Playwright's Perspective: Alexandra Tatarsky

From the playwright: Alexandra Tatarsky

I’m taking an Uber out to the suburbs for a job. There are rubber chickens poking out of my bag. 

“What do you do for, um, work?” asks the driver. 

“I’m a clown,” I say. “I’m working on a show. And it’s not going well.” 

“What’s the show about?” he asks. 

I slow nod, squinting vaguely into the distance. 

“Um, I guess it’s about… how it’s not going well? How living in this world can make you feel like your mind is hell?” 

“Oh yeah,” he says. He gets it immediately. “It’s like that Rihanna song, right?” And he puts it on:

I'm friends with the monster that's under my bed

Get along with the voices inside of my head

“Yeah,” I say. “Yeah, it’s actually basically exactly like that.”

We talk about demons the rest of the ride. Demons of the self. Demons of the state. Daily demons. Demons of history. So many demons. 

If you think about demons, they can be very scary. But if you look right at them, they’re kind of cute. That’s how it goes with demons. They make all these gurglings that are difficult to transcribe.

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I have to be honest: I feel most hopeful when I’m hanging out with earthworms. They flick and writhe into glorious shapes, like some secret alphabet. 

If I had to tell you what this show is all about, I’d say it’s about getting into the “oo” in doom. 

Or wanting to break things, at the same time as you want to repair them. And not quite knowing how to do either.

The other day someone told me that consonants were introduced to restrain vowels, because without consonants the vowels were too powerful.

eoeaoeoeoeaooaeeioueoeaioeeaueiouooaeoeeuoooeu

There, I just re-wrote that sentence, no consonants. It’s all one long wail. Frankly, too much to handle. Can you imagine if we all went around like that?

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My mom says, “You’re my daughter you’re amazing but does your pubic hair have to be that visible? You have a lot of pubic hair and it is… quite visible. I’m just not sure it’s serving you?”

I must confess I am also not sure. But I really do think it is. 

The mystics say hell is just unending shame. I defend all the things that curl outside the line: wanton calligraphics.

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In my bedroom is a stack of notebooks and the subject is nothing. Notes on Nothing. It turns out, nothing is really something. I could think about nothing forever.

For instance: Nothing matters. And at the same time, Nothing matters. It really does. Nothing makes sense. And at the same time: Nothing makes sense. It’s the only thing that makes any sense. 

This is a play about wanting to die and wanting to write a play about wanting to die and being unable to write a play about wanting to die — and that makes you want to die all the more! Oy vey. A spiral. No lines, just a series of circles down into hell. 

Or, as we say, “material.”

The world was going to hell, and all you did was nothing.

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When Adam invited me to do this show I thought: Playwrights? Fascinating! That’s not a place I had ever pictured myself… I am after all an anxious clown, by training and disposition. No one ever called me a playwright. 

But Adam brought out that old truism, no less effective for being oft-invoked: “The word is playwright,” he said. “Not playwrite.” 

Thus the word itself reveals: A play is not written – it is wrought. Beaten into being as if from hot metal. Hammered into shape. Physical. Malleable. Torturous, I might add. Wondrous. 

I wonder how we could be more like metal. Let the rising heat and hellishness of this world make us soften, be receptive to changing form.

What would it look like to refuse to compose, and instead insist on decomposing? Let the play, like the world, like the word, like the body, be eaten by worms, pecked to bits by birds, nibbled by fishes. Infinite rehearsal for the world to come.

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