Alex Tatarsky, who once made headlines by pulling a hoax at the Andy Kaufman Awards in 2013, where they announced they were Andy’s daughter and that he was still alive, says their absurdist performances live in “the uncomfortable in-between zone of comedy, dance-theater, performance art, and deluded rant—sometimes with songs.” Their solo show Sad Boys in Harpy Land premiered off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons in 2023 and comes to On the Boards November 12–14. In their “magnum o-pussy,” Tatarsky reanimates tortured characters from sources ranging from Seinfeld to Goethe and collages them into a bildungsroman about “a young Jewish woman who thinks she is a small German boy who thinks he is a tree.” Experimental electronic musician Shane Riley, director Iris McCloughan, set designer Andreea Mincic, and lighting designer Masha Tsimring also contribute to the “tour de farce.” It’s not for the faint of heart—be prepared for chewed-up sardines and mandatory audience participation—but you may walk away feeling a little less alone in our current dystopian nightmare.
Obviously I had to know more, so, ahead of their visit to Seattle, I spoke to Tatarsky over the phone about embracing hellscapes, making people groan with puns, and why they’re obsessed with compost.
Do you have any childhood memories that foreshadowed your career as a clown?
I’m walking around my neighborhood where I grew up in East Village in New York City right now, and the memory that is coming to mind is of this beautiful street performer who would perform with lots of tutus around his neck and this really amazing costume that looked like rags, but, if you looked more closely, was an elaborately constructed patchwork costume. A very harlequin costume, in the classic sense. I was just obsessed with this guy, and his performance was really him roaming the streets, looking strange and beautiful. So that immediately pops into my head, being drawn towards these figures in the neighborhood who turn life into something strange and beautiful by acting in nonnormative ways.
Something about trash being made beautiful and intriguing was really exciting. I think that’s a lot of the magic of theater, this transformation of the materials at hand. I love tour theater, theater that gets creative within the constraints of the situation, and often with very few resources. What do we have, and what can we do with what we have? The most creative and delightful things can emerge from that.
Dirt and decay come up repeatedly in your work, and I know you’re enthusiastic about composting. What do you think it is that draws you to these topics?
Composting is a great mood-booster. Apparently, it contains a microbe that functions better than prescribed antidepressants. It’s called mycobacterium vaccae, and it’s a really mood-boosting microbe. It suggests that humans are drawn towards decomposing matter, because that’s where there’s fertile soil that can sustain us, and I really find that to be true. Working with my hands and seeing transformation occur is really the only thing that gives me hope right now. So I think I’m addicted to the rot. It’s also an addictive framework: things are falling apart and society’s falling apart, and also maybe, emotionally, psychologically, mentally, you can feel like you’re falling apart sometimes, and that’s okay. It’s laying the ground for something else.
You’ve mentioned that you’re interested in hellscapes, can you tell me more about that?
My mental landscape is not the most pleasant place to be a lot of the time, and a lot of Sad Boys in Harpy Land is an attempt to be curious about the hellscape of the mind, amidst the hellscape of the world. Instead of beating yourself up for how you’re feeling, trying to make yourself be more productive when you don’t feel capable of it, how can you get curious about the hellscape and what it’s trying to communicate to you? So this whole piece is like an experiment in curiosity, navigating our current hellscape as a way to make it through, but also thinking about a rich tradition of hellscapes. There’s so much art and literature that deals with hell. It’s often a very exciting place, actually—there’s all kinds of exciting creatures. So maybe [a] hellscape is also a potentially generative space to be in.
Which works of art dealing with hellscapes are you most influenced by?
