-∞ (The Bad Infinity)

A short film, written and directed by Graham Sack

Based on the texts of Mac Wellman

Produced by Staging Film & The Tank

-∞ Cast Steve Mellor, Jan Leslie Harding, Tony Torn, Ben Beckley, Jocelyn Kuritsky, Greig Sargeant, Eliza Bent, Lynn Cohen, Lynne Marie Rosenberg, Jake Hart, Grace McLean

-∞ Crew Alex Basco Koch (DoP), Daniel Froot (Line Producer, Assistant Director), Ciji Singletary (Assistant Camera), Jacqueline Reed (AV Crew), Nic Benacerraf (Production Designer), Tekla Monson (Production Assistant), Jessie Stead (Editor), Jules David Bartkowski (Editor), Mark Reynolds (VFX), Alex DeNevers (Lighting Designer), Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew (Lighting Designer), Anthony Dean (Lighting Designer), Luke Allen (Sound Designer), Amelia Palmer (Sound Recordist), Katja Andreiev (Cosume Designer), Isabella Limeri (Makeup Artist), Ani Taj Niemann (Choreographer), Jennifer Allen (Assistant Producer), Nina Roy (Wardrobe Assistant), Antonio Irizarry (Production Assistant), Ghost Corporeal (Post Production), Stivo Arnoczy, Gabriel Bielawski, Natasha Sharpe (Titles)

-∞ Producers Jocelyn Kuritsky & Alex Basco Koch/Staging Film, Meghan Finn/The Tank, Nic Benacerraf, José Zayas, Zac Kline, Graham Sack

-∞ (The Bad Infinity) is an homage to the work of avant-garde playwright Mac Wellman, whom The New York Times theater reviewer Mel Gussow once described as "James Joyce reborn as a rap artist."

Mac Wellman has been a fixture of 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 not only experimental, but audacious. After three decades as the head of Brooklyn College's playwriting program — where he left his imprint on some of America’s most influential contemporary dramatists, including MacArthur Fellow & Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Baker and Windham-Campbell Literary Award winner Young Jean Lee — Wellman retired in 2019, occasioning a retrospective on his fascinating legacy. This retrospective included a festival of his works (titled Perfect Catastrophes) at The Flea Theater, which he co-founded in 1996.

Despite Wellman's long and illustrious career, this film represents the first time that his work has been adapted from stage to screen. Wellman famously invented his own wildly unconventional language for the "poetic theater," drawing on the absurdist traditions of Dadaism and Alfred Jarry's pataphysics. The film intentionally collides Wellman's complex language for poetic theater with the language of cinema in order to investigate the nature of experimentalism across live and recorded media. The script, adapted and directed by Graham Sack, 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 — Hypatia, or The Divine Algebra.

The result is an experimental "cinema essay” that playfully explores the multi-dimensionality of drama and the complex formal relationship between theater, film, and television. During a debauched dinner party in the twilight of late capitalism, John Sleight, Deborah, Megan, and Ramon discuss the various ways in which modernity is ineluctably drawn towards manifestations of "the bad infinity," ranging from the cascading Latin American debt crisis of the early 1980s to chaos theory, black holes, and Botticelli's visions of hell. The result is a media melange, a sitcom fused with a stage play, a “digital diorama.” As a higher-dimensional theater piece refracted and collapsed by a two-dimensional screen, -∞ delights in exploring the formal contradictions and thematic aporias of the modern media landscape.

The film's cast is populated with legendary experimental theater actors from the last four decades of the New York downtown scene, ranging from Lynn Cohen (VANYA ON 42ND STREET, THE HUNGER GAMES) and Tony Torn (a staple of the works of Reza Abdoh and Richard Foreman) to Steve Mellor and Jan Leslie Harding, who originated roles in Wellman's most iconic works. The production and release of -∞ are timed to coincide with a retrospection on Wellman's mesmerizing and indelible contributions to American drama.

Special thanks to Pepper Binkley, René Calvo, Anthony Dean, Jamie Effros, Josh Higgason, Sarah Hughes, Claire Karoff, Danielle King, Sandra Wilcox & Joel Kuritsky, Emily Perkins-Margolin, Peter T. McCook, Brian Miskell, Kerry Roland, Stephanie Rolland, James Rutherford, Christopher Silveri/CSManagement, David Skeist, Kayleigh Shuler, Sonya Sobieski, Stephen Stout, Donya K. Washington, Izzie Zuniga, Theatre Row, The Tank, The Harlem Flophouse, The Flea Theater, & The PIT, Lenore Skomal, Roberta Cooper, Craig Napoliello, Rick Sayers, & the entire “The Exes” team. 

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Featured in photo (clockwise, l-r): Graham Sack, Greig Sargeant, Jan Leslie Harding, Alex Basco Koch, Jocelyn Kuritsky.