Ben
Brantley

January 7, 2016

Let there be light, for starters. That’s the classic way to begin things, right? And so light there is in the first, teasing moments of “Germinal,” a delightful work out of France and Belgium that opened on Wednesday night at the Public Theater as one of the inaugural productions of this year’s Under the Radar Festival of experimental performance. But don’t expect an instant flood of illumination. Light arrives, instead, in fitful bursts out of the great dark void in which the audience initially finds itself in this more than clever production, conceived and directed by Halory Goerger and Antoine Defoort. Brightness stumbles, beckons and retreats, materializing in phantasmal pools and slivers that evaporate almost as soon as we’ve seen them.