No, you can’t. Mr. McBurney and his ace sound designers, Gareth Fry and Pete Malkin, have created an aural labyrinth of many layers. You’ll be watching Mr. McBurney’s lips moving in sync with what you’re hearing, only to discover that it’s just a recorded voice you’ve been listening to.  Did I say “just a recorded voice”? It’s a mistake to give undue value to what’s “real” over what’s a simulacrum of reality. With your earphones on, there’s no distinguishing between the live and the prerecorded, a blurring that allows Mr. McBurney to conduct very immediate-feeling conversations with his past selves.  And with his 5-year-old daughter, whose voice keeps interrupting him in what feels like real time. And with a host of people he interviewed in preparation for this show, including Mr. Popescu and a variety of neuroscientists, philosophers and environmentalists, who keep interrupting the central story with fragments of theories you’ve heard them expound earlier in the show.  The subject of what they have to say is profound enough to feel embarrassing. Among the questions posed: Is consciousness possible without memory? Is time only a structuring fiction devised by humans? Does time have one or two dimensions? Can language exist without words? Does the introduction of modern materialist cultures into indigenous communities inevitably destroy their essence?  Don’t worry if you didn’t sign up for a lecture. The academics are never allowed to hold forth for long. Instead, their voices poke into our consciousness in shards, like flotsam and jetsam carried by a rushing stream.  This melding of partly articulated ideas suggests that twilight that occurs just before you fall asleep, when the accumulated impressions of a day — and a lifetime — swirl in and out of focus, each weighted with the same significance. And there are moments that approximate the jolting, abrupt waking from such a state of mind.  You can be river-deep and mountain-high in the forest with a bewildered and depleted McIntyre after he’s been stripped of all his modern-man appurtenances, when the sound of a door opening thrusts us into Mr. McBurney’s London home, in the room where he is working on this show and where his restless little girl has entered yet again with a bedtime request.  So are these domestic scenes the present tense of the show? No, that would be the show itself, right? Better not to think too hard about this while you’re watching it.  Not that your mind (or whatever you choose to call it) is ever likely to drift. Mr. McBurney, who does McIntyre’s voice as that of a strapping stoic from a cowboy film, sustains the momentum of his story as tensely and enjoyably as if it were a Rudyard Kipling yarn, albeit of a postcolonial ilk. This isn’t a voyage into a heart of darkness but of enlightenment. And yes, there’s an attendant glimmer of New Age spiritualism.  But the awe-struck descriptions of nature in ascendance are always secondary to what we’re feeling, physically as well as emotionally. And “The Encounter,” which has only sharpened its production values since I saw it in London in February, summons those sensations not just through sound but also through lighting (by Paul Anderson) and projections (by Will Duke) that transform a sterile stage into a phosphorescent jungle where shadow trumps substance or an American suburb illuminated by a bonfire of discarded worldly goods.  For “The Encounter” is definitely a work of theater. And though you first meet Mr. McBurney as a vaguely detached magician M.C., his performance becomes increasingly passionate and physical. He is wrestling with all the elements that go into telling and listening to a story, which includes those transporting moments when the teller becomes the tale.  As does the audience. Just before you put on your earphones, Mr. McBurney says, by way of partial explanation, that “empathy and proximity are connected.” It may be he who’s running and dancing and leaping and sweating. But by the end of this nonpareil show’s two intermissionless hours, you are as lightheaded, exhausted, baffled and invigorated as if it had been you.  Category Broadway, Drama, Play, Solo Performance  Credits Conceived, directed and performed by Simon McBurney; Co-Directed by Kirsty Housley  Cast Simon McBurney, Richard Katz (at certain performances)  Closing Date January 8, 2017  This information was last updated: June 15, 2016  A version of this review appears in print on September 30, 2016, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: A High-Tech Head Trip Through an Amazon Labyrinth. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
Simon McBurney’s astonishing one-man show, from the British troupe Complicite, immerses the audience in an aural landscape where time and space collapse.