Lynx Performance :: Press: The Ones To Watch in 2007

San Diego Union-Tribune: The ones to watch
Somebody has to do it: Step forward with a vision, take charge, provide leadership. Certainly it takes a village, or at least an assemblage of performers, artists, volunteers, supporters and audience members to keep San Diego's ever expanding arts community vital and relevant. But it also takes individuals who are willing to do just a little bit more (or, in most cases, a whole lot more). Today, we celebrate some of the leaders who made an impact in 2006 and are poised to make a difference in 2007. We couldn't have done it without them. – JAMES CHUTE, ARTS EDITOR

AL GERMANI: His goal of bringing “that pure experience of life” onto the stage has helped distinguish Lynx Performance Theatre within the county's ever-expanding theater scene.

THEATER
An eye for what's 'kind of Lynxie'

Director Germani's offbeat, edgy works go for 'awe' factor

By Anne Marie Welsh
THEATER CRITIC

December 31, 2006

Al Germani chooses plays by instinct, a psychotherapist's instinct for what's deepest and truest – and often most painful – in human experience.

“I'm not excited about spending $5,000 for costumes or $3,000 for lights. I love the human element in theater,” says the artistic director of Lynx Performance Theatre.

Fresh off his beautifully cast, intense production of Amiri Baraka's racially confrontational classic “Dutchman,” Germani's got a couple of aces up his sleeve for next year: “Right now I really want to do Sam Shepard. (His) 'Buried Child' for me is right up there with 'Crave,' ” he says, referring to Sarah Kane's multi-voice piece about a mind turning in on itself, a potent and poetic work he staged effectively here last year.

Also on his list for 2007 are a Stephen Adly Guirgis drama about Judas on trial, and Noah Haidle's bleakly fanciful piece about an abused girl, “Mr. Marmalade” – anything, Germani says, “that's kind of Lynxie.”

“Lynxie” means the offbeat and edgy, and in works by younger playwrights not produced at the city's big theaters. His artistic specialty is a dark, semi-ritualistic style of naturalism. And he's shrewdly showcased a dozen actors new to the scene while highlighting new facets in those already familiar.

A practicing psychotherapist who's worked in various corners of the arts scene here for 20 years, Germani has moved closer to center stage during the several seasons since he founded Lynx and located in an industrial park near the Costco off Morena Boulevard.

“I'm interested in picking shows where the characters in the play are the kind of people I've worked with (in therapy) at every stage of their lives. I go in for in-depth psychology to analyze and evaluate them. I work the way John Cassavetes used to work (in film).”

Al Germani with Dave Phillips and Bill Kehayias

photo: JIM BAIRD / Union-Tribune
Al Germani, Lynx Performance Theatre's founding director, on the set of "Dutchman" with actors Dave Phillips (left) and Bill Kehayias.

When Germani's good, he's very very good. In a pair of intense productions, both with pitch-perfect casts, he introduced the city to the gritty urban rap of Guirgis (“Jesus Hopped the 'A' Train” and “In Arabia We'd All Be Kings”) as well as to Kane, the extravagantly gifted British playwright whose worldwide popularity peaked after she committed suicide at the age of 28.

Because he's amplified some scripts with music (“Dutchman”) or spliced dance segments into others (John Guare's “House of Blue Leaves”), he's been criticized for meddling or distorting the writer's intentions. And one playwright – Karen Hartman – pulled the rights to her play “Gum” from him because she learned he deconstructed and rearranged some scenes and repeated some dialogue to enhance the ritualistic quality of the script.

Germani first emerged locally as a dancer when he was in the master's program in dance at SDSU in the early 1980s. While earning another master's as a licensed clinical social worker, he also ran the Al Germani Dance Company, then served for 10 years as movement specialist and choreographer for director Scott Feldsher at Sledgehammer Theatre.

Feeling the limitations of his strict modern dance background, Germani went multidisciplinary with his CrossArts company, which performed a blend of dance and theater at Sushi Visual and Performing Arts even as the therapist Germani was helping to set up the Downtown Mental Health Center.

“Dr. David Bergman, a psychiatrist who was one of my supervisors at UCSD's Gifford Clinic, still comes to see my shows,” Germani says. “The other night, I told him that I think I have the greatest job in the world, working with eight people everyday who've been thrown out of their country of origin, or who've been molested, or even murdered someone. It's that pure experience of life that I get everyday in my chair that I want to bring into the theater.”

At Lynx, the director says he hopes to transmit such empathy and intensity to audiences, so they can “feel for others at a level you just don't with television or the movies. I want people to experience that moment when they walk out of the theater and say 'What the hell just happened to me?' ”

In a word, Germani wants to restore our capacity for wonder. “Some people want their experience to stay just intellectual, distant. I want my work at Lynx to appeal to those capable of surrendering to feelings of awe.”

Anne Marie Welsh: (619) 293-1265; anne-marie.welsh@uniontrib.com

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