A high-tech wonderland of sound, signifying not much
The central conceit of Complicite’s “The Encounter” is cool in theory and, if nothing else, unique in practice. But theater cannot survive on conceit alone.
When you walk into the Curran, where the English company’s show opened Wednesday, April 26, after an acclaimed run in New York, a pair of custom-made binaural headphones greets you at your seat. Don them before the show starts, and a sort of sound check plays on loop. It’s important to test not just that you can hear — you’ll be wearing the device throughout the performance — but also that you don’t have them on backward. As he tells the tale of National Geographic photographer Loren McIntyre, who got lost in the Amazon in 1969, director and solo performer Simon McBurney has such distinct soundscapes planned for your right and left ears that, taking it all in, you might feel as if you’ve sprung additional ears all around your head.
Binaural technology creates what’s called 3-D audio, meaning that these headphones can give you the impression of sound not just coming from a particular ear, but, say, from a particular spot far behind you. At several moments during the
show, I couldn’t help but look over my right shoulder to find a noise’s source, even as I kept scolding myself that it clearly came from my headphones. Prerecorded sound meshes with what McBurney says live, picked up from a variety of microphones scattered on the stage, as well as with hamstring-tingling bass resounding from subwoofers in the theater. You’re immersed in the roar of the Amazon River, the brassy hum of a flitting mosquito. Even if you’re in the balcony, the communion of performer and audience is disarmingly, discomfitingly intimate. McBurney need only purr to ring out loud and clear. Much of the time, it feels as if his voice emanates directly from between your ears.
After a while, though, the novelty of this effect wears off. I started to wonder if seeing “The Encounter” was that much different from listening to one of the great concept albums of the ’60s with a decent pair of regular headphones. When that happens, you’re left with the script, which was inspired by Petru Popescu’s account of McIntyre’s journey, in the 1991 book “Amazon Beaming.”
Some individual details are vivid, like a chest that “became a mirror of sweat,” but McBurney doesn’t give much shape to the story or to his characters. He speaks with so much breathless urgency that soon nothing can be urgent, and his first-person stream of consciousness tells rather than shows. The dangerous situations in which McIntyre finds himself read as an assortment of random events: flood, fever, a hex from a tribe of Mayoruna he encounters. Why are these happening in one order as opposed to any other? It’s almost as if you’re watching someone’s travel slides rather than feeling a story develop. When he speaks as McIntyre, McBurney uses a voice-transforming device to alter his soft British tenor to cowboy baritone, the kind of voice that could narrate movie trailers. That technology gives a clearer sense of the character than any of the text does. Members of the Mayoruna register as little more than names — Barnacle, Tuti. McBurney floats them with great import, as if merely whispering them should endow them with mysticism.
The 3-D audio picks up some of this slack, but even the most innovative sound technology can’t create plot and character on its own. That leaves “The Encounter” more aural experience than theater.