ONX: UTR-Under Construction: We Have No Need of Other Worlds by Graham Sack

UTR's Under Construction: We Have No Need of Other Worlds
(We Need Mirrors) by Graham Sack

SCHEDULE:

Friday, January 9 @ 6 PM
Saturday, January 10 @ 5:30 PM
Saturday, January 10 @ 9:30 PM
Sunday, January 11 @ 2 PM
Sunday, January 11 @ 7 PM
Monday, January 12 @ 7 PM

VENUE:

Onassis ONX, 390 Broadway, Floor 4, New York, NY, 10013.

RUN TIME:

60 minutes

ABOUT THE WORK

A son keeps vigil at his father’s bedside, reading aloud from the old man’s journals—cosmic reflections inspired by voyages across oceans and through jungles. The words feel eerily prescient, as though they were written with foreknowledge of this very moment. Perhaps the lesion in his father’s brain isn’t a disease at all, but a wormhole: a tunnel through space and time connecting different selves, different worlds.

We Have No Need of Other Worlds (We Need Mirrors) transforms that vigil into a live theater and immersive media experience exploring the relationship between family, memory, and technology. Part elegy, part biometric séance, the work uses interactive technology, video, and sound to link performers and audience members to a digital phantasm—a distortion in the fabric of the universe—asking whether memory itself might be a signal traveling through time, seeking someone to receive it.

Note: This performance includes strobing lights.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Graham Sack is an award-winning writer, director, actor, and academic whose work explores the intersection of storytelling and new technology. He is the founder of Chronotope Films and a recipient of the Sundance Institute Sloan Foundation Episodic Fellowship for The Harvard Computers, a television series based on the true story of America’s first female astronomers.

In virtual and immersive media, Graham was commissioned by Penguin Random House to adapt and direct George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo (winner of the Man Booker Prize) into a virtual-reality film distributed by The New York Times’ VR division. The project—the first-ever adaptation of a novel into VR—was a finalist for the Emmy Award for Innovation in Interactive Programming and was named one of Time Magazine’s “Top 5 Must-See Virtual-Reality Experiences of the Year.”

His other immersive works have been supported by Google, Samsung, and Felix & Paul Studios, and presented at Tribeca Film Festival, SXSW, New York Theater Workshop, Sotheby’s, Vancouver International Festival, and Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona. Most recently, he was commissioned by four-time Academy Award nominee Alexander Rodnyansky (Loveless, Leviathan, East/West, Stalingrad) to adapt Debriefing the President: The Interrogation of Saddam Hussein into a limited television series starring Joel Kinnaman.

Graham began his career as a child actor on Broadway, starring in Neil Simon’s Lost in Yonkers, and appeared in films such as Dunston Checks In and television series including Law & Order and New York Undercover. He is a member of the Writers Guild of America, Writers Guild of Canada, Screen Actors Guild, Actors’ Equity Association, Onassis ONX, and an alumnus of NEW INC, the New Museum’s art, design, and technology incubator.

ABOUT UNDER THE RADAR:

Under the Radar is the United States' premier festival of experimental theater and performance art. As a long-time New York City-based platform for cutting-edge work hailing from around the globe. Produced by ArKtype with Festival Director Mark Russell, UTR has been reimagined in its 20th annual season as a city-wide celebration that incisively speaks to our moment. Rather than being tied to a single host institution, Under the Radar's current iteration is curated collaboratively with an array of renowned arts organizations and curators, each harnessing the connective nature of the festival format to introduce some of the world's most innovative multidisciplinary voices to wider audiences. The 2025 edition of UTR will include over 33 distinct programs at 24 theater spaces, presenting more than 250 performances in only 16 days from January 4 to 19. The depth, breadth and excellence of this year's festival serves as proof that collaboration can power the American theater through this era of existential crisis into a reinvigorated future of conjoined artists ready to embrace diversity, challenge and reinvention.

ABOUT ONASSIS ONX:

Onassis ONX is the Onassis Foundation’s global platform dedicated to elevating innovative creators in the development, presentation, and distribution of new media artworks and immersive experiences. It provides artists and teams capacity-building programs, incubation and applied research opportunities, acceleration services, seed funding, exhibition opportunities, fellowships, and partnership-driven initiatives through its hubs in Athens and New York. A holistic engagement throughout the creative process which enables artists to build worlds at the frontiers of AI, immersive, spatial computing, gaming, and other emergent time-based media. Onassis ONX concurrently maintains a network of partnerships to bolster a growing ecosystem of cultural institutions ready to respond to new forms of creative expression that can engage with audiences around the world.