Alex Tatarsky

SAD BOYS IN HARPY LAND | Alex Tatarsky

“It’s a pleasure to see Tatarsky using their own body to genuinely invite and represent the circumstance of abjection that makes up a creative life, in all its catastrophes.” – Sam Max, Culture Bot

“… manic, strange, and unhinged, articulating artistic block as wildly gestural and crazy and beautifully formless” – The Lonely Cinephile

“Tremendous…superb”- The New Yorker

“A thrilling and frenetic mental breakdown of a show…” – Naveen Kumar, NYTimes

Alex Tatarsky

Alex Tatarsky Called a “hilarious, finely tuned absurdist” (Theatre Jones) and “one of the most exciting and hilarious performance artists around” (ArtSpace), Alex Tatarsky makes performances in the uncomfortable in-between zone of comedy, dance-theater, performance art, and deluded rant–sometimes with songs. Tatarsky experienced fleeting fame as Andy Kaufman’s daughter and used to perform as a mound of dirt. Playing with perceptions of language and narrative structure, their live performances are highly responsive to venue and audience, often breaking the fourth wall and embracing humor to reveal vulnerability and humanity. Venues include La Mama, MoMA PS1, Playwrights Horizons, The Kitchen, The Whitney and many bars and basements. As curatorial fellow at the Poetry Project, they organized a series on the poetics of rot. Research interests include bootlegs, hellscapes, and compost.

shows

SAD BOYS IN HARPY LAND

Created and Performed by Alex Tatarsky
Sound by Shane Riley
Directed by Iris McCloughan
Dramaturgy by Basie Allen and Lisa Fagan
Scenic,Props,Costume Design by Andreea Mincic
Lighting Design by Masha Tsimring
Developed with Eva Steinmetz

Alexandra Tatarsky collages narratives of artmaking and despair into a semi-autobiographical tour-de-farce, as told by a young Jewish woman who thinks she is a small German boy who thinks he is a tree. Equal parts sad clown, demented cabaret, and extended crisis of meaning, this unhinged solo takes place in the hellscape of the mind. The show chews itself up and spits itself out, embracing the fragment, the spiral, the unfinished, and the broken bits – moving through inaction born of anxiety, shame, guilt, and overwhelm towards strange & ecstatic modes of re-making the world together. The show is also a deranged adaptation 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. This narrative collides with other stories of tormented artists during horrific times to examine how depression often masquerades as individual malady when it might be better thought of as a shared sadness.

Stage: Black Box or Proscenium
Capacity: Open
Traveling Personnel: 3
Running time: 75 minutes

materials

Artist website

calendar

SAD BOYS IN HARPY LAND

September 26 2025 | PS21 Chatham, NY
October 2 2025 | Mayo Street Arts Portland, ME

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