Lasagna or: How I Learned to Stop Slipping towards the Prison of Permanent Darkness

A film/performance by Linas Phillips (the filmmaker who made Walking to Werner and Great Speeches from a Dying World and won the Stranger Genius Award two years ago) about his long-distance friendship with off-Broadway actor Jim Fletcher (who played Jay Gatsby in the several-hour, word-for-word adaptation at On the Boards last season). Topics discussed: aliens, loneliness, and pornography.

Phillips has promised documentary vignettes, live conversations with his friend in Crown Heights, Linas playing a mentally handicapped character on video, and "me in my room hooking up with a girl."

Our reviewer/theater intern Kaia Chessen saw it last night and sends an e-telegram:

It was interesting and weird and unique. Phillips used film interwoven with the acting, sometimes as key parts of scenes and other times as supplementary, sometimes as a tool to focus on the actors themselves and other times to draw attention to their surroundings or thoughts.

Sometimes the actors would be on the screen and on stage at once, saying the same lines slightly out of sync with themselves. Live improvisation on cello and guitar as a backdrop for the entire piece. It was poorly attended and shouldn't be.

More information at On the Boards. (Which also, as it happens, won a Genius Award.)

Also opening this weekend and studded with Geniuses—the Sundance film festival, starring three Seattle films this year: Lynn Shelton's Humpday (which uses our lil' old amateur porn contest as its backdrop), David Russo's The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle, and The World's Greatest Dad, whose onscreen talent is all Hollywood and whose production infrastructure was all Seattle.

Read about all three of those movies (and a comments thread that's all mad at Sundance for happening in a town that happens to be in a state full of homophobes) here.