I first read Michael Goldman’s The Actor’s Freedom as a college student in the early 1970s. The book has shaped the way I think about theater ever since.

I thought about Goldman again this week after seeing Simon McBurney’s remarkable The Encounter here in Ann Arbor. It’s a one-man show about—goodness—everything. The power of story, our need for story, the utterly shady border between fiction and fact, the linguistic and cultural barriers that impede communication (and at worst, breed violence). Climate change. Cultural imperialism. Parenting. There are long disquisitions on material possessions and on time. Time, the invisible Pied Piper who hauls us along with him, sometimes willingly, mostly not.

Above all, The Encounter is about the actor. The prodigious McBurney is onstage by himself for more than two hours, no intermission. His monologue, abetted by wizardly technology, is pretty much nonstop. He alternates between an authorial figure (a McBurney think-alike) and a real-life figure named Loren McIntyre, who was briefly, and terrifyingly, kidnapped by an Amazonian tribe in the 1970s. The performance has McBurney ranting, whispering, running as he deals with a range of unseen characters: an insomniac young daughter, a tribal chief capable of telepathic communication, a blood-seeking rival, dinner guests.

Part of McBurney’s power comes from the dazzling technology (every member of the audience wears headphones, so that the story effectively unfolds inside our skulls). But most of his power comes from his sheer physical presence—what Goldman labels the actor’s “freedom.” McBurney’s mercurial transitions and transformations (from character to character, scene to scene, past to present) remind us of the actor’s uncanny ability to transcend time and space, to embody (and thus tame) what terrifies us, to act in the face of paralyzing events.

And, in this case, to enter, almost literally, our minds. It’s hard to describe the pleasures of experiencing a play spoken directly into the ears. I’d initially been put off by ads for the performance, thinking the last thing I wanted to do was spend two hours sitting in a theater wearing a headset (how would that work with a hearing aid?). But I’m a convert.

As Goldman writes, the actor “is a figure of fear or awe, and of extraordinary delight, by virtue of his skills, whose power is felt throughout the audience—and must be felt if we are to respond well to his acting. […] He is beyond us because he is disguised; he both is and is not himself.” McBurney’s Encounter is one of the most striking examples of this truth I’ve ever seen.