Enter the audience.
KATE
Hey! Hey, welcome! Welcome to my show! My name’s Kate! You’ve all been to improv comedy before, right? Snap if you have. So, here’s the deal: You’ve just seen Tambo & Bones, over at Playwrights Horizons. And we are gonna extend the conversation a little bit! Now you shout out a word, any random word, and the FIRST WORD I hear, I will IMPROV a way to tie it back somehow to Tambo & Bones. Ok? Completely spontaneous!
AUDIENCE
The World’s End.
KATE
The World’s End! People of all genders, we are working with: The World’s End. Are you reading my mind!? The World’s End… is a 2013 pub crawl comedy film…with a major twist. Because I went to see it on a whim without reading any reviews or even a logline, the twist BLEW MY MIND. In real life, you only get to be a virgin once! In the theater, you get to be a virgin every time you don’t read a review! So, seriously, before reading this: Go see Tambo & Bones! Save your virginity!!
Some audience members leave.
AUDIENCE
Trauma.
KATE
Next.
AUDIENCE
Childhood trauma.
KATE
Aaaaaaaah. Next. I mean I know I said any word, but
AUDIENCE
Audience.
KATE
Audience! Ok. Hmm. I don’t know how to tie that back… let’s see… Tambo & Bones is a comedy about the complexities and complicities of performing Black pain, for profit, under winner-take-all American capitalism, for a moneyed and mostly white audience… just like Tambo & Bones!
AUDIENCE
(chanting)
Trauma! Trauma! Trauma!
KATE
Ok, wow. Rude. Who even is in this audience? What is going on here? Why do you want my pain? What do you think you’re going to do with the knowledge that I’m what the French call a “survivant d’un traumatisme?” That I had to do grounding exercises in the lobby of Playwrights Horizons before the show to feel even sort of ok? If I don’t give you all the details, are you going to make up stupid shit about me in your head? If I do give you all the details, are you going to continue making up stupid shit about me in your head? Will you make it about my gender? My race? My sexuality? My class? My capabilities? My employability? My future? My past? What am I supposed to do with my PTSD, make money off it? Is that what you want? Some sorta rags to riches nonsense?
The audience cheers wildly.
KATE
I’m not rich. I can’t tell that story. But I guess you’re in luck. Because I am going through a wild ride of unexpected re-traumatization this week, which started two days before going to see Tambo & Bones, I’m pretty much stuck thinking about full-body grief in this essay, whether I want to be or not. I have a background in clowning and in writing and loving satire, which are two modes that Dave Harris is working in here, and I’ve always been interested in how they relate to pain.
AUDIENCE
Rainbows.
KATE
Rainbows… are, uh, not in Tambo & Bones, a play that starts with two minstrel characters, whom the playwright calls clowns in his stage directions. Ultimately, Dave Harris gifts them full agency to challenge, attack, and subvert his world, their world—and ours. But they start out a lot like trauma survivors, frozen in childhood, with gaps in their memories.
I don’t really know what minstrelsy was like, but I know some things about playing the fool onstage. You’re playing low status and low intellect. But this can paradoxically be quite liberating and essentially a mindfulness practice, because it awakens you to more sensory awareness, instinct, wisdom, and emotion in the rest of your animal body. White male supremacy was being pretty psycho when it decided to define “humanity” as the polar opposite of being an animal, and manhood as the opposite of being a child.
If clowning can be a way to ground yourself, pleasurably, playfully, in your entire body, surely it’s actually great for a survivant d’un traumatisme? There’s a common understanding that such persons live from the neck up, which isn’t exactly how I would describe it. I mean, for example, right this second, I feel sort of like my body is on fire. But also like I’m frozen? Basically, my nervous system is completely dysregulated. But playful movement helps, and playing dumb helps, and expressing my most primal emotions with my body helps.
Because part of my own trauma goes back to when I was an actual child, giving embodied expression to an untraumatized child self can be so fucking healing.
