The Encounter Broadway Reviews

In this primal, lysergic movie for the brain, McBurney covers a dazzling array of topics: the nature of time, technology's deadening of mental powers, and the spiritual cost of civilized life. Part mystic thriller, part tricksy aural illusion, The Encounter offers a meeting of ear, mind and soul you will never forget.

It's a story told with vivid precision, both linguistic and theatrical. McBurney flies over the Amazon with a bamboo stick for a plane. He takes us right into the rainforest, looping his own animal whoops and insectoid croaks as he circles the stage, rustling plastic for leaves underfoot. The head-mic becomes the shamanic headman. It's a deeply immersive experience, completely transporting. You seem to fall out of time with McIntyre and McBurney, rapt by this gripping thriller.

But the awe-struck descriptions of nature in ascendance are always secondary to what we're feeling, physically as well as emotionally. And 'The Encounter,' which has only sharpened its production values since I saw it in London in February, summons those sensations not just through sound but also through lighting (by Paul Anderson) and projections (by Will Duke) that transform a sterile stage into a phosphorescent jungle where shadow trumps substance or an American suburb illuminated by a bonfire of discarded worldly goods.

McBurney tries to connect these themes - well, not the anti-materialism; the sound equipment must be expensive - to the technology at hand, noting that most of what we call reality is a fiction constructed, like the show's soundscape, from bits of information and shared assumptions. For McIntyre, those assumptions collapsed in his months with the Mayouruna, as dissociated, primal thoughts crept out of the gaps formerly filled with guesses.

But McBurney's conversations with his daughter beautifully illustrate the fractured, if not fractious, quality of time and place. 'The Encounter' also easily trumps the book's ability to convey the concept of beaming. McIntyre doesn't speak the Mayorunan language, but learns to hear what the chief wants him to know.

Complicite has been in the vanguard of merging technology and performance, and its latest work, The Encounter, which has just opened on Broadway at the John Golden Theatre, is the most audacious immersion yet into an artificially intelligent new theater. A solo show in which McBurney portrays many characters in wildly different locations, you might think of it, as I did, as a particularly inventive episode of A Prairie Home Companion as conceived and directed by Carlos Castaneda. It's a mindblower.

McIntyre's story is fascinating, but it serves here a placeholder, an opportunity for McBurney to explore his deeper thematic concerns: why do we surrender ourselves to narrative? How do we distinguish between reality and fiction? When should we trust the evidence of our senses and when should we allow for the extrasensory? (There's also lots of less helpful material about being and time.) McBurney intercuts the narrative with recordings of his sleepless daughter's desire to be told just one more story. The binaural audio, he says, is his way of reading a bedtime story to each of us, using proximity to encourage mimesis and summon our empathy.

Given how thoroughly the audience is let in both on the technology and the artifice, as well as the research that went into creating The Encounter, it's remarkable how quickly and completely the piece becomes an immersive narrative. Throughout, McBurney shifts between his own voice - either as onstage narrator or back in his London home studio with frequent interruptions from his 5-year-old daughter, heard in recordings - and the deeper, American-accented voice of McIntyre. Yet despite the constant reminders that this is an act of storytelling, the lines separating our experience in the theater from McIntyre's in the rainforest and from McBurney's own thoughts all but vanish.

'The Encounter' resembles an immersive, sensory take on the old-fashioned radio play, with multiple voices, heavy breathing and other sounds fully engulfing the listener. But after a while, the novelty wears off and you are left with unending bits of description and psychological contemplation.

It is, I hasten to say, a compelling radio play. Inspired by 'Amazon Beaming,' a 1991 novel that Petru Popescu wrote after meeting the real-life protagonist, National Geographic photographer Loren McIntyre, and hearing about his encounter with a virtually unknown tribe in the Brazilian rain forest.

There are readily apparent and relatable themes in 'The Encounter.' Among them: we're natural creatures, but our material possessions hold us hostage. As well, there's a well-intentioned message about how it's wrong to interfere with the lives of any indigenous people, particularly these, who-in the telegraphed words of a campaigner for Survival International-view 'the oil underneath the ground as the blood of the earth.'

'The Encounter' would work better as a podcast, where a listener can focus on the words, and pause and rewind in private. Instead it's been slapped onstage with 77 water bottles and a microphone shaped like a severed head.