When Genius Stumbles

An autobiographical piece of performance art with a title like
Lasagna or: How I Learned to Stop Slipping Towards the Prison of
Permanent Darkness should give a person pause. It sounds like a joke, a
third-rate burlesque of something that crawled out of a Manhattan loft
during the ’80s—some solipsistic hand-wringing about sex,
relationships, futility, and the cosmos. Linas Phillips’s Lasagna isn’t
exactly that. But it isn’t exactly not that, either.

A curious, complicated failure, Lasagna was made by two
extraordinarily talented men: Jim Fletcher (the celebrated off-Broadway
actor and Wooster Group regular who last appeared at On the Boards as
Jay Gatsby in Gatz, the six-hour, word-for-word adaptation of The Great
Gatsby) and Linas Phillips (the filmmaker who made Walking to Werner and Great Speeches from a Dying World, and won a Stranger Genius Award
in 2007).

The piece is a conversation between Fletcher, Phillips, and a
developmentally disabled character named Rimas, played by a video
screen of Phillips’s face with an actor (Leah Schrager) standing behind
it, her head hidden, her body performing the character’s awkward hand
gestures. This arrangement, stuffed downstage along with another video
screen, a cellist, a bed, and a computer where Phillips briefly watches
porn, creates a tight little space where the three characters wring
their hands about sex, relationships, futility, and the existence of
aliens.

Rimas is a kind of retarded superego, scolding Phillips for
masturbating too much and for his poor, flakey treatment of
girlfriends. Phillips and Fletcher tell stories about their domestic
lives: girlfriends and children and ex-wives. Watching Phillips and
Fletcher disappear up their own assholes can be comical and starkly
unflattering. (In one apparently spontaneous video clip, Fletcher
discusses the merits of cocaine with fellow actor Scott Shepherd in a
bar. Fletcher is interrupted by a phone call from his daughter, who
needs help with her math homework—in a flash, he becomes
spectacularly unhelpful and inarticulate.) At other times the solipsism
is just tedious.

Phillips’s films succeed because of their introspection and the
friction between the filmmaker and his subject. Phillips pulls back the
curtain and drills unusually candid peepholes into the frustrating
process of making independent movies. (In Walking to Werner, for
example, Phillips is so flummoxed by his remote hero Werner Herzog that
he is reduced to taking a thousand-mile walk from his home in Seattle
to Herzog’s home in Los Angeles. The pilgrimage, of course, is 10 times
more interesting than any Herzog hagiography.) But in Lasagna, Phillips
is the subject and watching him flail in the shallows of himself is
one-dimensional—there’s no curtain to pull back, nowhere to
go.

The failures of genius are more spectacular, more revealing than the
successes of mediocrity. But they are, in the end, still failures.