Linas Phillips' new theater piece "Lasagna or: How I Learned to Stop Slipping Towards the Prison of Permanent Darkness" opened tonight at On the Boards. Linas is primarily known for his feature documentary films "Walking to Werner" and "Great Speeches From a Dying World" in which he plays a significant part role, also documenting dramatic and affecting moments in the lives of others.

 “ ”¦a wet balloon filled with warm clams ”  ”¦that one is going to stick with me for awhile. Fantastic musings on sex, moments with snakes that mean everything and nothing, the removing of hair pins, a white shirt that says  ”˜Rainbow Times’, a moving yet simple dance sequence that illuminated this world, an alien bringing lasagna, the fun combination of humans and television screens, and a lecture from Whitley Strieber’s The Key that brought pasta eating to an art form ”¦the details form layers in this world, yet what do they mean? How do they come together? Is there a story?

Welcome to our review blog for Lost Action. Read our patron reviews, click on the Comments button to read the comments of others and post your own thoughts.

The short of it: go see this show. If you love dance, this show will remind you why. If you don’t like dance, this show will make you say,  “okay, dance sucks, EXCEPT for Kidd Pivot. ” Go see this show. The long(er) of it: Kidd Pivot’s Lost Action was the first show that I’ve seen at On the Boards in which I enter the theatre hoping that it’s going to be a specific something, and it turns out to be exactly that.

I’m afraid I’ve already hyperbolized myself out of relevance. There are shows. There are wars. War. There is extreme discipline. And what it enables. There is wrestling with angels. There is one death and it is shared and bodies in violent motion, everyday motion, play motion, are fathered and mothered by its impossibility, expanding and contracting, passionately - to the music of organs, crossing signals, breath, chatter – like the universe around a vortex of void. Even the score on its own would be worth it, k?

Welcome to our review blog for JERK. Read our patron reviews, click on the Comments button to read the comments of others and post your own thoughts.

I remember being 16 in 1974. Skinny, long hair like Aerosmith. With no job or no cash. I would hitch a ride when I missed the bus which was every day. At least half of the rides I would get were from someone with an agenda. An excuse, "My girlfriend got me all worked up, I really want to suck your dick..." I didn't feel threatened, it was flattering really. A well dressed man in his 40's picking up a wet teenager in a his Porsche. "Let's go to my house...". It wasn't my kind of thing.

In this show, one performer creates vivid scenes of the most horrifying acts of violence using just a few little hand puppets. I had been warned that it was a dark performance and I was excited to see it. I was full of curiosity about where a storyteller would be able to take us using a method like this. But as soon as it started, my curiosity was satisfied and my instincts of self preservation and personal safety took over. First of all - I had not adequately prepared my girlfriend who was sitting next to me, expecting to be delighted by the novelty of an avant garde puppet show.

Gisele Vienne's JERK, written by American poet Dennis Cooper, tells the true story of Houston serial killer and necropedophiliac Dean Corll, through the eyes of one of his teenage accomplices, David Brooks. Brooks, superbly played by Jonathan Capdevielle, re-enacts stories of Corll's conquests (he killed at least 27 boys and had sex with their dismembered corpses) through the use of hand puppets. The puppets are cathartic to Brooks, who attempts to come to a new understanding of his deeds through the reenactments.