Review: TAMBO & BONES at Center Theatre Group

There's a lot going on at the Kirk Douglas Theatre right now. Tambo and Bones begins as a minstrel show and sweeps through the history of race relations in America, a concert, a futuristic genocide, and something or other with robots in the eleventh hour.

There's a lot going on, but the play itself lands its message-- through a binary presented by two contradictory characters-- within the first twenty minutes, and then bumbles through seventy more minutes of reiteration, repetition, and regurgitation.

At first, comparisons to Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead seem appropriate even beyond the coin-centric antics key to both and Dominique Fawn Hill's incredibly enviable clown pants. However, where the former sinks into a rumination on the existence of fictional characters within a fictional universe, drawing parallels to our own existences in a presumably non-fictional universe, this latter work stagnates.

The titular characters are barely developed beyond their stock namesakes and each is merely handed a few political beliefs to defend from beginning of play to end. No one on stage learns. No one grows. And while, in the talkback, it is explained that this is a "play written for white people to see", it seems the play was constructed less with an audience in mind, and more with a need to itemize conflicting ideologies and examine them by imagining their most extreme conclusions.

As a whole, the audience seems to be an afterthought and a burden to the piece. Despite compulsory attempts at audience participation, the text of the play requires an agility from the mob that a major American regional theatre in 2022 is not capable of achieving.

Even with a dazzling lighting transition by Amith Chandrashaker and Mextly Couzin, the audience sits as spectators to a rap concert as it is performed for an imagined audience augmented with canned applause. The play is able to guide us toward the precipice of discomfort-- to a place where we are forced to sit in silence and reflect on what we are seeing in a meaningful way-- but then cannot resist the next cheap joke, landing us back in a familiar scenario in which we recognize the power structure.

We pay for the seats, you make us laugh. It is not until the final moments when this power structure is finally disrupted, but at that point, any shock lands as a single punchline after an effete ninety minute lecture.

W. Tré Davis as Tambo keeps everything simple. From his first moments on stage as a clown, he takes each moment as it comes without a single premonition to muddy up his gags. This hyper-focus is maintained for the duration of the evening. The highs are high, the lows are low, and everything about Tambo seems sharpened to perfection.

Tyler Fauntleroy's Bones seems immediately less calculated than his counterpart, but where this hinders his clowning, he lands as authentically laidback and at ease as a cocky rapper/ wealthiest man in the world.

This is a brilliantly designed and beautifully performed production of a play that is simply not equipped to make this a memorable evening at the theatre.

Tambo and Bones runs through May 29 at the Kirk Douglas Theatre. More here.

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