GERMINAL brilliantly melds low-tech and high-tech as four characters create a brand-new world from the bottom up (photo by Bea Borgers)
The Newman Theater at the Public Theater
425 Lafayette St. by Astor Pl.
January 6-9, $25
Festival continues through January 17
212-967-7555
www.undertheradarfestival.com
amicaledeproduction.com
The stars were out in force on January 6 for the opening night of the Public Theater’s twelfth annual Under the Radar Festival. Among those squeezing into the sold-out Newman Theater for the New York premiere of the highly touted international hit Germinal were David Byrne, Laurie Anderson, John Leguizamo, and Denis O’Hare. The eighty-minute piece, inspired by Gustave Flaubert’s posthumously published 1899 novel Bouvard et Pécuchet, uses the magic and mechanics of stage craft to help construct a mysterious new plane of existence, as the characters create a unique theatrical experience while modeling the birth of a civilization. Conceived by Halory Goerger and Antoine Defoort of l’Amicale de Production, the vastly entertaining, highly literate, and charmingly goofy show begins with some playful lighting effects, as if the God of Theater has slowly declared, “Let there be light.” Soon Arnaud Boulogne, Sébastien Vial, Ondine Cloez, and Defoort are each using small, handheld machines to manipulate first the lights, then their thoughts, conjuring them onto the back wall. Reminiscent of babies finding their way outside their mother’s womb, the four erstwhile explorers delve into the nature of language, sound, speech, communication, identity, recognition, classification, music, architecture, archaeology, self-expression, and various philosophical conundrums that would make Roland Barthes proud, Samuel Beckett happy, and Bertolt Brecht concerned. Social interaction takes center stage as they seek out connections of all sorts in addition to reason, meaning, and, well, just plain old fun. Boulogne, Vial, Cloez, and Defoort may give the appearance that everything is low-tech and improvised, but Germinal is actually a brilliantly seamless use of modern technology choreographed to the second. As the delighted audience filed out, we couldn’t help but think that if you could put younger versions of Byrne, Anderson, Leguizamo, and O’Hare onstage together in a black-box theater with today’s technology, you just might end up with something very much like Germinal.