Sad Boy in Harpy Land

It’s Sunday, 2pm, and I’m on my way to Playwrights Horizons. As I ride the L train, I read about Sad Boys In Harpy Land, and learn that Alex Tatarsky once described the work to an Uber driver as a play about wanting to die. I’ve wanted to die, I think. I think a lot of people have. I’ve had that thought more often than I can remember. When I was little, I worried about dying but at some point wanting to die became a way to get in front of the fear. Wanting to die also fed my blossoming sad-boy self (aka depression) with the secondary realization that thinking about wanting to die was such an unoriginal fantasy, a lack of imagination, a cliché, and probably just another indication I wasn’t worthy of living.

Thinking about dying is the privilege of the living, not just those who are alive but who can count on the world to keep them alive with such assurance that “wanting to die” becomes some sort of distorted act of resistance. But it’s just a thought. Death isn’t like that. I’m standing on the uptown platform of the ACE train, trying to read about the definition of a “harpy” (a bird of prey with a woman’s face) but I catch myself listening to the tortured small talk of groups of friends standing nearby. Unable to think about harpies, I unthinkingly swipe my way to Instagram. CEASEFIRE NOW appears across every feed, it’s all that one could or should think or say from over here at this exact moment. I see myself from the outside, thinking about thinking about dying, and I think about the genocidal violence that we’ve witnessed in the past few days, weeks, years, but especially about the violence happening at that exact moment while I’m standing here waiting for a train to go to the theater. This simultaneity of the world is only thinkable. Thinking it is important and yet leaves me feeling helpless.

I don’t usually read up in advance of seeing performance, but since I was asked to write a personal reflection I’m afraid I’ll miss something important if I don’t know what’s coming. I don’t trust myself to witness the work. I want to know what the play is about, where it’s going, how it ends, before I even get there. Such assurance will, I hope, give me a better chance of knowing what I want to write about it. 

Sad Boys in Harpy Land turns out to be a play that’s also searching for its meaning, in which characters are nested inside of one another telling stories about the plays they want to write but never finish. It’s a series of deferrals. Tatarsky uses Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister as a foil to make this point, describing the novel as a story about a boy who never writes the play he vows to write but who, in not doing so, leaves the reader to interpret his inaction as either a heroic or pathetic refusal to do his work. As the first foil, Wilhelm Meister promises that all of the characters Tatarsky will play are roles in plays that haven’t been written (a strangely cruel fate where one questions if they have a fate at all). Tatarsky has vowed to start their adaptation of Wilhelm Meister over and over again at different stages in their life — a commitment to begin again that casts a shadow on whatever iteration I’m watching as very purely now and already obsolete. Everything tends to fall apart in Tatarksy’s Harpy Land as they pull on strings that unravel the artist’s own most emphatic inquiries of “despair, despair…dis pear” (the refrain uttered as they pick up an actual pear and bite into the ripe fruit). 

Still at the scale of death we’re living through, there’s something unnerving about the willingness of a performer and director (Iris McCloughan) to sit so squarely in one’s own feelings of self-pity.

Somewhere Adam Phillips describes psychoanalysis as an attempt not to call the cops on oneself. It’s a way of asking: what else can be done with the intrusive thoughts (especially the negative ones) other than policing them out of existence? Louis Althusser got in trouble for telling his students that you can’t kill the cop in your head, because if the cop is in your head it’s already you. “Stop Killer Cops” by Amiri Baraka (who makes a brief appearance in Sad Boys) opens “gun flash beats the child’s head in.” If a cop isn’t one but all of these things — an inner critic, a fantasy of law and order, a killing machine of the militarized state — there becomes something absurd about trying to stop them, which isn’t to say that one shouldn’t try. 

This is the kind of chain of associations Tatarsky moves through with such precision and speed that it’s almost hard to catch a breath. This is the speed with which intrusive, assaultive thoughts bombard Tatarsky’s multiply-layered characters in their own self-criticism and self-annihilation — a speed familiar to anyone with an overactive superego. The pace is so frenetic it’s laughable, comedic because the underlying questions Tatarsky asks are so urgent, albeit absurd because one (never mind one actor) could never answer them alone. 

Spoiler alert: by the end of the play Tatarsky just wants to be a tree. I don’t know if this is instead of wanting to die or just a different form of a wish for something beyond the current terms of existence. Hearing an actor cry “I want to be a tree” repeatedly, part of me thinks of the old trope of grade-school theater casting students as scenic elements like trees when there aren’t enough speaking roles for the entire class. Did this ever really happen? I doubt it, despite how ingrained it is in a certain American cultural fantasy.  A fantasy in which being a tree was consolation — which makes Tatarsky’s desire for this role somehow more touching and sad, like wanting to fade into the background. The more they make their wishes known, the more I look around the space at the other audience members. We’re the trees, I think. We’re the background, Tatarsky can’t seem to disappear into — no matter how still they stand pressing dead branches against their body, modeling the tree they want to become. 

Harpy Land, they explained to us earlier, references Dante’s Inferno, place where the trees are actually suicides entombed, persons suspended between life and death. Silenced in their arboreal form, the souls trapped in the trees only speak or express when the harpies (bird-like creatures) peck at and puncture their bark. When they can speak, what do the trees say? Do the harpies know what they’re doing? Or does all their pecking create a score of indeterminate expression? And are the harpies destroying the trees or are they releasing the souls? Sad Boys In Harpy Land brings the audience over and over again to fits of hysterical laughter and then offers a lullaby that is just enough to let the trees leave this world where urgency and absurdity go hand-in-hand, and enter back into whatever remains outside the theater.

“It’s probably the best theater I’ve seen in years,” I write to Alex on Instagram, “You and Iris killed it. I was so glad to see it last weekend and have so much dread about trying to encapsulate it in a few hundred words.”

“Thank you,” Alex writes back, “Embrace the dread hehe?” We leave it there.

Joshua Lubin-Levy is a scholar, dramaturg, and curator. He is currently writing a monograph on the photography and performance work of Jack Smith. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Movement Research Performance Journal and Director of the Center for the Arts at Wesleyan University.