The Encounter

The term "surround sound" became common parlance decades ago, but not until "The Encounter" at the Curran has anyone really followed through on the promise of the term. And not until "The Encounter" did anyone realize how potentially alarming its connotations are.

Calling this a solo show -- starring British actor and director Simon McBurney, whose many, many accomplishments including playing a bad-tempered house elf in one of the "Harry Potter" movies -- isn't quite accurate, although McBurney is the only body you'll see onstage.

Instead the audio provides him a chorus of accompaniment; sometimes via recordings of himself, sometimes recordings of his sources for "The Encounter's" long and bizarre true story of a photojournalist lost in the Amazon in 1969, and sometimes of people from his own life.

These vocal apparitions pop up in the headphones provided to the seats, or sometimes just out of the speakers concealed in each row, and McBurney interacts directly with each audience member via a slightly freaky head-shaped microphone that lets him buzz one of yours ears or the other depending on where he's standing.

In short, while plenty of shows angle for the concept of "immersive" theater, "The Encounter" actually pulls it off -- which, like most sorcery, is both amazing and a little unsettling at times.

Based on the 2016 book "Amazon Beaming," "The Encounter" concerns American photographer Loren McIntyre, who in 1969 drops into the Amazon basin in search of a single tribe of reclusive locals.

He's not entirely convinced that it's a good thing when he finds them -- many times during the show voices remind us that contact with the outside world is almost always a net loss for tribal groups -- but he can't seem to keep away either.

And this is how McIntyre ended up lost, because although he was surrounded by people they had no common language and no frame of reference for each other's culture.

This is also where "The Encounter's" central conceit comes in: McBurney is onstage at the Curran, surrounded but also mostly alone. We in the audience are in the midst of a crowd but also isolated by the intentional confinement of the headphones and the atmosphere they generate. And of course all this reminds us that we are all always lost in individual ways.

(In one other bit of audio trickery, when McBurney speaks as McIntyre the sound system transforms his voice into one many octaves lower. Combining this with an American accent, he ends up sounding like Harrison Ford.)

McIntyre finds the tribe in crisis, although he can neither understand what's disrupting their lives nor what they're doing to counteract it. He ends up following them on a psychotropic pilgrimage into a spiritual realm he doesn't understand, an apocalyptic journey in the original sense of the word.

And make no bones about it, it gets freaky. The power of "The Encounter" to reach out and shake the audience begins whimsically enough, but by the time we're approaching the crescendo after nearly two hours it seems madness might be on tap.

To be honest, the technical prowess of this program exceeds what's needed. At times we felt assaulted by the potency of the audio and buffeted by the abandon of McBurney's performance.

By isolating the viewer, "The Encounter" puts us largely at its mercy, and it ends up working us over. Everything would be much easier to engage with if only -- pardon the phrase -- it were dialed down a little.

Still, as much as we might have bones to pick, we just can't really bring ourselves to take "The Encounter" to task. It's too courageous of an exercise and McBurney takes too many risks and makes himself far too vulnerable for even the most hardnosed critic not to admire his zeal.

As a story about transformation, you have to wonder how his own experience with "The Encounter" has changed McBurney himself, and how it keeps changing him. By the time he takes his bows, it is easy to believe that over the course of two hours he has become someone not quite himself -- maybe more than once.

"The Encounter" plays through May 7 at the Curran, 445 Geary Street in San Francisco. For tickets and information, call 855-315-1601 or visit SFCurran.com