Thoughts on Tambo & Bones
by Craig Lucas
How do you pitch your virtues, your strengths, your story, as it were, to (let’s be frank) the Oppressors.
Dave Harris’ Tambo & Bones faces this question, wrestling with the split between our desire for peace of mind and our desire for profit, servicing the Self by servicing the desires of those Oppressors. Let’s call them the Audience (the ticket-buyers, consumers, the ones calling all the shots, the Boss).
By embodying this split in two central Black protagonists over a landscape stretching from antebellum to post-apocalyptic America, this vision is grounded in economies.
And because this writer’s aesthetic is predicated on copping to the truth about himself, his look in the mirror requires us to the do the same: the fourth wall between us and the play reflects the playwright’s mirror gazing, and the reflected images stretch on and out.
And because it’s a play being performed in New York City in 2022, it speaks these truths to an audience made up of many different kinds of people.
At first there is a certain amount of fun to be had in pitting those constituencies against one another in a jocular fashion purchased with the author’s brutal self- filleting: I’m just doing this to make another buck, right?
The audience goes mad when the two opposing prototypes, Tambo and Bones (named after 19th century prototypes), launch out into the house to find the playwright and rip his earnings out of his gut (literally tearing him in two) to take for themselves.
That split rips the play a new, authentic asshole in which the overweening grasping for personal power through amassing more and more wealth begins to unsettle the opposing soul onstage whose heart beats for peace, a common good, that long- dreamed-for nullification of our old-timey, fakeass construct, Race.
Their war for the audience’s sympathies quiets down the earlier rollicking spirit out front where we sit in our self-congratulatory, wide-awoke self-identifications in this new disquieting moment where a wrong word, wrong address, wrong party affiliation or social class can get any of us cancelled if we don’t pony up the correct bona fides or intersectionality. Or youth. Or preferred musical tastes. Or aspirations.
This very uncomfortable turning of the wheel of fate and time and fashion and intellectual pandering and spiritual seeking hurls the play into its final landscape, one in which technology is employed to tell the truth of our national history. But minstrelsy still has its hooks in us, and the protagonists we began with, two Black figures plunked into a fakeass pastorale dream of a fakeass idyllic America where peaceful dreams could co-exist with scheming profiteers (who, let’s not lose our courage, invented Race in the first place) find themselves, their story, being enacted by white-faced robots speaking their words, appropriating their histories, attempting to own what they (the white Americans) already believed they owned, so why shouldn’t they go on telling those Black stories, even though they’re just robots and lack souls.
Our profit-minded Black protagonist finds his truth, his reality, is still threatened— murderously so—by a “mere” machine. A white machine. That has outlived the lives of all the white Americans who have been slaughtered in a national genocide, a Second Civil War.
So whiteness outlives white people.
And the threat to the internal sense of reality in a Black man standing before us continues long past the existence of any actual white people. They’re dead. (And for whites sitting in the house, does that mean contemplating one’s own permanent demise? As a race? We can only hope.) But the machinery set in motion lives on.
And on.
CL
20 Feb 22
