Alex Tatarsky has always loved performing. From singing operas at the age of 3 to now blending clowning, physical performance and comedy for their latest project, “Sad Boys in Harpy Land,” a narrative exploration of anguish and humor. The New York Times describes it as “a thrilling and frenetic mental breakdown.” Tatarsky will be performing their piece at the Portland Institute For Contemporary Art’s Timed Based Art Festival. They join us to share more about this work, and the different performance genres they draw on.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed using AI and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Alex Tatarsky is back in Portland. They graduated from Reed College about 15 years ago, went to clown school and then became an internationally celebrated performance artist. Their one-person show, “Sad Boys in Harpy Land” is part of this year’s Time-Based Art Festival put on by PICA (Portland Institute of Contemporary Art). You can see it this Friday through Sunday at Reed’s Greenwood Theatre. It is hard to describe: a blend of gross-out humor, dad jokes in various languages, existential clown sadness, song and dance, audience participation, and lots and lots of props.
Alex Tatarsky, welcome to Think Out Loud.
Alex Tatarsky: Thank you so much for having me. I’m really touched by that description. [Laughs]
Miller: Does it seem at all accurate?
Tatarsky: Totally accurate, possibly the most accurate. I never thought about the dad jokes in multiple languages, but I’m glad people…
Miller: I say that as an embarrassed practitioner of that art in one language. I say it with love.
Tatarsky: I think we should have pride in our dad joke proclivities. No more shame.
Miller: Yeah, well, I’ll work on that off the air [Laughter]. I mentioned that you went to Reed 15 years ago. What’s it like to be back in Portland?
Tatarsky: Oh, it’s so amazing to be back, and it’s also really haunting. I just got to the theater this morning, and it’s the same theater that I performed in 15 years ago, doing plays at Reed.
Miller: Because I’ve read that you did Russian literature at Reed with the plan or hope that you would use that degree to do some kind of academic-ey Russian-ey thing?
Tatarsky: It’s true. I was planning on Russian-ey stuff. I thought I would be a translator or a professor, an academic, yeah.
Miller: But at the same time, while you were in school, you were performing the whole time as well?
Tatarsky: Yes, I was performing kind of after hours. I would read and write all day, study really hard and then, at night, do strange, secret things. We called them vaudevilles. Like we’d set up a big, crazy tent and all go wild. So yeah, I never thought it would become the main gig. It was secret.
Miller: But it was important enough that you did it at night, using some version of your limited energy to do this theater, even though it wasn’t the idea that would be your career?
Tatarsky: I just didn’t know it was possible to somewhat make a living being a weirdo, like a professional, experimental clown. I’m still shocked that this is anything resembling a job.
Miller: So what did happen then between graduating and having you say, I’m gonna do this for real. I’m gonna try to be some kind of theater artist?
Tatarsky: Oh gosh, looking back on that horrible period in your early twenties when you have no idea what to do, I moved back to New York City where I grew up. Essentially, long story short, I couldn’t get a job. I was living at home and trying to make ends meet, any which way. And someone who’d seen one of these wild performances asked me to do a show at New York City’s La MaMa Theatre, which is this great old, experimental theater. And one thing led to another. I just kept saying yes to gigs. And weirdly, that’s been the most consistent work I’ve had.
But this show, “Sad Boys in Harpy Land,” in large part, grew out of that early twenties malaise and the existential spiral of what constitutes meaningful action? How does one survive in this world, survive your own mental hellscape? But also the difficulty of making a living and figuring out how to do something meaningful.
Miller: I want to turn more squarely to this ongoing work in just a second, the work that folks can see in Portland in a couple of days. But I don’t want to skip over the time you spent in clown schools – two years at a place called Pig Iron School in Philadelphia devoted to a particular tradition of clowning.
Tatarsky: Yeah, the folks at Pig Iron all studied together with this guy, Jacques Lecoq in the ‘90s in France. Maybe the only way I can say cock on air because it means chicken, Lecoq.
Miller: He’s French, so all is allowed.
