The American Voice: Dave Harris
Anticipation for Dave Harris’ major New York City playwriting debut has long been building amongst those of us who read hundreds of new plays annually — and now, at long last, here in December 2021, the exhilarating world premiere of Tambo & Bones is upon us. It’s staggering to realize that we are only at the beginning of Dave’s theatrical life at this scale. The beginning of his virtuosic plays bursting with sharp insight and laugh-out-loud humor. The beginning of his wild romps through satire and surprise. The beginning of storytelling built with a piercing awareness of not only who is watching, but what the exchange during performance does to both artists and audiences. Like Adrienne Kennedy, Dave has a creative restlessness that fuels his formally inventive plays. Like Anne Washburn, he interrogates history, rebuilding, and storytelling itself. Like Young Jean Lee, he follows what scares him. And Dave’s unique voice rings out clear and confident as it calculates the exact angle at which to approach Blackness, performance, violence, white nonsense, capitalism, the lens of storytelling, and so much more. And he delivers all of this with vibrant energy and an existential wit!
Dave’s oeuvre makes clear that he is truly an artist-provocateur above all. Mesmerized by craft and the ability to manipulate, he wields skills borne of both instinct and practice, in order to push the envelope and subvert expectations. Spend time with the honest ruminations on masculinity in PATRICIDE, as he examines how we observe the world around us when we are reading poetry alone. Look out for his upcoming film and TV projects, intentionally created for the screen. Experience the immediacy of his spoken word performance, where he mischievously plays with the assumption of an authentic self. Check out his Literary Ancestry Essay Series about the Black theatre canon, via Roundabout Theatre Company. Read his Playwright’s Perspective! (Please, please do!) Go back and watch his hilarious Inanimate Object Battle League series with Issa Rae’s media company, which organically sprouted early in the pandemic.
Whatever the medium of expression, Dave distinctly anticipates what the audience is expecting, and formally turns the piece on its head — not for shock value, but to advance the storytelling. He effortlessly creates striking prompts across art forms. So we are lucky that his Off-Broadway debut is happening alongside Off-Broadway’s “post”-pandemic return to theatre and efforts toward deeper thoughtfulness... Dave is a visionary and there are no passive choices in his work. If his story appears as a play, there’s an electric yet carefully considered reason for being placed in a theater. It insists on specifically existing as theater.
The pandemic triggered a long-overdue reckoning about race, while theatres largely remained closed, so we’ve been unable to work through those conversations via what we primarily do (ie: produce plays). This fall, shielded by vaccines and masks, productions are beginning amidst this charged cultural zeitgeist. Conversations about representation and authenticity often slide into an assumption that we need a sacred and unassailable truth — as if that would effectively squash injustice. After a year and a half of relentless instability and accumulating anxiety, grasping for certainty has become fashionable in many circles. But what is fully truthful? Can we trust it? Truth from what perspective? Truth for whom? Is that what we need right now? The concept of objective truth can understandably prove comforting in a time of fear. But is it an illusion? With simple theatrical gesture, Tambo & Bones scrutinizes the idea of truth as objective (versus subjective), starting in the first few minutes of the play — what makes a chair a chair? what makes a tree a tree? — and it ultimately leads us to loaded questions about personhood itself.
Instead of pouring cement onto any single final answer, Dave’s work unleashes a prismatic range of realities that gives our imaginations a full workout. Instead of continuing broad yet admittedly noble arguments, Dave prompts our imaginations to go to unpredictable and savage and beautiful and dangerous places. (Imagination is an escape, but also…can we escape what we imagine?) Instead of positing the existence of clean and irreproachable truth, Dave offers surprise.
Surprise lives in the gut of all of Dave’s plays. White History introduces someone from the KKK at a dinner party, while tonally trafficking in the realm of comedy. Exception to the Rule (which will premiere with Roundabout Theater Company this spring) is in conversation with No Exit and Waiting for Godot, as it shapeshifts into exploring abject results of education for Black teenagers just trying to survive. Incendiary begins with a sort of video game dramaturgy, to navigate us through the journey of a Black single mother planning to break her son out of prison. Everybody Black is a project of defining the Black American experience à la The Colored Museum…or is it? Surprise shakes us loose, and feeds our own inquiry about the structures and realities of our day-to-day lives. Are these conversations about race indeed an escalation? Or is time the only thing that is actually changing — amidst a cycle of endless iterations, without material change? (For more on this, stay tuned for Dave’s upcoming Soundstage audio play, exploring discussions about Black freedom. Is there a growing edge in the discussion of Black freedom in this country? What are we hoping to break the cycle toward?)
Working from his own personal curiosity (and against the concept of a monolithic Black perspective), Dave chases his own desire for understanding, consciously leaning into what feels surprising along the way. It is an individual pursuit honed by his unique perspective, then fully realized with lively collaborators, and forever marinating in the questions raised. Who needs to be in power in order to bring about meaningful change in our country? Is the very existence of traditional power keeping us from change? What world order would be most just? Is discourse around race and class finally accumulating? Is it stuck in a never-ending loop? What is fake? What is real? What is useful? What do we get swept up into? How should we behave? What would bring sustained self-actualization, tangible freedom, and peace to Black folks in the U.S.? Eschewing oversimplification, Tambo & Bones mines the complexities of these questions in relation to perspective. Dave’s plays are built on the understanding that storytelling doesn’t exist without charged lenses: the perspective of the writer fabricating the story, and the perspectives of the audience.
This play wrestles with two men’s approaches to addressing the source of their troubles, while exploring the creation of a self that is fabricated based on who is watching — for example, selling Black “trauma porn” to elicit interest from (what is perpetually) a predominantly white audience; or, being the buffoonish entertainment for a white audience via minstrelsy (in which U.S. theater has its roots). We watch their success within the frame of capitalism, until we are made to question the very definition of success. We experience the “successful” performance of Black pain in exchange for money, for applause, for laughs, for empathy. We observe empathy operating as a commodified product of performance and as a means toward profit. And then, the fact that the play is an act of sheer manipulation by the playwright is brilliant! It’s karma! It’s Machiavellian! It’s delicious in its desire, its wickedness, its dreaminess, its relatability. Dave chooses to insert himself in this artifice, to perpetuate and popularize these depictions to land his point.
As Tambo & Bones leads us through a surprising, playful, and unapologetic odyssey, we constantly question ourselves. We are gifted an opportunity to practice curiosity about ourselves, our world, our desires, our reactions, our assumptions, our choices. We may not have all the answers at the end, but we can own the consequences of our own choices: do we decide to imagine another space or do we decide to participate in this one? It’s a story built on the necessity of a present physical audience, on the tropes of storytelling within minstrelsy and music and beyond. Dave imbues every choice with intention and virtuosity — including the fact that this play is incomplete without your presence and individual imagination.
Natasha Sinha
November 2021
