Hell Is Where the Honest People Are
Alexandra Tatarsky grew up on the Lower East Side. Like all city kids, they were exposed to a lot at a young age. They were immersed in a thriving cultural scene – and, also, keenly aware of the vastly differing experiences of individuals around them. They came to understand that the city is a microcosm of society, and that individual human suffering is a symptom of collective ills.
The brokenness of humanity is an invitation for repair, but accepting that invitation can be daunting. It requires looking at all the damage, and addressing it with honesty. Clear and brutal honesty. The kind that all artists seek, no matter how agonizing. Or, as Alex put it, “Hell is where the honest people are.” Which is what makes it such a horrifying, and clarifying, setting for Sad Boys in Harpy Land.
Alex started the piece ten years ago, when they picked up Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe’s 1795 novel, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, in which the titular character goes mad trying to write a play. By Alex’s summary, Wilhelm is plagued by questions about the role of the artist in society, locked in his bedroom saying, “my mind is a theater of hell.” For Alex – both as an artist and as a Jewish person (in Judaism, hell is neither physical nor external) – the idea of hell as a form of psychological spiraling was both relatable and intriguing.
At that time, performing was a creative passion but a professional side hustle; they were two years out of an undergraduate degree in Russian Literature, and wanted to become a Slavicist or a translator. “I tried, but I could never get any job of any kind,” they said. “Performing was the only work I could get, ever, with consistency.”
Over the years, they became a student of many theatrical traditions, including commedia dell’arte, Jacques Lecoq’s school of clown and mask, and the devising theater company Pig Iron. Alex’s unique style of performance is fiercely embodied and equally verbal, and is incarnated by many characters.
The first character we meet is the Wandering Jew. Alex discovered him during a rehearsal with the choreographer Lisa Fagan, when the Wandering Jew came out fully formed, breathing heavily, exhausted, and coyly seeking the audience’s attention. “I think he must have already lived in me somewhere,” they explained.
Alex’s incarnation of the Wandering Jew is an embodiment of diaspora which resists romanticization, and rehabilitates a stereotype with complexity and self-contradiction. In the body of a young clown, he communicates what words cannot – intergenerational wounds, as well as the humor and imagination necessary to survive them without repeating them.
All of Alex’s characters work like a mask: a boundary that provides security vital to freedom of expression. Sometimes, obfuscation can create the safest conditions for honesty, especially when contending with the darkest parts of the human experience – injustice that defies reason, and suffering that cannot be put into words.
Which is why Alex has architected a circuitous play-morphology which confounds normative dramatic structures – encircling its ideas and returning to them later, eating its words and spitting them back out in a whirlpool of creative madness. And Sad Boys in Harpy Land is only one part of a lifelong project never intended to be finished: an adaptation of Goethe’s novel, which Alex is writing and performing in installments. It is a dramaturgical expression of hell, whose purgatorial illogic recreates the senseless violence of the world which produced it.
That senselessness is, also, why Alex makes great use of nonsense. Onstage, they burst with unintelligible sounds and absurd, spontaneous movements. Every night is a different performance that outstrips translation or recreation.
Nonsense figures heavily in diasporic writing, especially nonofficial Soviet-Jewish poetry, which Alex studied in college. They were fascinated by the ways that diasporic cultures create their own languages when they are cut off from a mother tongue. “It’s imagining your way back to a language you don’t speak. Which is such a rich, associative way to be thinking,” they said. “What are all the things that we want to express or envision, but can't in the language that we have?”
The theatrical practice Alex has created is more than a style. It is a language. And it is, like their ancestry, diasporic in nature: fragmented and infinite, ancient and invented, sensical and nonsensical, mystifying and clarifying. It comes from deep within them and articulates the inarticulable – translating an incomprehensibly broken world into the creativity and resilience necessary for its repair.
