Alexandra Tatarsky's SAD BOYS IN HARPY LAND to Have Off-Broadway Premiere at Playwrights Horizons

Playwrights Horizons will present Alexandra Tatarsky's Sad Boys in Harpy Land, with sounds by Shane Riley and direction by Iris McCloughan, November 2–26 (opening November 13). Tatarsky's latest work of “profoundly funny… funhouse-mirror horror” (The Forward), Sad Boys tells the tale of a young Jewish woman who thinks she is a small German boy who thinks he is a tree. Equal parts sad clown act, absurd comedy, rabid bildungsroman, and extended crisis of meaning, Sad Boys invites the audience into a hellish theater of the mind. Sad Boys is the first in a repertory series of innovative solo works performed by their creators this season at Playwrights Horizons, also featuring the New York premieres of Milo Cramer's School Pictures, directed by Morgan Green (November 8 – December 3, opening November 20), and Ikechukwu Ufomadu's Amusements, directed by Nemuna Ceesay (November 8 – December 3, opening November 20). This trio of plays is a new variation on the organization's programming templates, and its performances are offered at a lower price point.

 

Tatarsky, whose performance has been described by The New York Times as “a slip-of-the- tongue descent into the American id,” in Sad Boys collages narratives of artmaking and despair into a semi-autobiographical tour-de-farce. Tatarsky's own persona slips into that of young Wilhelm Meister of Goethe's bildungsroman Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship—embodied by Tatarsky as a petulant child with grandiose and perpetually un-actualized artistic ambitions. The performer plunges further into self-infantilization: shrinking into The Tin Drum's Oskar, a shrieking drummer boy who decides to never grow beyond three years old, and who incidentally teaches himself to read via Goethe. Tatarsky considers these tales of canonical German sad boys likewise through an intertextual prism of influence and reappraisal, referencing voices including Wagner and Amiri Baraka (in his nightmarish reworking of The Flying Dutchman), Dante and Helen Adams (in her surreal feminist collage poem "In Harpy Land"), and Wilson Harris' postcolonial epic Infinite Rehearsal.

 

Sad Boys in Harpy Land continues Tatarsky's self-imposed Sisyphean burden: to spend a lifetime never completing an adaptation of Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship—devoted to young Wilhelm's own unfinished artistic pursuits, all stymied by his self-loathing. Tatarsky's infinite performance series emerged 10 years ago when they were commissioned to create a “female solo performance” —and built a work prodding and deconstructing the category. Tatarsky subverts the idea of a “solo performance” as confessional, authentic, or driven by explorations of personal identity. They twist expectations of a work emanating from one's subject position—here, femininity, whiteness, Americanness, and Jewishness—into a grotesque parade of mask-like caricatures, and a history-collapsing panic attack springing from the timeless question: is art just another way of continuing to do nothing as the world sinks into hell? Sad Boys exaggerates the solo form's essence, highlighting the absurdity of its invitation to “watch someone bang around in a room in an ongoing and doomed attempt to make a feeling into a shape.” Here, inaction and self-reflection curl themselves into monstrousness.

 

Tatarsky comes to Playwrights Horizons in a season in which the organization is engaging playwrights whose methods sit outside conventional theater's definition of playwriting. Tatarsky's performances emerge from devised, physical, musical, and collaborative writing processes. Unlike the standard process in conventional theater—for plays to be written before design elements are later layered on—here, composer and sound designer Shane Riley and set, costume, and props designer Andreea Mincic have shaped the world of the piece with Tatarsky throughout its creation.

 

Tatarsky, whose work has been more widely programmed by dance and performance art venues than theaters, says of performing at Playwrights Horizons, “I got excited when Adam Greenfield emphasized that a playwright can mean someone who's writing on their feet, who's working with language sculpturally in space, who's thinking about where the form can be stretched and expanded. Doing this piece at Playwrights Horizons feels perfect, because Wilhelm Meister himself is a playwright—a failed and struggling and desirous playwright. Performing it here helps foreground how we're looking at a story from several hundred years ago, and still asking what it means to be a playwright: grappling with the state, grappling with privilege, grappling with access, grappling with shame, grappling with questions about theater's purpose.”

 

McCloughan and Tatarsky previously collaborated on Tatarsky's Dirt Trip, performed at MoMA PS1, and the earlier version of Sad Boys in Harpy Land presented at Abrons Arts Center—with McCloughan as those performances' dramaturg. Now, they step into the role of director for Sad Boys at Playwrights Horizons. They say, “One thing I'm really interested in structurally and shape-wise is: Alex is a really incredible improviser, and to me that's something at the core of their magnetism as an artist. So we're exploring how to make a show that's tightly written, which this is—it has a lot of ideas that need to be precisely expressed—but also, to find ways to leave room for Alex to make discoveries in the moment of performance and in the relationship with each audience.”

 

The 2023-24 season's three writer-performed solo works all share the Peter Jay Sharp Theater. Each of these events features the playwright as the performer, reminding us of the essential components of drama: the storyteller and the audience.

