Broadway is getting around to feeding the Iraq War into the cultural mill that helps to sort out its moral dilemmas. According to Patrick Healy (2011), this risky reflection has taken a long time. While Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo was produced way off Broadway in California's Kirk Douglass Theater and the Mark Taper Forum, the controversial play had to acquire star power and money to open on Broadway, and the community had to be ready to think differently about the War.
Star Power on Broadway
Given American reluctance to criticize its soldiers following the crude aftermath of the Vietnam conflict, this support has not been available since the early 1970s. Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo garnered a Pulitzer Prize nomination in 2010 for Peace Corps veteran, playwright Rajiv Joseph, for pressing the spectators' faces relentlessly to the bars of a horrifying cage.
His play mirrors what went wrong in Iraq before and during the early part of the conflict, and Robin Williams' masterful and subtle characterization of the eponymous Tiger tricks the audience into enjoying Joseph's black humor before pushing their heads down onto the conclusion: This is us. What to do about it is left up to the audience. Williams' pacing tiger is impatient with people, but he keeps control without the ad libs.
The Tiger's Back Story
Before the invasion, the Baghdad Zoo, built in 1971, was already in need of renovation. Around 600 animals lived there, including the animals featured in Rajiv Joseph's play. Sadaam Hussein had closed the zoo for repairs in 2002, but he reopened it as a military base. Partly to protect themselves, the zookeepers stopped feeding the animals when the conflict began. About three dozen survived the early attacks. Starving animals in the fog of war were Joseph's inspiration for Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo.
In April 2003, the BBC reported that veterinarians were heading to Iraq to try to take care of the abandoned animals at the Baghdad Zoo. By September, however, a brief, unsigned story in The New York Times' coverage of "The Struggle for Iraq" noted that, according to the zoo's manager, Adil Salman Mousa, some American soldiers partying at the zoo had tried to feed an animal through the bars of its cage, and "[t]he tiger bit his finger off and clawed his arm. So his colleague took a gun and shot the tiger."
The Drama of the Tiger
Joseph's play opens with a symbolic recasting of the incident, in which the Tiger, played by Robin Williams in the Broadway production, is thrust into a ghostly existence by a shot from the purloined golden gun of Uday Hussein, one of Saddam Hussein's sons. We know we are in a world of moral relativism because another soldier, "Sarge," is said to have taken a "golden Howitzer" first.
No one character owns evil in this play, but the deceased Uday, considered by Bruce Chadwick and others to represent the worst of it, presides over a decaying Paradise that no god can save, though Musa (Mousa, in the story), now a topiary gardener for Uday, makes a devil's bargain to stay there. The garden's perversion is a heavy indicator of the playwright's view of how far humankind has sunk since the invasion. Uday may be a ghost bearing the head of his fallen brother, but his continuing insidious effect on the survivors' memories is one of the horrors that Joseph's writing exploits so exquisitely.
Women, particularly Musa's sister, Hadia, and an exploited leper, appear only briefly and fare poorly in occupied Baghdad. The two soldiers involved in the tiger killing incident have demons galore to battle, and they are relentlessly subjected to temptation and its consequences. Saddam Hussein's own greed, satirized bitingly by a stolen golden toilet seat, launches the cynical undoing of more than one character.
The Aftermath
The Baghdad Zoo has been restored, and it now exhibits more than a thousand animals, but humankind's potential for recovery remains an open question. The play leaves people without a scapegoat, confronting only themselves in the void. Reviewer David Finkle suggests that the play asks the audience to accept too much on faith in this surreal world. However, once the idea of a talking tiger--a ghost--is accepted, the audience must know that other rules are likely to be broken. The tiger's death unleashes everything bestial about the occupation. Although there is much discussion of gods, faith is beside the point in this visceral world.
The dead tiger speaks the truth in plain English within a narrow range of emotions. This remarkable conceit enables the audience to listen to Iraqi characters speaking emotionally in Arabic while maintaining the feeling that they comprehend some of what is being said. Translation is the mechanism for much drama in the play, but many of the most important thoughts are spoken in a language beyond words. The worst of us is no different from the animal. The best of us needs to find a way back to sorrow, to pity, and maybe love. That this story is presented with glittering human art and artifice offers only a slender comfort that the mind will find a way.
And After All That
People will have to do a lot of forgiving and forgetting to resolve the moral dilemmas that arose from this war. It may take a village of narratives to accomplish that mission amid all the twisted knowledge received after The Fall. Once in awhile, a play comes along that is so powerful its apparent flaws may be virtues in disguise. Look away if you must, but you will miss the work of two of the great cats of the stage: Rajiv Joseph as interpreted by Robin Williams.
Sources
- Chadwick, Bruce. " 'Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo' Does Not Roar." History News Network. 4 April 2011. Accessed 28 May 2011.
- Finkle, David. "First Nighter: Robin Williams Broadway-Bows in Rajiv Joseph's Toothless Play." Huffington Post. 3 March 2011. Accessed 28 May 2011.
- Healy, Patrick. "Star Power Meets War's Fire Power." The New York Times. 23 March 2011. Accessed 28 May 2011.
- Uncredited. "The Struggle for Iraq: U.S. Soldier Kills Tiger in Baghdad Zoo." The New York Times. 21 September 2003. Accessed 28 May 2011.
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