Tatarsky: [Laughs] He’s French, so it’s OK. They brought his philosophy to the states and now have a two- to three-year conservatory that’s modeled on that style. So it’s clown training, but clown is like the most advanced moment. So you spend two to three years preparing the vessel, learning a lot of different traditions of mask performance. Clown is considered the smallest mask. The red nose of the clown is the smallest mask.
Miller: What drew you to that tradition?
Tatarsky: I think I was excited by the possibility to transform the entire body into an expressive instrument. A lot of American theater and performance is pretty psychological and almost resembles film in some way. This tradition is really big and expressive, and it treats the theater as this uniquely dangerous and weird situation where you’re actually trapped in a room with a bunch of other human beings, sharing the same air, experiencing the same things. And this tradition is very responsive to that. The clown sees what’s happening and responds.
Miller: What do you like about having the ability to, but also maybe being forced to respond to the audience?
Tatarsky: [Laughs] I love that phrasing. Yes, being forced to respond. I mean, I’m so drawn to this. And I think clown is having a renaissance because we spend a lot of our time these days really isolated, really in our screens, alone, alienated, not connecting to each other. So clown is exactly the situation that forces us to be present with each other for an hour. My show’s about 75 minutes. Seventy-five minutes where you’re not on any screens. You’re actually feeling present.
Miller: I should say I didn’t see your show in person. I saw what I imagined to be a lackluster representation of the in-person version. It was recorded and I saw it just online. And I loved it, but there were moments where I thought, man, I wish I were in person to watch it. But back to the question. You mentioned the 75 minutes and interacting with the audience. There are multiple times in the version I saw where you call attention to time, say things like, “this is gonna go on longer than you want, but that’s what it is.” Why add in those moments?
Tatarsky: The art of the clown is all about acknowledging what’s actually happening. Comedy can turn to tragedy very quickly if it’s so deeply uncomfortable and unfunny that actually your heart hurts for the performer and what’s going on. I think the clown acknowledges those moments of awkwardness and discomfort, and it’s precisely that truth about what’s happening in the shared experience that does this magical alchemy.
Miller: So let’s turn to this show in particular. You say in the show that when you were 24 years old, you vowed to yourself that you would adapt a coming-of-age novel, called “Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship” by Goethe, alongside your own life for the rest of your life. I’d never heard of this novel. What’s it about?
Tatarsky: What is it about? [Laughs] It’s about a little boy who really wants to be a theater artist. Sound familiar? But he’s not very good at it, and that just really touched me. It’s a long, long novel. It’s hundreds of pages about this struggling young theater artist, and it’s written in the 1700s. But I was so moved and also I laughed out loud, because the struggles were so contemporary, just not being able to make a living and also not knowing how to have a meaningful life.
Miller: Had you read it before you graduated from college and were back living at home wondering how you would make a living?
Tatarsky: I actually had not. But in this period of time when I was trying to figure things out, probably in part because of my Reed College training, I looked to literature for answers. So I was looking around at the history of coming-of-age tales to think about what these classic narrative arcs are like. How do you become a successful integrated member of society, which is what these books are about. But there’s always a period of struggle, spiral, mental collapse and depression, and this whole show really looks at that moment. Like, what if we just stayed there and were curious about those feelings?
Miller: I love that. I mean, it does seem like a particularly Reed-ey thing. Maybe these great texts can give me some insight and some clues for how to live my life. But it actually seems like, in your case, that it worked. Or at least it is working. I mean, the work you’re doing now is like the working out of those ideas.
Tatarsky: Yeah, I mean, I think it gave me permission to face these questions head on in one’s art. These are old, old questions of how to get by and how to make a life. And we can make that the material of our work trying to figure it out together.
Miller: Have you made other vows to yourself that have been as consequential as this one that you made when you were 24?
Tatarsky: This one has occupied all my time ever since. There’s no time for other vows. No, this has been a pretty all-consuming project, kind of wildly. Even in 2020, when the premiere of this show was canceled … As we all might remember, the theater shut down for a while there. I even lived in a vacant storefront in Philadelphia, in character. So I turned it into little Wilhelm Meister’s bedroom, where he’s losing his mind, and got to really live out the dream of being an existentially confused little German boy.
