Program Notes for ALEX TATARSKY: Sad Boys In Harpy Land
Alex Tatarsky
Sad Boys in Harpy Land
January 8–10, 2026
McGuire Theater
Sad Boys in Harpy Land
Conceived and Performed by ALEX TATARSKY
Live Compositions & Sound Design
SHANE RILEY
Director
IRIS MCCLOUGHAN
Scenic, Props, Costume Design
ANDREEA MINCIC
Lighting Design
MASHA TSIMRING
Stage & Production Management
PAYTON SMITH
Developed with
EVA STEINMETZ
Sad Boys in Harpy Land was commissioned by Abrons Arts Center through the Jerome Foundation AIRspace Residency Program. Playwrights Horizons, Inc, in New York City produced the NYC Off Broadway Premiere of Sad Boys in Harpy Land in 2023. Sad Boys in Harpy Land received development support through FringeArts, the Jilline Ringle Solo Performance Program at 1812 Productions, Movement Research, Poetry Electric at La Mama, and MAAS.
Tonight’s performance runs approximately 75 minutes with no intermission.
A post-show Q&A with the artists will follow Friday’s performance.
Please join us in the Cityview Bar after Thursday’s performance to meet the artists and continue conversation about the work.
A NOTE FROM ALEX TATARSKY
My investigation into the figure of the sad boy began over 10 years ago when I performed “Episode 1” of the lifelong project that would become Sad Boys in Harpy Land as part of a festival of “female solo performance” at La Mama ETC, a very special old experimental theater in NYC where I grew up. In the madness of making that piece, all these categories began to seem very… unstable. What, after all, is “female”? And what is “solo” — when we live in collaboration with countless bugs and fungal entities, not to mention the cacophony of voices in our heads and all our influences and collaborations? And what… come to think of it… is “performance” if all day long we undertake the exhausting performance of acting like well-adjusted, possibly even likable, people in an utterly irrational, unjust, and dysfunctional world? Oy vey. I was doomed. All the fictions were beginning to unravel.
It was at this time that I first began to identify with young Wilhelm, the protagonist of a very long German novel (that practically nobody reads) called Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. The book follows the journey of Wilhelm, a young man who really wants to make a life in the theater but confronts many obstacles along the way, from financial ruin to crippling self-doubt. I became particularly obsessed with a passage in which Wilhelm just wallows in despair. He is being horribly annoying but also very funny.
The arc of most stories is that a character encounters some hardship and then overcomes it. But instead of pushing all those “bad feelings” away in an attempt to become a more functional member of society, I just wanted to stay there, in the sadness. Could it be that unbearable feelings are a valid response to an unbearable world? How can we stay in touch with the things our depression and anxiety might be trying to communicate to us? While also moving through it?!
Sad Boys in Harpy Land was supposed to premiere in March of 2020. But I think we all know what happened in March of 2020. Or maybe we are trying to forget. Or trying to remember better.
So then the show just sat there and rotted for a while. It decayed and was eaten by worms. The worms chewed it up and shit it out. And in that strange, painful, but also in some ways wondrous time, the category of “solo” fell apart even more. It is the illusion of our separateness that is killing us.
May we all have the strength and softness to both feel the sadness of being alive right now and keep wiggling through it together, laying the ground for something else to emerge.
SPECIAL THANKS
It is such a delight to get to share this work here in Minneapolis. Big thanks to everyone at the Walker who believed in this show and worked hard to make all the pieces fall into place. Thanks to my incredible team who for some reason have stuck with me despite my sad boy antics. This work was made over many, many years of playing and experimenting in rehearsal spaces and with audiences. Thanks to William Electric Black at La Mama, Ali Rosa-Salas at Abrons, and Adam Greenfield and Natasha Sinha at Playwrights Horizons who supported the creation of this show and thanks to everyone who ever stopped by a rehearsal and talked with me about the project including Basie Allen, Lisa Fagan, Magda San Millan, Isa Saldaña, MC Uster, Mariana Valencia, and Sacha Yanow.
Accessibility Notes
Sensory note: This performance includes audience interaction and movement. A variety of seating and standing options will be available. Please see a staff member for assistance or accommodations.
Content note: This performance contains nudity, explicit language, and mention of self harm.
ASL interpretation and live captions are available for the Friday performance.
Audio description services are available for the Saturday performance.
For more information about accessibility, visit our Access page.
Learn More
Sad Boys in Harpy Land borrows lines and images from a wide array of fictions including Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, Wilhelm Meister’s Theatrical Mission, Dante’s Inferno, Helen Adam’s In Harpy Land, Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum, Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman, Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman, and Wilson Harris’s The Infinite Rehearsal as well as Depression: A Public Feeling by Ann Cvetkovich and the Seinfeld episode “The Opera.”
–
A proud third-generation East Villager, Alex Tatarsky is a performer, writer, and researcher who makes work within the in-between zone of comedy, poetry, dance-theater, and deluded rant.
In the lead-up to presenting Sad Boys in Harpy Land at the Walker, Tatarsky sat down with artist and writer Amy Ching-Yan Lam to discuss the power of language, Anna Karenina, and the role of the artist for the Walker Reader. Read their conversation here: Spells are Called Spells for a Reason: Alex Tatarsky and Sad Boys in Harpy Land
–
Read Alex Tatarsky’s Playwrights Perspective for Playwrights Horizons.
