The Bad Infinity

This film is an homage to the work of avant-garde playwright, Mac Wellman. Wellman has been a fixture of experimental theater since the 1970s; his brand of philosophically knotty and outrageously anarchic anti-theater helped define what it meant to be experimental. Despite Wellman's long and illustrious career, this film represents the first time his work has been adapted from stage to screen. Graham Sack's cinematic adaptation fuses three of Wellman's works: the acclaimed play, "The Bad Infinity" (1983); "Speculations," a treatise on his theory of multi-dimensional drama; and "Hypatia, or The Divine Algebra," an Opera Libretto. The result is an experimental "cinema essay" that intentionally collides Wellman's language for poetic theater with film and television — uncannily resonant in our post-Covid media landscape. During a debauched dinner party in the twilight of late capitalist civilization, John Sleight, Deborah, Megan, and Ramon discuss the ways in which modernity is drawn to manifestations of "the bad infinity," ranging from the Freudian death drive to the cascading Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s to chaos theory, black holes, and Botticelli's visions of hell. The film's cast is saturated with luminary actors from the last four decades of the NY downtown experimental theater, including Tony Torn, Greig Sargeant, Steve Mellor, Jan Leslie Harding, Jocelyn Kuritsky, and Lynn Cohen. Lynn Cohen's final film. First broadcast on CUNY TV in 2023. Gold Telly Award winner, General: Experimental.