NEW YORK: Well-known Indian American playwright Rajiv Joseph’s darkly-comic Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo resists the temptation to moralise about either the Iraqis or the Americans. Instead, it captures the “shock and awe” campaign and the mess that ensued in Baghdad as they unfolded through the eyes of a ratty, old Bengal tiger caged in the bombed out Baghdad zoo.
Joseph wrote Bengal Tiger as a 10-minute play back in 2003. Three years later, when he got a fellowship with the Lark Development Company, he stitched new scenes together to expand it into a two-hour drama. The off-Broadway play presented by the Indo-American Arts Council opens this week.
Joseph told DNA he was moved to write Bengal Tiger which takes his audience into a Kafkaesque Iraq following two American soldiers, a talking tiger and an Iraqi translator after he read a news item.
“An Associated Press story reported how American bombs had blown apart the Baghdad Zoo in 2003. The animals escaped — the lions literally ran through the streets during a blazing gun battle and were shot and killed by US Marines,” said Joseph.
“An American soldier stationed inside the zoo to guard it felt sorry for a hungry caged Bengal tiger and tried to feed it. The tiger bit off his hand. The other soldier promptly shot and killed the tiger. That was the end of the article. I read this absurd story and was really touched and haunted by it,” added the 32-year-old playwright, who teaches writing at New York University.
“I felt sorry for the Bengal tiger — he was very far from where he was supposed to be. I sort of imagined the tiger as a character who couldn’t believe his luck!
He had been kidnapped, shipped out of his home in the Sunderbans and put into a cell in Baghdad; then he ended up being a casualty in the Iraq war.”
Joseph’s protagonist, the tiger speaks to the audience with all the vitriol of a scrappy old man. “He talks about how much his life sucks,” said Joseph.
“At one point, the tiger talks about cruelty and how years ago, when he was living in the Sundarbans, he killed two children. He ate them and caused misery to the parents. But
he insists it wasn’t cruel, it was lunch. Yet, now children are being killed in Baghdad for no reason half as good as lunch.”
Joseph feels his magic realist work will not touch a raw nerve with American families who have lost loved ones in Iraq.
“There is always a danger of people being offended. But the play is not critical of American soldiers so much as it is critical of the situation. The soldiers, the tiger and the Iraqi all find themselves confused and afraid in the chaos.”
Joseph’s previous play Huck & Holden about an Indian engineer who comes to study in the US and falls in love with an African-American, played to packed houses in New York and Los Angeles.
“Huck and Holden was a romantic comedy. This is a drama with darker comic elements. The similarities between the two come down to the tension that arises from a culture clash,” said Joseph, whose Kerala-born father migrated to the US in the ’60s to study. He married an American woman.
“I am mixed race and have two sides to my family — a very American side and a very Indian side. Growing up, it was interesting negotiating between the two and realising the huge differences. And yet, I feel comfortable with both sides. My parents come from two different worlds and yet they have had a happy marriage,” said Joseph.
