Tambo & Bones

Tambo & Bones

By Dave Harris
Originally Produced at Playwrights Horizons, New York, NY
Dates TBA

Tambo and Bones Promotional Image featuring playwright Dave Harris

Tambo and Bones are two characters trapped in a minstrel show. It's mad hard to feel like a real person when you're trapped in a minstrel show. Their escape plan: get out, get bank, get even. A rags-to-riches hip-hop triptych, Tambo & Bones roasts America’s racist past, wrestles America’s racist present, and explodes America’s post-racial future — where what’s at stake, for those deemed less-than-human, is the fate of humanity itself.


Artistic Statement: Tambo & Bones is a ferocious satire, a keenly self-aware allegory of America’s history of racism. The play asks audiences to compare minstrelsy to today’s entertainment industry, a space where black artists are often asked to commercialize their blackness before white audiences in order to turn a profit for white executives. Explosively funny and carefully calibrated, Tambo & Bones is a meditation on racial politics that looks to America’s past as well as to its future, making a searing contribution to the American theater. - Adam Greenfield, Artistic Director


Grant statement: Pointedly, Tambo & Bones incorporates music, movement, and a mosaic of performance styles, combining expert clowning with expert rapping. This extra week of rehearsal provided by the Edgerton Foundation New Play Award will give the creative team essential working time to craft the music, develop choreography, and work with the actors on the stylistic precision that this play demands. Every rehearsal period is a time-intensive process, but Dave Harris's theatrical imagination has created a distinctly kaleidoscopic world that -- especially in this world premiere production -- can be realized thanks to the Edgerton Foundation's generous gift of time. - Adam Greenfield, Artistic Director

Director: Taylor Reynolds