Miller: So there are two little German boys whose voices and bodies we hear or experience. There’s also one of their mothers, there’s an old wandering Jew, a kind of lounge-singer voice vibe, an anxious performer super ego at times. These voices at this point, these individuals, are they bouncing around your head all the time, even when you’re off stage?
Tatarsky: Yeah, in some way, the show gave me metaphors through which to try to make peace with some of the voices in my head. So for example, the character of the harpy, who’s a mythical bird-woman who attacks these tree men in “Dante’s Inferno,” in one of the circles of hell, the harpy plays a big part in this show. The harpy, for me, represents one’s own self-attacking thoughts that peck at us and break us down.
So now when I have those self-attacking thoughts, it’s genuinely helpful to be like, “Those are the harpies, those are just the harpies. The harpies are always there.’ And if you make peace with them or you even try to make friends with them, get curious about their experience and the voices in your head, “OK, Harpies, what’s going on today,” it makes it all a lot more manageable.
Miller: Now, to be clear, the novel and the other works that you referenced, you mentioned Dante there as well, they’re super specific and super fertile as well. So, even though you’ve dedicated more than a decade at this point of your working life to a work that’s based on them, it doesn’t seem like it’s hemmed you in. How has the play morphed over the years?
Tatarsky: A strange thing happened when things shut down in 2020, where we all had to go into a kind of reflective period, out of necessity because it was such a different time. I felt like the show chewed itself up and then vomited itself back up in that time. Another way I’ve thought about it is the show, up to that point, got eaten by a worm and then the worm pooped it out. And the show, I hope, holds all of that digesting, chewing, spitting up, vomiting up, pooping out. That’s all fertile. That crap is literally fertile. It lays the ground for new ways of thinking and being to grow.
Miller: But both of those metaphors, these digestive, super-bodily, gross sort of metaphors, in each case, you’re talking about the show as a kind of external thing. Is that how it felt? I mean, whether it’s being digested or thrown up, it happened to this thing, but this thing is you in some ways, or your creation. But it feels external?
Tatarsky: That’s really interesting. You’re allowing me to reflect on something I haven’t in a way, but I think you’re right. It has a monstrous quality to me. I mean, I’m a quite shy person so it takes a lot of energy to find a way to be OK on stage in front of crowds. The show offers a bunch of masks in a way. All of these characters are masks that I can wear that then give me a sort of permission to play and to be truthful, and share things that are horrifying to share because they’re so vulnerable. Also, the humor of it sort of allows all of that to come out and feel OK.
Miller: What do you mean when you say that you’re a shy person?
Tatarsky: [Laughs] Like I’m squirming right now. No, I mean it’s terrifying, I think, to figure out how to be “normal” or “acceptable” with one another in life. Right now, we’re sitting in these chairs facing each other, being somewhat still. We’ve been trained and disciplined our whole lives to comport our bodies and our voices in socially acceptable ways, and it’s scary to navigate that and stay within those constraints. So in normal life, I feel a lot of shyness figuring out how to be. But on stage, I’m allowed, I’m encouraged to expand beyond those constraints.
Miller: Right, and that’s one of the things I’ve seen you talk about before. Everything in life is a performance. It’s most obvious, maybe, to an audience, that when we go to see a show, that that’s a performance. But a point it seems like you’re trying to make here is that we’re all performing all the time?
Tatarsky: Yeah, I think we also are performing so many identities, for instance, that are themselves constructions and fictions. Even if we think about being Americans and what is this story that we all agree to live within and carry forward? And to what extent can we, by learning what those stories, myths and fictions are, then also rewrite them?
Miller: There’s something so seemingly free about your performance, in this piece. The sense I got watching it was that you could just do anything. I had no idea what was coming next, and it just felt like, from my perspective as an audience member, that you didn’t have boundaries – in a great way. I mean, one of the words I’ve seen that’s been used a couple times to describe your performances is “unhinged,” which is a similar way to put that. Does it feel that way to you? When you’re on stage, do you feel like there are boundaries, that there are lines you can’t cross?
