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Press :: San Diego Union Tribune Featured Article
Play takes journey to the dark side of the mind Psychotherapist, choreographer, jazz musician. It may sound like an odd résumé for a director, but Lynx Performance Theatre's Al Germani has a skill set uniquely attuned to Sarah Kane's tortured, rhythmic play “Crave.” The Lynx production, which opens tonight, is the San Diego premiere of the controversial British playwright. Kane's haunting, poetic and semi-autobiographical play gives voice to the inner workings of a mind fractured by depression and abuse, contemplating suicide. She wrote it in 1998, less than a year before taking her own life. Germani's current work as a psychotherapist focuses on the unique challenges that face artists and performers, helping them to develop and maximize their creative ability. But over the years, his practice has encompassed child therapy, social work and therapy for couples as well as individuals. This has given him firsthand experience with long-suffering characters in such previous Lynx productions as “The Exonerated,” “In Arabia We'd All Be Kings” and “Jesus Hopped the A Train.” Lynx is known for producing dark, gritty stories that often revolve around the oppressed, demoralized, despondent and abused. “I've been picking plays - 'A Train,' 'Arabia,' 'Exonerated' - whose characters I've actually had lots of experience with in my 25 years in psychiatry, so I can really do my thing as a director and use my experience as background,” said Germani. “I think there's a brilliance to ('Crave') in the dynamics of all the levels of consciousness and unconsciousness inside a young woman who's struggling with life and her possible death, with depression and mental illness.” For the past 10 years, Germani has specialized in treating artists with emotional and depressive conflicts - artists much like Kane. Her uncompromising fusion of violent, lurid imagery with intense, beautiful lyricism has brought her simultaneous acclaim and rancor. Her first play, “Blasted,” created a scandal when it premiered in London in 1995. In the story, a middle-aged journalist takes a mentally challenged young woman to a hotel room in Leeds, where he proceeds to ridicule and abuse her. Suddenly, an armed soldier bursts in, and the play splinters into an abstract portrayal of civil war. Inspired by the Bosnian conflict, the experimental work depicts scenes of rape, cannibalism and extreme brutality. The Daily Mail described the play as a “disgusting feast of filth,” and Kane was immediately labeled a playwright who immaturely relied on vulgarity and shock. Kane followed up with “Phaedra's Love” and “Cleansed,” which also were extremely graphic in their portrayal of the dark side of human nature. Both met with harsh criticism from the reviewing press. Yet amid the many detractors, Kane drew support from such playwrights as Harold Pinter and Edward Bond, who considered her a complex, literary and misunderstood writer. Today, Kane is widely regarded as a major force in British theater. Critical opinion of Kane didn't change until she penned “Crave,” originally published under a pseudonym to allow the play to escape the controversy elicited by her own name. While less violent than her earlier work - and the most accessible to mainstream audiences - “Crave” continued the playwright's movement away from naturalism, dispensing with such dramatic conventions as plot, character description and stage direction. Voices convey human needs and desires in "Crave," including that of Sonya Bender, whose character represents innocence. The one-act play runs only 45 minutes. Its four characters are identified only by letters. They speak in fragments and random phrases, with no sense of traditional dialogue. The “beautiful rant,” as Germani describes it, is more like a modernist poem than a play. “It's like chamber music, the way she wrote it,” said Germani. “The content can be very poignant, and sometimes very sad and scary, but I'm trying to do it as a classical musical composition for words.” This is where Germani's background as a percussionist and jazz musician comes in handy. “I drive my actors crazy, because I work with beats and rhythms,” he said. “But once actors get into it, they love it, because they're not just actors – they're musicians and dancers all rolled into one. This play lends itself to that,” he said. Germani is known among actors as a meticulous and demanding director. “Simultaneously challenging and nurturing” is how cast member Jennifer Jonassen described his directorial style, while Sonya Bender said working with Germani is “like taking a master acting class.” Jonassen's character in “Crave” represents what Germani called the Freudian id – the primal side of human nature that encompasses basic needs and desires. Sixteen-year-old Bender plays a character that represents innocence. Jo Dempsey (filling in for Linda Libby, who dropped out of the production due to illness) plays a mother figure, and Andrew Kennedy takes on the male part of the psyche. These voices describe yearnings, remember past abuses and question a future marred by psychological damage. While “Crave” draws heavily from Kane's personal experience, it is also a general meditation on love, loss and desire. “The play isn't just