Layers & Layers: Linas Phillips's Lasagna @ OtB
Lasagna or: How I learned to stop slipping towards the prison of permanent darkness. At first glance you might think, "What on earth does pasta have to do with suicide?" Actually, nothing. However, you walk away thinking Linas Phillips's mixed-media performance art piece, which had its one-week-only premiere at On the Boards last weekend, spent most of its 90 minutes exploring the latter.
The show begins with a long-winded message from Linas to collaborator Jim Fletcher about nothing and everything all at once: Topics run the gamut with these two, from masturbation to aliens, while Phillips intermittently laps up spaghetti.
Rimas, Linas's mentally challenged alter ego, is a brilliant character. Played by Phillips in a pre-recorded video on a flat-screen TV, which is positioned about a dancer's body onstage, it sounds absurd but the idea was brilliant. Rimas's taunts of Linas's preoccupation with masturbation were hilarious. A favorite line compared sex to a bowl of warm clams.
Fletcher is compelling in his day-in-the-life conversations with Linas, transitioning from iPhones in real time to pre-recorded scenes to documentary-style footage of him traversing NYC. Later, a conversation Philips has with an ex-girlfriend, who reveals she no longer thinks of him, was so real it felt like we were the ones having it. We're talking awkward, uncomfortable and hopeless during that phone call.
The last 20 minutes take a 180-degree turn in a heady podcast where Fletcher and Phillips discuss a book titled The Key.This part would have better received if they had decided to play it either live or just in the recording, or made the transitions between the two more seamless, but mostly we just found the back-and-forth distracting.
Ultimately, Phillips is just trying to both love and to matter at the same time. With words of wisdom from Jim and comedic relief via Rimas, mixed with a little interpretive dancing, strumming violin, and mass media, Lasagna proved entertaining and endearing.
