Bones (left), played by Tyler Fauntleroy, and Tambo, played by W. Tré Davis, bust a rhyme.
When the lights came up at the end of Dave Harris’s disorienting Tambo & Bones, my companion asked me, “Am I real?” The satirical play teasingly calls attention to the artifice of theater and performance while emphasizing “fake-ass” set pieces, “fake-ass” backstories, and “fake-ass” racial identities. Even the composition of the audience at Playwrights Horizons seems to be fabricated. I wasn’t so sure I could give my friend an answer.
Structured in three parts that roughly correspond with the past, present, and future of African American social history and performance genres, Tambo & Bones opens in a pastoral setting with watercolor backdrops, a Styrofoam sun, and painted plywood trees. The scenery could have been created for an elementary-school pageant, but it soon becomes evident that this is a minstrel-show plantation set. (Stephanie Osin Cohen’s scenic design for the three parts smartly and simply establishes the appropriate tone and style throughout.)
Bones (Fauntleroy) tells it like it is in rap.
The first character to amble into the sham bucolic setting is Tambo (W. Tré Davis), dressed in the colorful rags and patches of a blackface minstrel (kudos to Dominique Fawn Hill’s costume design). Tambo’s only desire is to get some sleep under the plywood trees, but his peacefulness is disrupted with the appearance of Bones (Tyler Fauntleroy), also wearing minstrel attire. Bones’s primary objective is to amass quarters by whatever means necessary—including cajoling the audience with a phony story about a sick child. Tambo and Bones verbally spar and dispute the meaning of life, and the clowns (as they are identified in the script) could be cousins of Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot.
Tambo and Bones’s existential quandaries and humorous banter, however, morph into a comic treatise on racial oppression and the presumption of African Americans as nonhuman or “fake” people. By the end of the first part, Tambo has abandoned his desire to enjoy a rejuvenating slumber and joins Bones in the pursuit of quarters—no, dollars!—from those behind their subjugation.
In part two, the clowns have been transformed into a pair of early 21st-century rappers with sunglasses, expensive sneakers, and gold chains hanging down to their waists. The arena-style lighting by Amith Chandrashaker and Mextly Couzin, and sounds of a roaring crowd by Mikhail Fiksel make it clear we are no longer watching a minstrel show. Through a series of rap songs (Justin Ellington provided the original music) and repartee, Tambo and Bones explain how they moved from the plantation to the city to superstardom:
Thought it we had it made / turns out we had it wrong
Depression in a pasture / to the hood wit a bong
Rob steal shoot deal / whatever it takes
Can’t get the money / then ya can’t change ya fate.
A few wealthy rappers, it turns out, can’t alter the underlying racism in society, and the segment ends in racial civil war.
As a minstrel clown, Tambo (Davis) offers a treatise on race. Photographs by Marc J. Franklin.
The third and final part, set in a nondescript lecture hall, takes place 400 years later, and Tambo and Bones once again have been transformed, this time into the real-life actors who had previously played the clowns. They are, in short, no longer fake-ass people in the futuristic, post-racist society. With the help of a pair of “glitchy” robots (Dean Linnard and Brendan Dalton), Davis and Fauntleroy narrate the circumstances that brought them (and us) to this Afro-futuristic world.
Directed by Taylor Reynolds, Tambo & Bones is as provocative as it is theatrical. Harris’s critique is both biting and trenchant, and the play entertains even as it pours salt on the festering wounds of systemic racism. Some of the sequences may go on a bit too long, but the payoffs are worth it.
As Tambo and Bones (and as Davis and Fauntleroy in the third part, for that matter), the real Davis and Fauntleroy are a dazzling duo. Their precise comic timing and impressive music abilities make the absurdity, grotesqueness, as well as the nonstop (albeit creative) barrage of the N-word, palatable and engaging. They ingratiate themselves with the audience, and they impel us to recognize—however we racially identify—our own complicity in current structures.
Tambo & Bones is an excellent addition to the roster of this season’s new and returning plays that explore issues of race in the United States. Over-the-top, cheeky, and confounding, this is a work that uses every fake-ass convention imaginable. In the process, Tambo & Bones exposes hard truths.
Dave Harris’s Tambo & Bones plays through Feb. 27 at Playwrights Horizons (416 W 42nd St). For tickets, COVID guidelines, and performance schedule, visit playwrightshorizons.org.
