Notes on Sad Boys in Harpy Land
In the throes of curating the trio of solo works now onstage at Playwrights Horizons, the artistic team cast a wide net. Heretofore, our programming has excluded playwrights who create new work via interdisciplinary, non-literary methods (e.g., ensemble-devised work, improvisation, physical theater), and – curating a theater dedicated to playwrights – we want to think expansively about what that word means. We began to search for playwrights who might never have considered us a home for their work, asking friends and colleagues nation-wide for their help and recommendations. Just about everyone we spoke to suggested we get to know Alexandra Tatarsky – and mein gott! I’m so grateful they did.
Alex happened to have a limited run of Sad Boys in Harpy Land coming up at Abrons Arts Center in the Lower East Side, so Natasha Sinha and I went to check it out. After which, we fell over ourselves trying to bring this gob-smacking, dangerously funny, enigmatic and brave work to our theater.
It’s a play unlike anything I’ve personally ever encountered, firmly rooted in the continuum of great twentieth-century comedian-existentialists (Beckett, Sartre, Ionesco) while reaching urgently into the depths of our present-day anxiety – all performed with the physical comedy chops of a Bill Irwin and the gorgeously strange humor of an Andy Kaufman.
In an interview with 3Views on Theater, Alex describes their play:
Sad Boys in Harpy Land is an ongoing autobiography and deranged adaption of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Theatrical Mission, a novel about a little boy who wants to be a theater artist but isn’t very good at it, as told [in the present moment] by a young Jewish woman. …The narrative collides with other stories of tormented artists during horrific times (The Tin Drum, Dante’s Inferno) to examine how depression often masquerades as an individual malady when it might be better thought of as a shared sadness. …Essentially, it’s a clown show about falling apart.
The underlining of “tormented artists during horrific times” is my own, because that phrase has been shouting loudly at me since I first read this interview. Because – and I don’t think this is controversial to say – we are living, today, (I’m writing this on November 1st), in horrific times. Speaking for myself, it’s hard to read headlines or walk through Manhattan streets or sit at a desk typing into my laptop without a continual undercurrent of helplessness in the face of the massive, seemingly incurable violence that’s neither happening to me nor is something I feel I have any real power to impact.
Or, (again speaking just for myself) that helplessness in the face of over 3 million losses from Covid-19; or, as a gay guy who came of age after the AIDS pandemic decimated a generation of my people; or, as a Jew born in Brooklyn, 1975, safe but among a family and community still living in the overwhelming shadow of the Holocaust. What does one do with all of that guilt and helplessness?, or – worse – the accompanying shame of knowing one’s guilt and helplessness have no meaning?
That anxiety is both the subject and the unfolding action of Sad Boys in Harpy Land, which manages to be hilarious as it depicts a 34-year-old artist in a protracted effort to simply live under the weight of their own inadequacy. To do this, Alex has created a clown who’s trapped in the hell of their own eternal shame, jacked up on caffeine, desperate to distract themself by playing games and trying on other personas. It’s like a skier losing control down a steep and endless slope.
As comedy, it’s electrifying to feel laughter and despair simultaneously in a single breath. It’s also cathartic, this invitation to laugh into the void, because through this skillfully constructed work of theater, Alex gives a name to an unsettled feeling too deep in our souls to have a name. To face an open future in the shadow of our past, and in light of the unfathomable suffering immediately around us at present; to know that your helplessness has no value, nor does your grief about your helplessness; what a gift it is to see despair’s face and find laughter there.
