Tambo & Bones NYC Reviews and Tickets

"The director, Taylor Reynolds, doesn’t help clarify or illuminate Harris’s shallow script, defaulting to only one mode: loud and emphatic. And the transitions between sections do little to connect the parts in service of a grand thesis. A satire and a concert and an off-road turn into speculative fiction: “Tambo & Bones” is a lot of things, but nuanced is not one of them."
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"The bajumbled storyline is amplified with bold lighting design by Amith Chandrashaker, along with Mextly Couzin and Dominique Fawn Hill's rags-to-riches costumes that serve as a mix of rag tags and 90s streetwear. Through every act change — each an important and necessary elevation of the plot — Tambo and Bones believe the only way out of this constant loop of oppressed caricaturism is through the extinction of white people. Whether or not that’s true is not very clear after the show ends, but the plot line does offer bubbles of nervous laughter."
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"Tambo & Bones, however, fades in its coda in a way these other two plays do not. Its deepest thrusts are made in the blistering first two sections, and while the third is certainly trying hard for the coup-de-grace — any mention of genocide is sobering — Harris leaves this part’s most powerful statements in the stage directions where we don’t see them. “There is no line between actor and character / between audience and actor. We are responsible for everything we have ever done,” goes one such lyrical stage direction, which is impressive to read but unplayable in this production. The weight of those early minstrelsy images is also difficult to get over. Harris is trying to accelerate past them, to use their gravity as a slingshot into even more extreme territory, but they keep pulling the show backwards. His purified Afrofuture keeps paling in the bilious light of the real past."
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"Emotional whiplash is piled into these three disjointed acts that make bounding leaps from one to the next like a mechanical bull trying with all its might to shake the cowboy off its back. Tambo & Bones may not be the story that breaks free of its historical trappings, but Harris clearly will not be leaving the stage until he's at least broken a few cardboard trees."
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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…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>
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"In short, I found about three-quarters of Tambo & Bones unendurable, save for a few funny lines, and then came a rather brilliant finale that impelled me to forgive some of what preceded it. Harris has plenty of legitimate gripes about social injustice to unpack, but there are a great number of plays about race out there right now. And while it's high time more of these voices were heard, you have to wonder if the market isn't being over-saturated, and audiences won't be able to cope with the sheer volume, and the well-intentioned companies producing these plays won't be subverting their cause. Tambo & Bones, let's say, isn't among the more compelling of them. But the trapped-in-a-preposterous-entertainment motif is still pretty intriguing."
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"Throughout Tambo & Bones, obscenities are tossed at patrons like custard pies in silent-film comedies. It’s hardly news that this expanded vocabulary is prevalent. “Fuck” and “shit” and forms of them are commonplace on stages nowadays. There’s another word that may or may not be obscene. Possibly, linguists might be able to explain whether it’s a slur when spoken by whites but not when uttered by, primarily, young Black men. Somehow, its many Tambo & Bones repetitions raise the challenging-to-answer query."
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laywright Dave Harris’ Tambo & Bones’ evidences his stellar poetry slam career with its tart punchy dialogue, hip-hop flourishes and fierce insights. In three satirical scenes lasting 90 minutes, Mr. Harris offers an irreverent exploration of racism and capitalism in the U.S.A. Under the prevalent comic tone there’s pain. The N-word is used in abundance and matter-of-factly.
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