Here’s a question: If what seems a good idea falls short in the realization, does that mean it can’t have been a good idea in the first place?
Having seen Dave Harris’ three-part (Past/Present/Future), intermissionless 90-minute Tambo & Jones, I’d like to say no, it doesn’t mean that. I think Harris, better known as a poet than a playwright, had not only a good idea but also an idea keenly and sadly relevant to America racism today. After all, we’re living in a time when Senator John Kennedy can dismiss Joe Biden’s intention to appoint a Black woman to the Supreme Court by demanding “a nominee who knows a law book from a J. Crew catalog.”
If I have it right, foremost among Harris’ Tambo & Bones intentions is exploring how Blacks can successfully combat contemporary racism. He goes about his crusade by appropriating two stock characters from the now long-repudiated entertainment form, the minstrel show, in which, for those new to the concept, white men performed in blackface.
(The development of the minstrel show is often considered America’s first contribution to the international entertainment field. Eventually, Black men did join casts, as is covered in Carl Wittke’s 1930 Tambo and Bones: A History of the American Minstrel Stage.)
The fun-loving, comically argumentative focal figures are Harris’ title duo, Tambo (W. Tré Davis) and Bones (Tyler Fauntleroy). During the first third of a decidedly non-minstrel-celebrating exercise, Tambo and Bones arrive on a set that designer Stephanie Osin Cohen presents as a cartoon with two-dimensional trees and fake grass and a sun shooting out foot-long rectangular rays.
After Tambo has done some fooling around with one of the short trees to supply shade in which to doze, Tambo shows up, immediately passing his hat to front-row patrons. He cajoles them for quarters, thereby establishing another of Harris’ comic-dramatic intentions: bringing the commonality of commerce as the societally acceptable Black-white exchange.
(Incidentally, if any regular theatergoers begin thinking this section of Tambo & Bones resembles Pass Over, which played earlier this season. and that both productions owe a hefty debt to Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, they’re right.)
With his begging, Bones only comes by a single quarter. He gets it from the generous Tambo, who says that what will change 21st-century-audience minds about the subject is a treatise on American Race attitudes. To prove his point, he delivers one. It doesn’t have the effect desired, although some spectators applaud.
Okay then, this is the place to note that before Tambo & Bones gets going, under Taylor Reynolds’ creative direction, and after some jaunty music has played (supplied, it seems, by Justin Ellington who’s credited with original music?), a voiceover lets everyone know that audience participation is encouraged, that even standing is in order. Initially, about a third of the ticket buyers at the performance I saw complied (sheep-like?) but less so as the action progressed.
The problem with the Tambo-Bones minstrel segment is that it’s only intermittently amusing. When Bones adds a knife to his folderol (to plunge down between his fingers), guffaws are not the result. Harris’ move to jolly white audiences through this look at how minstrels depicted Blacks becomes increasingly strained.
He has the same effect in both the present and future Tambo & Bones thirds. His present, where dollars not quarters are the goal, has the focal characters as chart-topping rappers on a national “Escape” tour. There they are on a stage with flashing lights (thanks to designers Amith Chandrashaker and Mextty Cousin) and rapping away while not always easily understood. They also hawk T-shirts as an additional means to fill their coffers, this underlining Harris’ commerce theme.
In Harris’s third part, actors Davis and Fauntleroy come out as themselves, still doing their best at lifting the proceedings by delivering a discourse, much of which went over this viewer’s head, involving two robots. They’re X1 (Dean Linnard) and X2 (Brendan Dalton), white actors who go through standard mechanical gestures while Davis and Fauntleroy talk about doing away with them. Before too long, they get physically abusive, an ugly sequence followed by Bones expressing contrition.
It may be that Harris is suggesting the sole way Blacks will succeed at helping to end white supremacy in the future is by obliterating the white race. But is he? That confounds this reviewer, who left the theater dazed and confused and perhaps siding with Harris if the obviously concerned poet-playwright is at a loss to see how racism in America can and will ever be overcome.
It may be that Harris’ not bringing off his work as he sets out to is an ironic reflection of a national inability to solve the much larger and abiding condition.
Throughout Tambo & Bones, obscenities are tossed at patrons like custard pies in silent-film comedies. It’s hardly news that this expanded vocabulary is prevalent. “Fuck” and “shit” and forms of them are commonplace on stages nowadays. There’s another word that may or may not be obscene. Possibly, linguists might be able to explain whether it’s a slur when spoken by whites but not when uttered by, primarily, young Black men. Somehow, its many Tambo & Bones repetitions raise the challenging-to-answer query.
Tambo & Bones opened February 2, 2022, at Playwrights Horizons and runs through February 27. Tickets and information: playwrightshorizons.org
