Review: What you hear is what you get in ‘The Encounter’

Fifteen years ago, Simon McBurney and his company, Complicite, presented a revelatory theatrical realization of Shostakovich’s 15th String Quartet with the Emerson String Quartet at UCLA. “The Noise of Time” opened with a large radio onstage playing broadcasts that imaginatively took us back in time, and I wrote that I didn’t really want to say too much more (although I did), because one of McBurney’s great talents is to operate in unexpected ways.

With Complicite’s one-man show, “The Encounter,” which opened at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts on Friday night and runs through Sunday, I want to say even less. That radio has become real, at least in a believably virtual sense, and in ways no one else has ever tried before onstage. The one man is McBurney himself, and his performance is an amazement. There is nothing in theater quite like being caught unawares, and that may be the ideal way to see “The Encounter.”

So I’m not going to tell you much about the content of this retelling of Petru Popescu’s riveting book, “The Encounter: Amazon Beaming,” other than that it’s the account of a National Geographic photographer’s harrowing 1969 journey into a remote region of the Brazilian Amazon and his frightening encounter with the mysterious Mayoruna tribe. On the level of an adventure story, McBurney delivers a good two hours’ worth of mesmerizing material.

It is surely more fun to discover unawares how he does it. But since this is being billed as a specimen of the currently fashionable immersive theater, here goes. A crumply clothed man in T-shirt and jeans inhabits a set littered with little more than water bottles, a table and a chair as stage properties. The backdrop looks like acoustical paneling. Paul Anderson’s lighting conveys much of the atmosphere.

In the middle of the stage is a binaural microphone, shaped like a human head, and it is the key. The audience wears small, on-ear headphones. Through them, McBurney’s job is to mess with your head. The advantage of binaural technology is that it creates the illusion of space — sounds, all around you, can come from a distance or whisper in your ear. It can fool you into thinking that something you hear is happening in the back of the theater when, in fact, it is all in your mind.

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Binaural technology has been around for a while. It was thought that the magic of spacial trickery could be a way to distract you into thinking compressed MP3s sounded better than they do. A few higher resolution musical recordings have been binaurally made, but in a world turned back to vinyl, they haven’t widely caught on.

Lately, though, the BBC has been using binaural recording to striking effect for radio drama, and that is essentially McBurney’s approach. As radio drama has long proved, nothing is more immersive than your own imagination.

This McBurney accomplishes mostly with brilliance. At the curtain call, he referred to his large sound crew as musicians, and he’s not wrong. Environmental sound effects are just the beginning of what they do, which is much closer to electronic music in shaping a continually evolving soundscape that also includes the sophisticated use of music, including bits of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s recording of Arvo Pärt’s “Los Angeles” Symphony, which Esa-Pekka Salonen premiered.

McBurney also happened to attempt a staging of Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique” with Salonen in 2004, experimenting with Walt Disney Concert Hall in its first season and also with making Berlioz’s opium-ridden visions visceral. Now, in “The Encounter,” he has the means to mind-bend big time. The jungle is a place of spirits, where everything is alive, alluring and alarming. When needed, the Mayoruna spike the water.

McBurney questions everything. “What is immersion?” leads to “What is real?” That, as he readily acknowledges, is the question of the day.

Who, even, is McBurney? He is Loren McIntyre, the photographer. He is also himself, haplessly telling the story, interrupted by his daughter. He employs a vocoder, like Laurie Anderson uses to lower her voice to a man’s range, confusing matters all the more. The stage is sometimes so dark as to leave you with your own stage pictures.

But it is also at times lighted to confuse you. Like watching an old-fashioned radio drama being created, you watch McBurney shake the water bottles to conjure up the Amazon, and, sure enough, the headphones get you to believe your ears more than your eyes.

Time is equally flexible. McBurney talks about time as circular, the way some physicists now interpret it and the way the Buddhists have for circular eons. That’s another deception, because you think you are prepared for the time warps.

In all this, McBurney realizes much of what he began with “A Noise of Time” and “Symphonie Fantastique,” but he remains one theatrical step ahead of his technology. The sound isn’t really as good as it first seems. Too much compression flattens voices a little and music a little more. Ear fatigue sets in.

On the other hand, fully wired $2,000 headphones not only would be impractical but also would probably create the problem of too much realism, given that much of the tension comes from the confusion between what is and what isn’t real. That leads to the other issue here: whether it is desirable to turn the theater into a private space.

It was delicious to not always know whether I was hearing something on my headphones or actual sound in the hall. But the presence of other people in the audience could easily break the spell, as did the woman sitting next to me by periodically checking her bright phone in the darkened theater.

To McBurney’s credit, he had the extraordinary power to repair the spell faster than I would have thought possible through old-fashioned great acting, leaving no question about the essential importance of this theatrical encounter.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

‘The Encounter’

Where: Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, 9390 N. Santa Monica Blvd., Beverly Hills

When: 8 p.m.Tuesday-Friday, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday

Tickets: $25-$100

Info: (310) 746-4000 or thewallis.org

Running time: 2 hours

mark.swed@latimes.com

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