About the Artists
ALEX TATARSKY (writer and performer) 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. A trained clown and passionate composter, Tatarsky delights in messing with the expectations and power dynamics of a given context to probe the construction of narrative, self, and community in real time. They are currently touring their falling apart bildungsroman about wanting to die, Sad Boys in Harpy Land (Abrons, 2023), and their compost clown lecture-performance Dirt Trip (MoMA PS1, 2021). Other pieces include Nothing Doing (Under the Radar, 2025), MATERIAL (Whitney Biennial, 2024), Gnome Core (Glen Foerd, 2023), Untitled Freakout (The Kitchen), and Americana Psychobabble (La Mama, 2016). In addition to touring clown shows, they frequently perform improvised sets in bars and basements. As curatorial fellow at the Poetry Project, Tatarsky organized a series on the poetics and politics of rot. Current research interests include magic tricks, soil remediation, and renn fayres.
In 2015, Tatarsky formed the roving poetic research unit, Shanzhai Lyric, with artist Ming Lin and together they co-founded the Canal Street Research Association, a fictional office devoted to probing the limits of authorship and ownership through the prism of Canal Street, New York City’s beloved and reviled counterfeit epicenter. https://tatarsky.biz/
SHANE RILEY (composer and sound designer) is a musician who lives in Philadelphia. https://shanerileysound.com/
IRIS MCCLOUGHAN (director) is a director, performance maker, and writer in New York. Their performance works have been presented in New York (PAGEANT, BAX, The Poetry Project, Danspace Project, Movement Research at the Judson Church), Philadelphia (The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia Contemporary, FringeArts), and elsewhere. Recent direction includes Sam Bell’s Il bunkerini (Clubbed Thumb’s Winterworks), Alex Tatarsky’s Sad Boys in Harpy Land (Playwrights Horizons), and Joan Jonas & Eiko Otake’s Drawing in Circles WHY? (Castelli Gallery/Danspace Project).
Iris is a past winner of the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from American Poetry Review. Their writing has appeared in American Poetry Review, Prelude, Tupelo Quarterly, juked, jubilat, Gertrude, Denver Quarterly, and Queen Mob’s Teahouse, among many others. They are the author of three poetry chapbooks, including triptych (greying ghost, 2022).
Iris has collaborated with many other artists and writers, including Eiko Otake, Joan Jonas, Mike Lala, Alex Tatarsky, Lena Engelstein + Lisa Fagin, Juliana May, and Beth Gill. Their work has been supported with residencies and fellowships from Clubbed Thumb, Soho Rep, The Chocolate Factory Theater, The Mercury Store, JACK, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.
ANDREEA MINCIC (set, costume, and props design) is a designer whose work operates at the crossroads of performance, visual art, and experimental theater. In close collaboration with artists such as Alex Tatarsky, Andreea is invited to engage both imagination and handcraft—building unruly worlds through sets, costumes, wigs, masks, puppets, and hybrid objects that live somewhere between sculpture and performance. Previous collaborations with Tatarsky include Nothing Doing (Under the Radar 2025), Material (Whitney Museum of American Art), Untitled Freakout (The Kitchen), and Dirt Trip (MoMA PS1).
https://www.andreeamincic.space
MASHA TSIMRING (lighting designer) Recent projects include – Off Broadway: Practice (Playwrights Horizons); Friday Night Rat Catchers (New York Live Arts); Rheology, A Woman Among Women (Bushwick Starr); Six Characters (LCT3); Coach Coach (Clubbed Thumb); Staff Meal (Playwrights Horizons); Grief Hotel (Clubbed Thumb); Sad Boys in Harpy Land (Playwrights Horizons/Abrons Art Center). Regional: the aves (Berkeley Rep); The Inspector (Yale Rep); Primary Trust (La Jolla Playhouse). Dance/Opera: GEMS, Plenum/Anima, Me. You. We. They. (LA Dance Project); Giulio Cesare (Hudson Hall); morning/mourning (Prototype/HERE); Terce (Prototype); Deepe Darknesse (Lisa Fagan/Lena Engelstein/New York Live Arts); Rodelinda (Hudson Hall/Santa Fe Opera); More info at www.mashald.com.
PAYTON SMITH (production and stage manager) is an interdisciplinary theater-maker. She has stage managed, devised, and crafted Philadelphia, New York, New Orleans, and Santa Fe. She studied Theater and Performance at Bard College and the National Theater Institute. Recent Stage Management credits include: Nichole Canuso Dance Company (Being/With 2021-2023), Annie Wilson (Always the Hour 2023), Bearded Ladies Cabaret (Rose: You Are Who You Eat, 2022), FJK Dance (Off Limits, 2022), Prism Quartet (Mending Wall, 2022). paytonesmith.com.
Walker’s Performing Arts Department would like to thank Pablo de Ocampo (Curator, Moving Image), Rosario Güiraldes (Curator, Visual Arts), and Adam Greenfield (Artistic Director, Playwrights Horizons, NYC), who brought our attention to Alex’s work.
Living Land Acknowledgment
The McGuire Theater and Walker Art Center are located on the contemporary, traditional, and ancestral homelands of the Dakota people. Situated near Bde Maka Ska and Wíta Tópa Bde, or Lake of the Isles, on what was once an expanse of marshland and meadow, this site holds meaning for Dakota, Ojibwe, and Indigenous people from other Native nations, who still live in the community today.
We acknowledge the discrimination and violence inflicted on Indigenous peoples in Minnesota and the Americas, including forced removal from ancestral lands, the deliberate destruction of communities and culture, deceptive treaties, war, and genocide. We recognize that, as a museum in the United States, we have a colonial history and are beneficiaries of this land and its resources. We acknowledge the history of Native displacement that allowed for the founding of the Walker. By remembering this dark past, we recognize its continuing harm in the present and resolve to work toward reconciliation, systemic change, and healing in support of Dakota people and the land itself.
We honor Native people and their relatives, past, present, and future. As a cultural organization, the Walker works toward building relationships with Native communities through artistic and educational programs, curatorial and community partnerships, and the presentation of new work.
Acknowledgments
To learn more about upcoming performances, visit 2025/26 Walker Performing Arts Season.