I first discovered the phrase “Harpy Land” through the work of Helen Adam, this Scottish American female balladeer who would make these really absurd, darkly humorous feminist revisitings of classic text that she would read and perform. Also, she would make collages, cutting up photos from fashion magazines and collaging them into drawings and watercolors by William Blake, or these older, more iconic depictions of the inferno, for instance, and that approach really inspired me. First of all, the fact that we’re, over the centuries, revisiting a lot of these same mythic stories—that’s very interesting to me, as something that theater does, revisiting and reworking ancient tales. But also, she was being so cheeky and literally cutting up these very canonical images and texts in order to put a feminist spin on them, so that was also in my mind as I was making the piece. How can we cut up and rearrange source material to comment upon it?
Are there any common themes across all these hellscapes?
One thing that comes to mind is that there are realms of hell, of course, that are fiery, like the hell that we might see in popular depictions. But in Dante’s Inferno, in the deepest point of hell, the devil is frozen in a lake of ice, and that really speaks to me right now, that a kind of contemporary hell is a sense of total isolation and being cut off from feeling. So that’s something I’m thinking about a lot. One of the jobs of theater is to give us a space where we can feel again and crack open that ice, that I think is protecting us, in some ways, from a lot of the suffering around us, but is its own kind of hell, to be so cut off from our feelings.
What role does wordplay play in your work?
I’ve always been very interested in why people groan at puns, and the fact that puns make people groan has always made me really love puns. If a pun can make a whole room groan, that’s pretty powerful. It’s having a physical, embodied effect on a group of people. So I’ve always followed the groan as a guidepost. How can we mess with reality by messing with language and reshape perception by playing with words that shape our experience? The pun is a powerful spell for me, for sure.
What are some examples of how you might interact with the audience and venue?
I think all architectures are pretty haunted by the things that have unfolded there and the principles that informed the design, because space disciplines us to behave in a certain way. A lot of theater spaces are designed to kind of control a large group of people, right? To sit them down in a particular space and use sound and light and architecture to make them still and quiet. And so I’m very interested in messing with those expectations and playing with those behaviors. Pushing against the prescribed behaviors in particular spaces is really exciting to me. But in order to push against them, you first have to analyze what they are. So, my practice is site-responsive, because whenever I come into a new space, I’m looking around, going, “What are the expectations people come into this room with, and how can I acknowledge and also disrupt those expectations?”
How would you describe the atmosphere in the room at your performances?
It really shifts a lot! I’m really excited by surprises and making an audience think one thing is happening, and then revealing that it was a trick the whole time. I also welcome the feeling of chaos or topsy-turviness, rupture. I think a lot about spirals: how a typical narrative arc follows a more linear shape, and how I can create both the feeling and the composition of a spiral, which is also on my mind as I think about hell. How can we spiral together, down, down, down?
Your work hinges so much on discomfort, vulnerability, and humiliation. Is it ever too much, or do you get used to it?
It can be too much, yeah, definitely. I mean, being a clown is very scary. Your material is revealing itself in the space between performer and audience, so it’s very unpredictable, and of course, you want to dance between control and spontaneity. And sometimes things can really go off the rails if you lose control of a room. That can definitely happen, especially in the space of comedy. I think comedy is really high-stakes, because the contract with the audience is pretty straightforward. The audience came to a comedy show because they want the comedian to make them laugh, so if the comedian doesn’t make them laugh, they can get very angry, and then you have to respond to that anger in the room and try to surf it or flow with it or kind of alchemize it into something entertaining, but it can be really tricky.
There was a period of my life I was getting invited to perform at a lot of galas, which can be a lucrative gig, but most performers would agree it’s a very difficult situation, because you have a large room of intoxicated, somewhat bored, very wealthy people who do not necessarily want to see a weird performance at that particular moment, followed by someone asking them for more money. So it’s kind of the worst environment, and I do find it to be a great challenge. It reminds me of the jester in the king’s court or something. You’re like, okay, my job is to entertain you, keep your attention, make you love me so I get hired again, but also try to communicate a critique about this situation at the same time. It’s very hard to pull off, and I’ve had many abject failures where I can’t get out of bed for a week because I feel so mortified about how it all went down.
Why do you think people fear clowns so much?
