Theatre in Review: Tambo & Bones (Playwrights Horizons)

	W. Tré Davis. Photo: Marc J. Franklin

For a form of entertainment that died out nearly a century ago, the minstrel show continues to exert its grip on our collective imagination. Spike Lee put it at the center of his media satire Bamboozled. David Thompson, John Kander, and Fred Ebb used it as the framing device for the The Scottsboro Boys, about a race-based miscarriage of justice. Adrienne Kennedy and Suzan-Lori Parks have used elements of minstrelsy in their plays, to subversive effect. And yet, how many Americans alive today have ever seen one? (The chances are better if you're British, thanks to the long-running BBC series The Black and White Minstrel Show, which, unbelievably, didn't sign off until 1978.)

The format may be moribund, but writers and directors still find creative uses for it. In Tambo & Bones playwright Dave Harris builds a bleakly comic essay around two iconic minstrel characters. It's a prank, a provocation, a satire of extraordinary richness that has no intention of taking a single prisoner. It's also an assault on the very idea of what one might call performative Blackness -- for example, in plays like this.

As you may know, Tambo and Bones are leading comic figures in the minstrel show universe; basically, slave caricatures, they are the spiritual parents of the shuffling-for-laughs stereotypes that thrived in vintage Hollywood films (played by the likes of Stepin Fetchit and Mantan Moreland) and lingered into the 1950s with the radio and television series The Amos 'n' Andy Show. (Traces of minstrelsy can be found in more recent Black comics.) Here the title characters occupy a pastoral world of scenic vistas painted on muslin and pop-up trees. Bones, the more assertive of the two, trolls the audience for quarters, first by peddling a sob story about a made-up child, then by attempting to stab himself in the hand. "They wanna see my pain?!," he wonders. "Will that appeal to they sense of empathy?"

Instead, Tambo insists, Bones needs to win over the audience with "a treatise on race in America." What follows is a scathing historical recap, from the Middle Passage to the election of President Obama; I'd quote from it, but by the time I crossed out all the N-words it would look like a Mad Lib. Other mayhem follows, including an assault on the "playwright" (really a giant dummy) and more tales of woe, carefully tailored to earn audience sympathy and ready cash. In their habitation of a transparently false setting and their futile scrambling after a better life, there's a touch of Vladimir and Estragon about Tambo and Bones -- if Beckett's characters were magpie wits with a gift for urban trash talk.

Then Harris flips this scenario, reframing the title characters as gangsta rappers who serve up their criminal pasts for the delectation of their fans. Addressing a cheering crowd, they say, speaking alternately, "It took work to get here. We had to struggle. We had to sweat. We broke laws. We dealt crack. We went to night school. We killed a guy. We made sound financial decisions and built a stock portfolio." Harris, who got his start as a slam poetry artist, has a wicked way with the pair's lyrics, which are almost entirely unrepeatable here.

Their partnership breaks down when Tambo tries out a number that openly questions the emptiness of his current pose ("But I'm still confused/Don't know whose shit to blame/Tried to tell my story/All I got was a trip to fame"), culminating with a declaration of war on America. To his dismay, he gets nothing but applause. Bones, for whom the pursuit of wealth is its own justification, asks, "You thought you was gonna sing a song about racism and change the world?"

Suddenly, we're hundreds of years into the future as Tambo and Bones, in academic lecture mode, offer a presentation about a long-past "white genocide." Or as Tambo puts it, staring into the heavily white Playwrights Horizons audience, "This story that was passed down for us to perform, centuries later. For an audience full of faces that are as Black as ours." It's Harris' most daring gambit, imagining an all-Black world where the elimination of white people is discussed as dispassionately as, say, the destruction of Native American culture in a modern-day university history lecture. "Think," Tambo says. "Once, there was an old world where n----s would have to put on shows for people that looked nothing like them. And those n----s would have to figure out what was real and what was fake, what was true pain and what was just a story, they'd have to do all of that in front of an audience full of white n-----s who had money and safety and no idea. How could anyone know freedom in a world where they are always being watched?"

This scenario breaks down, however, with the introduction of two robots tasked with acting out the historical account of Tambo and Bones, who eventually became arms dealers, and their role in the genocide. (Tambo wanted to eliminate white people; Bones wanted to get rich by arming both sides.) The machine men rebel, insisting on their humanity, and the presentation ends in chaos and a howl of frustration. Harris' argument starts to crumble, too, although Brendan Dalton and Dean Linnard, as the robots, add plenty of slapstick amusement with their jerky, off-kilter movements. By this point, however, Harris is running out of gas; repeatedly stating his argument in different contexts does little to advance it. And his thesis turns self-defeating: In asserting that any form Black performance is hopelessly corrupted by the pursuit of wealth and the white gaze, is he laying the groundwork for a more authentic means of expression? Or is he talking himself out of a career?

It's hard to say, but Tambo & Bones ends with a gesture of contempt for the audience that rings hollow; it's supposed to be the moment when the mask drops and the actor playing Bones confronts us with his real rage. But Harris has done his work too well, and it's all too obvious that we're seeing an actor following the script. It should be a shocker but it feels like hokum.

Taylor Reynolds stages these confrontational games with considerable verve, although she can't keep the final third from feeling redundant. Certainly, Tré Davis (Tambo) and Tyler Fauntleroy (Bones) change personas as easily as they swap out Dominique Fawn Hill's varied costumes. Stephanie Osin Cohen's set design effectively creates a new world onstage every thirty minutes or so; in the rap sequence, she provides plenty of leeway for the exciting, concert-style lighting of Amith Chandrashaker and Mextly Couzin. Mikhail Fiksel's sound design provides fine reinforcement for Justin Ellington's original music, as well as for a series of voiceovers, including increasingly hysterical news commentators, the rantings of a certain racist president, and reports of revolution in the streets.

In his program note, Harris says that during his poetry slam days he became bemused by the idea of making money while retailing stories of Black woe, ultimately concluding that there was something dishonest about it -- and, by extension, in all forms of creative writing. It's a fair point but the problem is his, not the audience's, no matter how racism may be involved. There's a degree of self-absorption here that some audiences may justifiably find off-putting. But make no mistake; this is an attention-getting debut from a writer of no small talent. --David Barbour