photos by Robbie Jack

 

                                        By Ron Cohen

 

 

If you ever had a hankering to journey through the exotic and fabled rainforests of Brazil, The Encounter, the profoundly stunning one-person show conceived, directed and performed by Simon McBurney, may well change your mind. As a vicarious experience, it is surely a trip worth taking from the assumed safety of a Broadway theater seat, but the actual sojourn that McBurney describes – mainly for your ears but also for your eyes – is no pleasure trip.

 

The show is a recreation of the time an American photojournalist, the late Loren McIntyre, working for National Geographic, spent in 1969 stranded with an indigenous and rarely seen people of the Amazon called the Mayoruna. He is drenched in violent rains, beset by hunger, trapped in a thorn bush. He has to retrieve his shoes from being burned in a ritualistic fire and sees his camera destroyed by a monkey. He comes across some hideous corpses and is attacked by maggots who burrow under his skin and nearly kill him. He is both befriended and mortally threatened, while trudging through perilous jungle with this peripatetic tribe as they seek to go back to what they ambiguously call the ‘beginning.”

         

 

The piece is inspired by the 1991 book Amazon Beaming by Petru Popescu, which detailed this episode in McIntyre’s life. McBurney, who is artistic director of Complicite, the acclaimed and highly imaginative British theatre company, is a masterful story teller and complex thinker, and the tale is infused and deepened with philosophical implications about time, reality, society, materialism and the connection between the primitive and civilization.  He also makes the telling excitingly visceral and intimate as well, while eschewing, for the most part, literal props and scenery.

 

 

Nevertheless, there’s plenty of tech stuff at work here. Most prominently is the use of audio, including a binaural microphone shaped like a human head standing center stage. It also functions like a human head, picking up sound from all sides and transmitting it stereophonically to the headsets worn by the audience. Audience members find the headsets waiting for them on the back on their chairs. McBurney opens the show by demonstrating how this microphone and various others placed around the stage operate. He explains how one will transmit his own voice, when he speaks as himself acting as the show’s narrator, and how another will deepen his pitch when he assumes an American accent and portrays McIntyre. There are also a variety of sound effects, musical scoring and prerecorded voices that will come through the headsets, which are to be worn by the audience throughout the show. (Gareth Fry and Pete Malkin are the sound designers.)

 

All this audio technology could be seen as a gimmick, but it truly heightens McBurney’s intentions as a storyteller, his desire, as he says while ruminating – also at the start of the show – on the art and purposes of storytelling, to talk to the audience “more intimately.” The headsets bring startlingly close to the audience the aural illusion of falling rain, the voices of the Mayoruna, the footsteps crushing jungle growth along with McIntyre’s expressions of surprise, bewilderment and anxiety as he interacts with the tribe.  One of the more arresting effects – sound building on sound -- comes when McIntyre finds he can communicate with the leader of the Mayoruna telepathically. The soundtrack also contains the voices of various experts McBurney has interviewed, discoursing on such topics as time, environment, and the state of indigenous communities. Not all of this is comprehensible but it demonstrates what McBurney calls “a sort of infinite cacophony if you like, in my unconscious.”

 

Along with this fantasia of sound, there is certainly McBurney on stage, dressed in rugged clothing, often carrying out the actions he is describing, whether it is a native slicing his arm in a bizarre rite or a desperate McIntyre racing about the natives’ village in the pretense that he can put a hex on them.  The visual aspect is further heightened by Paul Anderson’s lighting, which at some climactic moments, explodes into a frenzy of geometric patterns on the back wall of Michael Levine’s dark-hued set.

 

After all the calamities, the show ends on a rather peaceful note: McBurney is in his London flat telling a bedtime story to his young daughter. As she falls asleep, McBurney, as if in a final reflection on McIntyre’s adventures with the Mayoruna, quietly repeats “some of us are friends.” It’s a good thought to keep as the audience takes off the headsets.

 

Playing at the John Golden Theatre

252 West 45^th Street

212 239 6200

www.Telecharge.com

Playing until January 8