The Bad Infinity: Eight Plays by Mac Wellman (PAJ Books: Art + Performance)

Rating:
Summary: A must-have collection for any fan of modern theatre
Review: Mac Wellman is perhaps our greatest contemporary playwright.

He is an intellectual and a verbal acrobat. He is an anti-naturalist.

This collection brings together some of his earlier work. The plays contained are not as beautifully mature as the Crowtet plays or those even more recent. They are still much more interesting than most plays written in the past 50 years or so. Some of the plays were commissioned as site-specific works, which proved to be fascinating exercises for his abundant imagination.

They're probably not for everybody. Witness the scant productions of these works. They're kind of weird. But if you get them--are able to tap into them--the aesthetic experience is overwhelmingly wonderful. Mr. Wellman's heart is as big as his brain, and that's what make these works great.

Rating:
Summary: Beautifully bizarre
Review: Mac Wellman is the closest thing to a reincarnation of Gertrude Stein that we've got. Much of his writing frustrates any sort of analysis, and yet it is mesmerizing and beautiful. The monologue "Terminal Hip", which won an Obie award and is included in this collection, is a perfect example of Wellman at his best -- here, the detritus of our common languages converges in a mesmerizing tone poem which begins, "Strange the Y all bent up and dented/ Blew the who to tragic eightball. . ." It's certainly not easy to read, or to sit through in a theatre, but it's worth the effort of attention, for few people have ever been as talented as Wellman at discerning the hidden beauties in the pure sound of language.

But it's not all just about language. There's substance here, though sometimes you really do have to search for it. There's a fascinating adaptation of Dracula (vampires are a common theme in Wellman's work), and some marvelous political satire -- Jesse Helms is a favorite target of Wellman's wit. (Alas, Wellman's best satire, and perhaps his best play, "Sincerity Forever", is not included here, though it is available in the anthology Grove New American Theater edited by MIchael Feingold.)

It's probably fair to say that Mac Wellman is America's leading avant-garde playwright, for though his name is certainly not a household word, his career has been long and broad enough for him to have had many important productions throughout the world, and to have influenced a whole generation of young theatre artists. He is to his own generation what Richard Foreman was (and is) to his, and what I expect Suzan-Lori Parks will be to hers: a formidable imagination, a great artist, an inspiration, and a necessary provocateur.