Tatarsky: The most delightful thing is to try to feel out where the line is, and then to approach that line and then play at the line. Especially in relation to the audience, which could mean physical proximity. It could mean content and themes. It could mean energy. Where is the line where you feel that you really shouldn’t cross it, and then how close can you get? And if you get too close, then there’s a whole game of backing away from the line, inching towards it again. How can you bring an audience to that line with you, then kind of dance around crossing it, and where that can bring you?
Miller: How are you reading an audience then? I mean, because inherent in what you’ve just described is an exquisite understanding, I imagine, of where the audience is. So how do you read an audience?
Tatarsky: I’m really looking at you all. [Laughter] I mean, that’s what’s so thrilling. You’re looking at me, I’m looking at you. I’m so curious about an audience, and I’m really watching everything. For instance, just practically speaking, clowns really don’t perform with the lights blacked out. There’s always just enough light that we can really watch. Not to make the audience nervous, but you should be a little bit nervous, we can see, with your body, what you’re taking in when people’s arms cross, when they’re processing on their face. Then you want to always notice and respond, and see what you can do to have people open up and receive.
Miller: And you’re able to do that, just craftwise, while also remembering your beats and where your props are, what prop is in your pants at that moment or which keyboard to pull out at some given time?
Tatarsky: It is a lot. It’s really funny. I always find myself laughing really hard during tech, when you’re loading into the show and getting all the cues, because it’s both so serious and so silly and ridiculous at the same time. But truly, if the rubber chicken is in the wrong place, it messes everything up. [Laughs] So it’s like utmost seriousness to make the most ridiculous thing possible.
Miller: Do you like being in an audience at this point?
Tatarsky: Oh, I love it. It’s like research. I’m just so curious.
Miller: What are you paying attention to, do you think, as an audience member, because of the work that you do on stage?
Tatarsky: I’m always looking to be surprised, and see and experience something that I haven’t before. I’m really paying attention to rhythm and to the shape of a work as a whole. If it’s the Time-Based Art Festival and it’s a time-based medium, really our material is time. Like a sculptor works with whatever material they sculpt, we work with time to shape it. So it’s really like if I have a little over an hour, what do I want that shape to look and feel like? So I love to watch how artists are sculpting time.
Miller: How vulnerable do you feel on stage?
Tatarsky: Well, on stage, I feel kind of invincible. I’m protected by the situation. I can go anywhere. As soon as I get off stage, the socialized judgment returns and I go, “Dear God, what have I done? How did I say that, do that, share that?” But the stage really is a kind of sacred, ritualized space that gives us a frame within which we can go places that we ordinarily would not.
Miller: But doing that, night after night in some cases, it doesn’t transmit that sense of invulnerability to offstage life. It only exists on stage. It’s that circumscribed?
Tatarsky: Maybe a little bit. This is kind of personal, but one thing I’ve reflected on is that I do think I’m more comfortable in my body from performing so much in front of audiences. Like a lot of this body shame that you grow up with that comes from all angles, that affects all of us I think, I have sort of made peace with it because, actually, the most exciting thing to do is find pleasure in your body, in your physical flesh vessel. If you can find delight and play, that transcends everything. That can really ease insecurities, and that does translate. So that’s been exciting. I welcome all into the clown healing.
Miller: What are you most excited about exploring in future performances?
Tatarsky: Oh, what a great and sticky question. In future performances, like in future works, I think I’m excited to continue figuring out this problem of how difficult our minds can be to us, and how that relates to a lot of injustice and horror in the world. How else can we use the theater to work out some problems together?
Miller: Alex Tatarsky, it was a pleasure talking with you. Thanks very much.
Tatarsky: Thank you. What a treat.
Miller: Alex Tatarsky is a New York City and Philadelphia-based clown and performance artist. You can see their one-person show, “Sad Boys in Harpy Land” as part of this year’s Time-Based Art Festival. It is Friday through Sunday at Reed’s Greenwood Theatre.
“Think Out Loud®” broadcasts live at noon every day and rebroadcasts at 8 p.m.
If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983.
