The Encounter
Opening Night: September 29, 2016
Closing: January 8, 2017
Theater: John Golden Theatre
In the one-man play, McBurney draws from Amazon Beaming, a book by Petru Popescu about National Geographic writer and photographer Loren McIntyre’s experience with tribes along the Amazon River.
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September 29, 2016
With his intense eyes, dimpled chin and thatch of hair, Simon McBurney has a chameleonic look that shifts imperceptibly from innocent to sinister, enchanted to terrified, that will be familiar to anyone who’s seen him onscreen: He played Colin Firth’s illusionist sidekick in Woody Allen’s Magic in the Moonlight and the father of Eddie Redmayne’s Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything, among many other roles.
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September 29, 2016
Closing one’s eyes in the theater can be a sign of boredom or exhaustion. But shutting the peepers at Simon McBurney’s utterly transfixing mind-tickler The Encounter is a valid expression of rapture. You’re wearing headphones which transmit binaural (“3D”) sound, as McBurney moves around the stage rattling props and speaking over a dense layer of pre-recorded voices and FX. If you enjoy radio drama, audiobooks, or simply having your senses suffused by intense sonic stimulation, then lean back and let the lids drop.
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September 29, 2016
Is this a play or a podcast? The fall Broadway season starts off in a most unusual way with “The Encounter,” an audio-intensive solo show in which each audience member receives his or her own pair of headphones and listens to sonic effects and muddled storytelling for two straight hours.
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September 29, 2016
What’s that whispering behind my left ear? Why is that man seated over on the right making such a racket?
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September 29, 2016
See that scruffy-looking guy up there on the stage, the one messing around with the microphones and the plastic water bottles? It turns out that he’s a world-class head shrinker — and head enlarger, too, an all-purpose mind-bender. He is going to retune, rearrange and reproportion your senses, while taking you places you never expected to visit.
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