I have a lot of theories about this—in fact, I made a whole other show about it called Dirt Trip. It’s about Americans’ fear of compost and fear of clowns, this American inability to be present to death and decay. Things that defy category or are in between categories make people very uncomfortable. Things that are in the process of decaying, for instance, are really horrifying. Or a clown often has unclear gender, unclear race, is even a bit at the edge of humanness. Is it a human? Is it a creature? And all of that, I think, is very unsettling for people. But also historically, when I looked at when this fear of clowns began, it’s quite late. It really took off in the ’70s, and if you look at the ’50s and ’60s, clowns were often used as mascots for the sale of things like ice cream and hamburgers—think of Ronald McDonald. So it couldn’t have been a terrifying thing if brands were using the clown to sell to their kids.
My theory is that there was this moment in the ’50s where people were being sold the idea that consuming would make you happy, and by the ’70s, it was clear that that was a lie. The economy was collapsing, there was widespread, growing inequality, and the clown became revealed as a kind of liar who had been selling this really empty, harmful idea. And that’s when you start seeing serial killers dressing up as clowns, tons of horror movies and horror literature coming out with the scary clown, and the scary clown always has a big, huge fake smile. So it’s like the fakeness, the artifice, the myth of the American dream. The myth of happiness, that you’re supposed to always have this pasted-on smile, is what is itself so horrifying.
What are you currently obsessed with?
I’m doing a deep dive into the history of magic right now, which has some overlap with the history of circus and clowning in America. But I guess this is a more recent research obsession. [I’m going from] seeing the clown as a kind of metaphor to describe our politicians—as bumbling dysfunctional fools—I’m starting now to think the magician is a better metaphor. The folks in power are excellent at distraction tactics, at manipulating us, at making us look in one direction so that they can get away with a bunch of tricks that we don’t notice happening. So I’m trying to analyze the history of magic shows in this country in relation to all kinds of strategies of deception by the people in power.
For instance, in my bag right now, I have a book called Collateral Magic: How the CIA Conjured Democracy from the Cold War to the Forever Wars that is a very straightforward analysis of how magicians worked with the CIA to teach them these various strategies of deception. It’s pretty fascinating, because these are techniques that people learn, and they’re present in advertising, they’re present in how we think about money and how value works. They’re techniques to make reality seem other than it is, so I feel like it’s important to analyze this and combat these techniques with our own strategies of reality shaping.
A lot of it is manipulation of attention, which there is a lot of conversation about right now. I think one of the most important things we can do is refuse to be hypnotized by our screens, which are, as we know, designed by the same people who design casinos. They’re designed to keep us addicted and looking at a small box instead of engaging with each other in the world because movements happen when we’re talking to our neighbors and hanging out, observing what’s going on right in front of us on the block. So I think the most important thing we can do is reclaim our attention and talk to each other.
Do you have any rituals for slipping into the headspace of performing?
A lot of performers will talk about this attempt to “get into your body,” which I think is an interesting phrase because what does that mean for the rest of the time, that we’re not in our bodies? But it does seem to be true, that a lot of our days are spent a little bit out of touch with our physical selves. So really, I’m just trying to wiggle around, loosen up, get back into my body. One of my favorite choreographers, Mariana Valencia, says that her warm-up is trying to remind herself she has a body, which I also find really interesting, and it often involves lying on the floor. I’m just trying to loosen up, get back in touch with my impulses that are not really allowed in normal, everyday life. You’re not really allowed to use the full range of your voice and body, so I’m giving myself permission to act in unsanctioned ways.
What do you want audiences to take away from Sad Boys in Harpy Land?
I’m really inspired by the earthworm. The earthworm chews up the detritus of the world and shits it out, and that worm poop is the most fertile, necessary substance we have. I hope people take away a renewed vigor in turning shit into gold, on a personal and global scale!
See Alex Tatarsky: Sad Boys in Harpy Land at On the Boards, Nov 12–14, 7:30 pm.
