a certain cool, postmodern tone, which is partly derived from the use of technology. Then again, there's something faintly absurd about a piece designed to comment on the emptiness of modern civilization and humanity's fatal separation from the rhythms of Mother Nature -- using the most up-to-date technology.

Admittedly, that technology has been put to some cunning uses. Michael Levine's set seems almost parsimonious in its lack of décor, but keep an eye on the upstage drop that, when treated by Will Duke's projections, comes to life in a variety of eye-teasing ways, and Paul Anderson's clutter-free lighting achieves some remarkably beautiful looks using a handful of beams or strong bursts of sidelight. Whatever else you say about The Encounter, it is executed with supreme confidence and skill.

Still, this is a voyage without a satisfying destination. I won't soon forget the feeling of McBurney's insinuating voice, burrowing deep inside my ear; perhaps there yet is a way to put this technology to use in the service of drama. -- David Barbour