While You’re In: Commune with cats, encounter ‘The Encounter,’ and hang out with Harry

Cats and “Cats”: Cat videos are an Internet staple — and they might be even more essential as we spend a lot more time watching our small screens. Enter the Quarantine Cat Film Festival, which will screen online beginning June 19 and will be made up exclusively of videos submitted directly to the festival by pet owners. The rough part is that the deadline for submissions is Friday. But if you’re really lucky — or if you already have a video of Willow or Jasper or Chester doing something cute, funny, brave or loving and you have it on video — this is your chance. The Grand Cinema in Tacoma is participating in the festival, so if you tune in to watch it through the virtual screening room, the Grand will get half of the proceeds. As for the other “Cats,” no, The Olympian is not suggesting you watch the much-maligned 2019 film, because if you’re the type who adores bad films, you’ve probably already given it a look — and if you’re not that type, you probably don’t want to. Rather, we recommend a filmed version of the 1981 Andrew Lloyd Webber musical that gave birth to the film. The Broadway show, streaming free for 48 hours beginning at 10 a.m. Friday, is probably nearly as nonsensical as the recent film, but theatergoers were so charmed by it that it ran on the Great White Way for 18 years.

Close “Encounter”: The highly acclaimed one-man show “The Encounter,” about National Geographic photographer Loren McIntyre’s life-altering trip to the Amazon, “takes you on an extraordinary journey,” critic Sam Marlowe wrote in The Times of London, “yet you never leave your theater seat.” In this case, you won’t need to leave your couch. British theater company Complicité is streaming Simon McBurney’s show free from 10 a.m. Friday till 1 p.m. May 22. You’ll need to wear headphones to get the effect of the three-dimensional sound design, aimed at helping you imagine the jungle and experience something of McIntyre’s profound shift in consciousness. “In one extraordinary act of communication, the concept of a ‘separate self,’ so precious to our contemporary sense of identity, is undermined to the point that it becomes, for McIntyre, utterly illusory,” McBurney wrote in a 2016 article in London’s The Guardian. “One self, one so-called individual consciousness, he discovered, can be connected to another in ways he had never imagined.” On its September 2019 list of the 50 best theater shows of the 21st century, The Guardian ranked “The Encounter” no. 13.

Wild about Harry? There’s something new in the world of Harry Potter, the wizard who enchanted the world not with a magic spell but through the books and films that bear his name. One might call it “Harry Potter and the Global Pandemic.” Unfortunately, it is not a new J.K. Rowling creation in which the brave orphan and his best friends, loyal Ron and brilliant Hermione, conquer a powerful force whose chief motivation seems to be destroying all that’s good in the world. Instead, it is a comforting return to the book that started it all. Daniel Radcliffe and other stars of the Potterverse are reading “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” being released one chapter at a time as part of the Harry Potter at Home Project. The site also includes quizzes, wizard-inspired games, and instructions for making a howler and knitting a Weasley-inspired scarf. Potter fans older than 21 might also want to check out a video of a Hogwarts-themed wine and food pairing at http://www.facebook.com/pairingspdx/ or http://www.instagram.com/pairingspdx/.