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From the Artistic Director

Tambo & Bones

by Adam Greenfield

With dubious logic, theater-makers of the sixteenth century — the neoclassicists — bended the insight of Aristotle's Poetics to advance their notion that the finest drama must be strictly constrained to three “unities.” Unity of Action: a play should follow one principal action. Unity of Time: the action should occur over a period of no more than 24 hours. Unity of Place: the action should play out in a single physical location.

I imagine Dave Harris in the sixteenth century, wearing a cape and pointy little shoes. He’d be saying, “Nah.”

The idea of the unities, that we might decide what makes great art or how art is meant to behave, is at the heart of neoclassical drama, which spawned the notion that there’s such a thing as a “well-made play.” The neoclassicists rejected the brazen adventure of Shakespeare’s epics in favor of plays more refined, shapely, and colorless — and written to behave as their audiences expected. Like a present-day dog show, theaters aimed to present perfect specimens of the drama. It stuck for almost a century. 

And though the centuries since have seen dramatic forms attacked and splintered over and again, this notion that there are rules to good drama persists, and at times seems pervasive. The “well-made play” of 2021 is not so stuffy as to adhere to the “three unities of drama,” but it plays to our expectations in other ways, adhering to a standard of logic and plausibility, affirming cultural assumptions and beliefs that we already hold; and it’s rewarded when those standards are met. 

How often do plays genuinely surprise us? scare us? defy our expectations? challenge what we believe?  

I recall a particularly depressing bit of criticism from Charles Isherwood: “There's not much point in aiming high if you can't hit your target. And is it really necessary for playwrights to dream up new worlds?” Here again, in our midst, was a critic asking for drama to think small, to focus on reflecting a world or belief we are familiar with. It’s what philosopher Jonathan Lear refers to as “the tyranny of the already known,” and it seems to permeate our stories.

But then I read Dave Harris’s plays, and again I picture him, this time in a cool striped shirt and sneakers. He’s still saying, “Nah.”

Dave’s plays yank us into spaces where knowledge and experience are undermined, where moral or emotional conclusions are not readily available; we have to find them for ourselves. He doesn’t pretend to have any answers, only wild questions: what is the world?, and is it real?, and must we live in it?  Formally, his plays defy expectation; he seems less interested in the way a play behaves than he is in how it misbehaves. Reading his work is like being in the passenger seat of your crazy friend’s joyride.

I love Tambo & Bones for its athleticism and curiosity, and for the way it acutely re-frames the narrative of race in America, written about beautifully in Natasha Sinha’s accompanying essay. I also love Tambo & Bones because, as a piece of theater, it scares the hell out of me. In my career, I have no experience of making or reading or watching a play like this one; no other is play like it. I have no idea what will happen in that moment when it meets its audience in our building: that shared, live moment between artist and audience where a play becomes theater. Each time I follow its narrative, I find new conclusions; it leaves me spinning, looking outwardly and inwardly at my relationship to what I’ve just experienced. I don’t yet have a vocabulary for this play, and it’s thrilling.

This state of not-knowing, the feeling of being held captive by a play, of having no idea where its narrative or thought will carry me next, is what got me addicted to theater as a (admittedly, strange) kid. In those moments where anything can happen, none of my life experience matters much and I’m totally open to being taken someplace else. And that pursuit is at the heart of Playwrights Horizons; it’s what puts that awkward second word, “Horizons,” in our name. In a time so vulnerable, in which every direction is shaky ground, we turn to the unfamiliar worlds and unexpected questions put before by writers. 

For the past two years, all through the theater’s pandemic shut-down, I’ve been in an extended state of anticipation to share Tambo & Bones with audiences in our theater. Whatever that experience may prove to be, I’m thrilled and eager and frightened and ecstatic to share it in real time and space, hopefully with you.

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