Review: THE ENCOUNTER Is More Tech Demo Than Engaging Storytelling

The underappreciated art of sound design takes center stage in Simon McBurney's The Encounter, a dramatization of Petru Popescu's book "Amazon Beaming" that comes off more as a demonstration of technological capabilities than engaging storytelling.

The narrative involves National Geographic photojournalist Loren McIntyre's 1969 search for the source of the Amazon River in the Brazilian rainforest, focused on his encounters with the indigenous Mayoruna tribe, a people who have resisted contact with the outside world.

McIntyre suffers near-starvation and hallucinations, living in a state of semi-captivity within a society that has drastically different concepts of reality and communication.

But in this production, which originated with the British company Complicite, of which McBurney is artistic director (he co-directs with Kirsty Housley), what's being told takes a back seat to the way it's being told.

Every seat at the Golden Theatre is now rigged with a set of headphones, which audience members wear throughout the two-hour long performance. The stage is set up by designer Michael Levine to resemble a sound studio and the way McBurney creates sound images from water bottles, a bag of Cheez Doodles and tangled videotape seems no different from the way a Foley artist would enhance a live drama during the golden age of radio.

But at center stage is a binaural microphone, resembling a human head on a stick, which allows him to vary the way listeners hear live and recorded sounds in terms of direction and distance.

While wearing headphones, the sound design by Gareth Fry and Pete Malkin creates senses of location and space with realistic sounds that appear to originate from anywhere around you, so specific that you might be tricked into shushing the person sitting behind you for talking during the show.

Remove the headphones and all you hear is the unamplified voice of McBurney as you watch him maneuver his devices.

THE ENCOUNTER doesn't appear to introduce anything revolutionary in terms of sound design that wouldn't be included in a top shelf Broadway production (consider Fitz Patton's extraordinary work in THE HUMANS), but by pushing the aural experience to the forefront, it calls deserved attention to the Sound Designer's art.

For a good twenty minutes or a half-hour, the technological display is very entertaining. The narrative, however, isn't, as McIntyre's inner monologues grow tiresome and the environment recreations seem redundant.

Occasionally, McBurney steps out of character to play out scenes where his efforts are interrupted by his restless young daughter. Viewers at The Encounter may empathize.

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