- ∞ (THE BAD INFINITY)

Written and Directed by Graham Sack
Based on “The Bad Infinity", “Hypatia,” and “Speculations” by Mac Wellman
Produced by Jocelyn Kurnitsky, Alex Bosco Koch, Meghan Finn, & Nic Bennaceraf
Supported by Staging Film & The Tank

Premiered at The Flea Theater’s Perfect Catastrophes Festival.
Official Selection for the 2021 New York Indie Theater Film Festival at the New Ohio Theater and 2021 LA Indies Festival.
Distributed by CUNY TV (First aired: November 24, 2023).

Mac Wellman has been a fixture of New York’s downtown experimental theater since the late 1970s. Along with the likes of Richard Foreman and The Wooster Group, his brand of philosophically knotty and outrageously anarchic anti-theater helped to define for an entire generation what it meant to be experimental.

Despite Wellman's long and illustrious career, -∞ represents the first time that his work has been adapted to screen. This film, adapted and directed by Graham Sack, intentionally collides Wellman's complex language for poetic theater with cinematic form in order to investigate the nature of experimentalism across live and recorded media. Sack’s adaptation is a fusion of three of Wellman's works: the critically acclaimed play The Bad Infinity (1983), a treatise on Wellman's theory of multidimensional drama; Speculations, and an opera libretto; and Hypatia, or The Divine Algebra.

With its preoccupation with illusions, masks, and infinite repetition, The Bad Infinity is especially well-suited amongst Wellman’s plays to a video translation that leans in to its qualities as telescopic and kaleidoscopic image. The play is structured both as a debauched dinner party in the twilight of late capitalist civilization—with faint echoes of Sartre’s No Exit, Albee’s Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death—as well as a philosophical sonata exploring, through dialectical theme and variations, the many ways in which homo modernus is seduced to the edge of “the bad infinity”—a swirling, existential abyss, that is equal parts Burkean sublime and Freudian death drive. Written in 1983 and first performed in 1985, Wellman’s original text draws (sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly) from disparate influences, including the cascading Latin American debt crisis of the early-1980s; the Mandelbrot set, fractal patterns, and chaos theory; Stephen Hawking’s theory of black holes and gravitational singularities; Dante’s Inferno; and Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation. Three decades later, the film adaptation feels prescient and all the more urgent in a post-financial-crisis America that is mesmerized by its reflection whilst staring into the abyss.

This result is an experimental "cinema essay" exploring the multi-dimensionality of drama and the complex formal relationship between theater, film, and television — a media melange, a sitcom fused with a stage play, a digital diorama. As a higher-dimensional theater piece refracted and collapsed onto a two-dimensional screen, -∞ delights in exploring the formal contradictions and thematic aporias of the modern media landscape.

Cast: The film's cast is populated with a variety of legendary experimental theater actors, including the late Lynn Cohen (Vanya on 42nd Street, The Hunger Games), Tony Torn (a staple of the works of Reza Abdoh and Richard Foreman); Greig Sargeant (Elevator Repair Service’s Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge) and Steve Mellor and Jan Leslie Harding, who originated roles in Wellman's most iconic theater works.

Press: Broadway World: “2021 NYC INDIE THEATRE FILM FESTIVAL Announces Full Lineup”, The New Yorker: “Perfect Catastrophes”