In “Tambo & Bones,” currently running at Playwrights Horizons, playwright Dave Harris (“Summertime,” “Patricide”) gives the audience a minstrel show with three variety acts whose timeframes span more than two centuries. Endmen Tambo (W. Tré Davis) and Bones (Tyler Fauntleroy) appear as humans in olios one and two performing for white audiences, and they appear as robots, themselves, and their characters in the final folio where Tré/Tambo and Tyler/Bones are emcees at a celebratory event attended by an all-Black audience in a future time where apparently no white people exist.

From the moment of Tambo’s entrance in “PART 1: A Fake Ass Pasture,” it is clear that Playwright Dave Harris is on an important journey of grappling. What he is grappling with and why unfolds throughout the three Parts of his important play. And although that process might not be immediately clear to a white audience or to a white critic, the grappling is still important and essential to the future health of theatre in America (and elsewhere).

Traditionally, the minstrel genre featured white actors in Blackface performing for white audiences. In the first variety act here, black actors perform for a white audience and Tambo and Bones grapple with the purpose of their craft: is it to inform the white audience of the importance of Black history, or is it to “get quarters,” to make money. An apt metaphor for grappling with the relationship between black playwrights, particularly young black playwrights, and their audiences, particularly their white audiences, and their producers, particularly their white producers. As the theme of “PART 2: A Real Ass Concert” queries, is that relationship defined by “Get that money” or “Change that World,” “Cuz we started from the cotton now we here Buying back four hundred years.”

As Tambo and Bones continue the journey from “Quarters to dollas. Dollas to dreams,” the minstrel show “shapeshifts” into “PART 3: BLACK / History/ BLACK / Future/ BLACK / Present.” This olio is perhaps the most challenging of all, calling into question the nature of grappling itself. True grappling is a reciprocal process. White audiences, white producers, and white critics, need to reexamine their relationship to Black playwrights, especially to the voices of young/new Black playwrights. Does this relationship require white audiences, producers, and critics to learn new languages, embrace alternative points of view, embrace listening more than speaking? What else might be required?

Under Taylor Reynolds’s direction, W. Tré Davis and Tyler Fauntleroy add sinews to the bones and flesh to the sinews of their two deftly developed characters. Honesty and authenticity weave through their performances: they are wonderful to watch, to listen to, and to learn from. Stephanie Osin Cohen’s scenic design, Dominique Fawn Hill’s costume design, Amith Chandrashaker’s and Mextly Couzin’s lighting design, Mikhail Fiksel’s sound design, and Justin Ellington’s original music enhance these performances perfectly and recreate time, place, and mood with the onset of every shapeshifting scene.

“Tambo & Bones” emphasizes the need for the protagonists’ struggles to end, the need for them to imagine a future where humanity “can end the race war for good,” the need for them to reclaim their agency, the need for them to learn to live “without and adversary.” Tambo asks, “Quarters to dollas. Dollas to dreams. Dreams to . . . a new world. Do you understand me Bones? I’m happy.” Can we begin to be happy with a new world in the theatre where dialog replaces disagreement, where “Black History/Black Future/Black Present” collides successfully with a new understanding of what it means to make theatre, to be in theatre, to produce theatre, and to write about theatre. A new world where we are “responsible for everything we have ever done.”