Additionally, I’m a blond, white, female person, which is an embodiment that white supremacist patriarchal thinking has culturally coded as dumb but sweet, innocent and childlike. (I mean, seriously, the actual etymology of my feminine given name is “pure.”) When I can play both within and outside of that stereotype, and use it in the service of social critique, I feel in control. But when anyone actually mistakes me for this social role, or insists I try to live within those confines? It’s devastating. It’s also classist and racist. This limiting image of white womanhood was built to stand in polar opposition to Black womanhood, and to deny and denigrate it.
Um, I guess I have digressed, because there are no women in Tambo & Bones, but there are also no rainbows, so women connect us back to rainbows. TL;DR: Don’t go to spin class trying to sweat out “impurities.”
AUDIENCE
Alchemy.
KATE
I think converting pain into satire, into comedy, can be a way of dealing with pain without re-traumatizing yourself. I believe, fundamentally, that every writer should have a right to write in a way that doesn’t re-traumatize themselves or their core audience.
Some comedy is actually peak tragedy. This might partly be my own aesthetic bias, but I suspect comedy, with its sense of play and intentional distancing, might be a more effective vehicle for aiding the processing of collective, systemic, ongoing traumas than tragedy. There are some feelings I never want to relive. I want a blunt force instrument to slap my pain out of me. Catharsis for me is often much more achievable within comedy.
AUDIENCE
Satire.
KATE
Right… so the play moves from a childlike state of play to full blown sci-fi satire. Satire runs on hyperbole. Satire takes an idea to its extreme, logical-yet-wrong endpoint. When we get to the intense thought experiments of act three, this might sound weird, but I felt so safe and taken care of. I contemplated an imaginary genocide against white people in a pleasure-rich but also multifaceted way. Mark Ravenhill tweeted this not long ago, and it strikes me as relevant here: “The emotions released by a good play are I believe complex – we can’t quite name them.” In that third act, Tambo & Bones carves out space for us-the-audience to experience something irreducible in its experiential complexity. In plain English: Catharsis. A catharsis that I’m sure is most fully needed by Black people in this country— as one friend who is Black gleefully said to me: “White genocide was for ME!” But I suspect it worked really well for me too at least in part because of my relationship to trauma. Comfort the disturbed and disturb the comforted. You don’t always know who that will be in your audience.
If the satirical endpoint hadn’t been fully, playfully embodied, I doubt I would have loved this experience as much. The production, as directed by Taylor Reynolds, never lost its grounding in the body, or its playfulness, even as it journeyed through worlds of big ideas.
AUDIENCE
Lineages.
KATE
There were so many! Dave’s in conversation with other Black writers working metatheatrically and asking crucial, confrontational questions about who is in the theater audience, and why, and what harm does that cause, and to whom, and how can we change this. In our generation, that’s people like Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Jackie Sibblies Drury, James Ijames, Aleshea Harris, Jeremy O. Harris, Phillip Howze… He’s also in conversation with Quiara Alegría Hudes’ essay, High Tide of Heartbreak. Going further back, I see connections to Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman and Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal. Tambo & Bones also lives within a Playwrights Horizons producing lineage of sci-fi satires, which includes plays like Robert O’Hara’s allegorical Mankind and Anne Washburn’s lo-fi sci-fi Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play.
AUDIENCE
Pizza.
KATE
I don’t… no I’m sorry I can’t tie that back. There was no pizza in the show. Ugh! But I said I would do this! Ok fine… pizza originated as a real food item in the physical world. Then it was converted into an emoji, which is fake pizza used to convey semi-real emotion, and soon it will be converted into a more realistic fake pizza in the metaverse, where it will be considered more real because it will be more committedly fake. You will be able to buy it with real currency which is a weird thing to say because money isn’t real unless you don’t have it. Money is part of capitalism which coercively uses fake scarcity and fake worlds to induce real scarcity and real destruction and real pain in the real world, which is really being destroyed. But for a select few, it creates temporary abundance. All of this begs real questions, tough choices, and a committed gratitude practice. Fortunately, at this point in time, many of us can still afford a slice of real pizza. Tambo & Bones.
Photo by Marc J. Franklin
