From March 21-23, 2025, Alex Tatarsky performed their solo show Sad Boys in Harpy Land at Fringe Arts. For those of us in the theatre, we now know that Tatarsky’s spiral of existential dread smells and tastes exactly like partially masticated tinned fish.
A dream – or perhaps a nightmare – composed of sad clowning, demented cabaret, and an extended crisis of meaning, Sad Boys in Harpy Land, had its audience belly laughing and slack-jawed as we journeyed through the hellscape of Tatarsky’s mind.
I was struck by the existential breakdown of communication that Tatarsky and her creative team embedded within the ridiculous plots, cabaret singing, and strangeness bubbling just under the surface of the human psyche. There is something senseless, yet deeply political in the clownery and shenanigans of Tatarsky’s hellscape – a hell scenographically represented by hand-painted miniature cardboard flames that Tatarsky hilariously shuffles across the floor to emphasize that we are, in fact, experiencing hell right now.
True to clown form, Tatarsky masterfully executes an intense physicality throughout the performance, endlessly transitioning from one extreme mood to the next, one movement to the next, and one emotion to the next. And it feels like this will never end – something Tatarsky is very much aware of as she reminds us that “this will feel long, perhaps too long.”
Increasingly caffeinated from forgotten-and-found cups of coffee, Tatarsky merges the persona of a little boy from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795) with another little boy in Günter Grass’s novel The Tin Drum (1959). By weaving together her own biographical voice with these two literary characters from obscure German texts, Tatarsky shatters the audience’s preconceived expectations of theatrical adaptation, a choice that is, of course, by absurdist design.
The layering of one obscure little literary boy atop another, combined with Tatarsky’s own demented yet deeply personal storytelling, blurs the boundaries of Alex as an individual. This “Alex,” but “not-Alex,” but “not-not-Alex” masterfully perplexes identity in these strange times. At one point, in Tatarsky’s backward adaptation of Grass’s novel, we learn that the little boy Oskar experiences an adaptation of The Flying Dutchman, which is itself an adaptation of the myth of the Wandering Jew – a character Tatarsky embodies multiple times. She compassionately reclaims this character of the Wandering Jew alongside her own positionality as a “Jewish woman…no, Jewish white woman..no…white Jewish woman..no….”
Billed as an “embrace of the spiral, the unfinished, and the broken bits, the piece attempts to move through the inaction born of anxiety, shame, and overwhelm toward strange and ecstatic modes of re-making the world together.” Alex Tatarsky’s Sad Boys in Harpy Land delivered on all accounts, that is if delivering anything is even possible in absurdist performance. For there is no theatrical catharsis, no solution, and no recognizable direction in which we all seem to be heading. Despite this, the absurdity in Sad Boys in Harpy Land reminds us that absurdity is all around and that sometimes coming together to laugh and cry is enough in the present moment.
Sad Boys in Harpy Land at Fringe Arts
Created and performed by Alex Tatarsky
Live music by Shane Riley
Scenic, Props, Costume Design by Andreea Mincic
Lighting Design by Masha Tsimring
Directed by Iris McCloughan
Developed with Eva Steinmetz
Dramaturgy by Basie Allen, Lisa Fagan
Read more reviews by Evan Mitchell Schares on Artblog.
Read Sharon Garbe’s review of Alex Tatarsky’s 2023 Gnome Core performance at Glen Foerd.