about suicide,” said Bender. “It's really about universal feelings like loneliness, companionship, love and hate.” Throughout her life, Kane suffered bouts of depression. Each episode proved increasingly debilitating, until she became suicidal. Her treatments for depression and suicide informed her final play, “4.48 Psychosis,” written throughout the fall and winter of 1998 and 1999. On Feb. 20, 1999, Kane hanged herself, just weeks after her 28th birthday. To allow her personal life to distract us from the theatricality, beauty and emotional power of “Crave” does a disservice to the play and playwright, Germani said. But it is nearly impossible to view the play outside of the context of her life. A writer's suicide often leaves behind many unanswered questions, much as the play's ambiguous ending will undoubtedly provoke discussion. “The big question is, when she killed herself, was it joyous, good, bad? Was it courageous, was it cowardice? Why did she do it? There aren't any answers,” said Germani. “Even at the end of the play, you don't know whether it's an ascension – or whether it's a descension. I'm honoring her by keeping it in a gray area. “Especially nowadays, with arguments about mercy killings, medical technology and assisted suicide, it's very timely.” March 15th, 2006. All press information and downloadble hi-res photos posted here. Lynx Performance Theatre is Proud to Present Written by Sarah Kane, Directed by Al Germani EXPERIMENTAL THEATRE IN SAN DIEGO Lynx Performance and Artistic Director Al Germani return to their roots in Experimental Performance Theatre and continue their dedication to the premiering of award winning progressive works with the San Diego introduction of controversial British playwright Sarah Kane and CRAVE her impressionistic, haunting, poetic and autobiographical work for four voices completed less then a year before her death by suicide. SHOW DATES: May 5th thru June 11th 2006 THERE WILL BE NO PERFORMANCES MEMORIAL WEEKEND ( MAY 26, 27, 28 ) Lynx Performance Theatre Space Tickets: $20 & $15 Kane’s alarming ability to artistically put into words her slow, complex, often terrifying, often beautiful, "descension" ( or one could argue “ascension” ) provides: “A stunning achievement: lyricism woven into a symphony of voices . . . invokes T.S. Elliot and Samuel Beckett” — New York Times “A stunning, haunting, and beautiful poetic quartet for inflamed yet bewildered souls.” — London Times Her journey ends in acquiescence and surrender to the solace of death. So we have in the words of this young, brilliant, tormented woman a stunning vehicle to explore the challenge of our struggle for dignity and redemption while experiencing the full range of human emotions. Presenting Sarah Kanes CRAVE continues Lynx Theatres Mission Statement of authentic investigation and presentation of characters that struggle to exist and have worth on the edges of humanity in order to create exciting, provocative, progressive theatre that incorporates psychological credibility and emotional realism. Additional Information: Sarah Kane Blasted, Phaedra's Love, Cleansed, Crave and 4.48 Psychosis add up to a body of work which pushed recklessly at the naturalistic boundaries of Theatre. Each play was a new step on an artistic journey in which Kane mapped the darkest and most unforgiving internal landscapes: of violation, loneliness, power, mental collapse and, most consistently, the landscape of love. In 1996 while working as a Writer in Residence in London, her new play, Crave, an experiment in open textual form, was presented under a pseudonym to allow her work to escape, briefly, from the shadow of being 'Sarah Kane, the controversial Playwright. Crave is divided into four voices that speak without concrete context and with only the most fragmentary hint of a narrative. The voices describe desires, remember losses, and question their future in the face of their psychological damage. Binding the whole piece, as in Cleansed, is the exploration of love's assault upon the wholeness of the self. She draws upon many forms of love: sexual love, maternal love and abusive love. In Crave one can almost feel the intoxicating release of Kane's writing as the borderlines of character evaporate and her imagery moves from physical to experiential. The effect of the piece when staged is surprisingly musical. With it’s attendance to rhythms, revelation of its meanings not line by line but rather like a string quartet, and in the hypnotic play of different voices and themes, four voices become one. This creates an overwhelming impression that they are, in fact, from within and without one individual life and evokes a powerful sense of a self fragmented. Drawing heavily on personal experience, Kane, by excavating herself rather than attempting to capture an invented character's consciousness opens her writing to the audience, leaving a space in which they can place themselves and process their own experience. Crave ends in a falling towards light. It is, like Cleansed and Blasted, an ambiguous redemption. Falling, while a liberating metaphor for the shedding of the self it is also reflective of our secret longing for the self-destruction of death. as Da Vinci called it “Like the moth, we too are drawn to the Flame”
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