 

Says Adam Greenfield, “The three productions running in repertory share the commonality of ‘solo performance' but are otherwise so spectacularly different: in Alex's Sad Boys, characters explode from the performer in ways as laugh-out-loud funny as they are disquieting; Milo Cramer's work, like Tatarsky's, explores questions of complicity and our role in the systems around us, with keen, trenchant observation rendered through the sweet simplicity of ditties we might learn in school; Ikechukwu Ufomadu unexpectedly collapses bone-dryness and whimsy into an evening of theatrical and hilarious anti-theatrics and anti-humor. With these works, we're seeking to expand the range of artists and works that audiences expect to see at Playwrights Horizons. It's our mission to support and advance playwrights, and to do so means considering fully what the word ‘playwright' means.  In these works, we see the vast range of possibility that exists between a single performer onstage, the audience, and all the unpredictable things they can do with the space between them.”

 

About Alexandra Tatarsky

Called “a hilarious, finely tuned absurdist” (Theatre Jones) and “one of the most exciting and hilarious performance artists around,” (Artspace) Tatarsky makes work in the unfortunate in-between zone of comedy, performance art, dance, theater, and deluded rant – sometimes with songs. Playing with perceptions of language and narrative structure, their live performances are highly responsive to venue and audience, often breaking the fourth wall to reveal vulnerability and humanity.

 

Tatarsky's work has been presented at La MaMa, MoMA PS1, The Kitchen, Judson Church, Abrons Arts Center, NYU Skirball, Gibney, the New Museum, and many bars and basements. Tatarsky experienced fleeting global fame as Andy Kaufman's daughter and used to perform as a mound of dirt. They have had the pleasure of collaborating as a performer, devisor, and dramaturg with artists including Pig Iron, Aya Ogawa, Poncili Creacion, Trajal Harrell, Lilac Co, Zhe Zhe, David Levine, Marianna Ellenberg, Adrienne Truscott, Josephine Decker, Eva Steinmetz, and Gabrielle Revlock. As curatorial fellow at the Poetry Project, they organized a series on the poetics of rot.

 

Tatarsky writes on spambot poetics, bootleg lyrics, and grotesque politics for publications including New Inquiry, Vulture, ArtReview Asia, OIE, Spike, Garlands, Hypocrite Reader, and Weekday. Together with Ming Lin, they form one half of Shanzhai Lyric and the fictional office entity Canal Street Research Association. Current research interests include bootlegs, hellscapes, and compost.

 

About Shane Riley

 

Shane Riley is an electronic musician based in Philadelphia. He has collaborated with Tatarsky on works at The Kitchen, Abrons Arts Center, Triple Canopy, Gibney Dance, and MoMA PS1. He was one half of cult band SSS, known for “their outrageously energetic live performances and for their totally scrambled and chaotic music.” Under his own name, Riley has released the albums AI generated crapola and dont. His work has been described as “at times hyperderivative of speedy gonzalez but at least John Cage wasn't buried alone.“

 

About Iris McCloughan

Iris McCloughan (they/them) is a performance maker, writer, and artist in New York City.

Iris's performance work has been presented in NYC (The Poetry Project, Castelli Gallery, Ars Nova, Movement Research at Judson Church, PAGEANT, JACK), Philadelphia (Institute of Contemporary Art, The Barnes Foundation, FringeArts, Philadelphia Contemporary), Chicago (Links Hall), Minneapolis (Bryant-Lake Bowl), and Detroit (Public Pool). Most recently, they directed Joan Jonas and Eiko Otake's collaborative performance Drawing in Circles      WHY? at Castelli Gallery. They have collaborated as a performer, dramaturg, and writer with many other artists, including Eiko Otake, Joan Jonas, Beth Gill, Mike Lala, Jaime Maseda, Toby Altman, Doug LeCours, Jessie Young, Julie Mayo, Pig Iron Theater Company, and Team Sunshine Performance Corporation.

Iris is a past winner of the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from American Poetry Review and was named a finalist in nonfiction for Best of the Net 2020. They are the author of three poetry chapbooks, including triptych (greying ghost, 2022) and Bones to Peaches (Seven Kitchens Press, 2021). Their writing has appeared in American Poetry Review, Prelude, Tupelo Quarterly, juked, jubilat, Gertrude, Denver Quarterly, and Queen Mob's Teahouse, among many others.

Ticketing Information

 

Tickets are on sale now and can be purchased here.

 

 

About Playwrights Horizons

 

Playwrights Horizons is a writer's theater dedicated to the development of contemporary American Playwrights, and to the production of innovative new work. In a city rich with cultural offerings, Playwrights Horizons' 52-year-old mission is unique among theaters of its size; the organization has distinguished itself by a steadfast commitment to centering and advancing the voice of the playwright. It's a mission that is always timely, and one that's necessary in the ongoing evolution of theater in this country.

 

Playwrights Horizons believes that playwrights are the great storytellers of our time, offering essential contributions to civic discourse and illuminating life's greatest paradoxes. And they believe in the singularity of a writer's voice, valuing the broad, eclectic spectrum and diversity of American writers. At Playwrights Horizons, writers are supported in every stage of their growth through commissions (engaging several of today's most imaginative playwrights each year), New Works Lab, Soundstage audio program, and Almanac, the organization's literary magazine.

 

Playwrights Horizons presents a season of productions annually on their two stages, each of which is a world, American, or New York premiere. Much like Playwrights Horizons' work, their audience is risk-taking and adventurous; and the organization is committed to strengthening their engagement and feeding their curiosity through all of its programming, onsite and online.

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