Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo: life in a zoo is hell
19 Oct 2022

by Drew Rowsome - Photos by Dahlia Katz

A philosophical, and not incidentally hungry, tiger is caged in the Baghdad zoo while war rages around her. The tiger, Kristen Thomson (The Wedding Party), is having a moment of schadenfreude as she criticizes the intelligence of the lions who used to live across from her. Like almost all of the characters we are about to meet in Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, she is quick to brag and castigate but her own plans and aspirations are as obviously doomed and naive. Two American soldiers, a dim-witted but action hungry Christopher Allen (Orphans for the Czar) and a braggart Andrew Chown, bicker and boast as they dodge explosions, circle the cage, and debate shooting a menacing ostrich. The dialogue and the monologue overlap, punctuated by the noise and lights of the raging battle, and very quickly things go inevitably wrong.

 
From there playwright Rajiv Joseph's text branches out into surrealism, horror, comedy and more philosophy. We meet Ahmed Moneka (Follow Your Heart) a gardener who is working as a translator. He has created the now bedraggled topiaries that loom over our heads. He has also an obscure agenda and suffers from trauma. Joseph fills the plot with misdirection, macguffins and red herrings. There are heavily weighted symbolic objects beyond the topiaries, with a golden gun, a solid gold toilet seat, knock knock jokes, many ghosts, and the severed head of Saddam Hussein all figuring into the proceedings. There is excessive violence, both on and off the stage, and everyone is struggling to survive at any cost. As the tiger, now a ghost, ponders, "Why would god create a predator and then punish it for killing?" Or, "It wasn't cruelty, it was lunch." When does survival cross over into sin? Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo explores that dilemma from many angles but leaves any decision up to the audience.

Uday Hussein, Ali Kazmi (Uncle Vanya), has been gratuitously and violently sadistic simply because he enjoys it and he can get away with it. One event triggers Moneka's Musa and leads to a series of escalations and revenges. The tiger, now a ghost, haunts but more with puzzled questions than any harmful intent. She notes that "when an atheist finds herself walking around after death, she has some serious re-evaluating to do." Everyone gets the chance to re-evaluate as the number of ghosts wandering Baghdad increases in the cranage. The prose and action keep the mind racing to keep up, curious, and not able to puzzle at the themes and intent until after. Director Rouvan Silogix utilizes the staging in the round as a battlefield where the characters wrestle with each other, the concept of a god, and their own existence. Only once does the pace falter, when the audience interprets a sexual situation as comedy. That may have been the intent, a bit of comic relief is a necessity, but it feels odd to hear sniggers at that point when previous viciously pitch black violence gags have gone unguffawed. 

The cast keeps up a frenetic pace that begins emotionally intense and then escalates. They are an ensemble, occasionally pulling double duty, most notably by Sara Jaffri who plays diametrically opposed characters pointing out the brutality of chance and fate. The focus shifts constantly, as a war zone does, with protagonists becoming background then reappearing. As the tiger remarks of characters and life, "These Americans thinking that when things die they simply go away." Chown goes from hero to victim to villain, while Allen dramatically descends into madness before ascending into an almost saint-like questioning state. But Thomson has the toughest role. The tiger must accept its nature and seeks answers while striding through the travails of the complicated relationships and world exploding around her. Thomson begins in a feline state, her hands always outstretched as claws, before settling into her skin and becoming a beatific earth mother splattered with blood. The metaphors are often blunt, even overstated (there is a lot of shouting when precision would have been more effective), but still remain oblique and mysterious. Just like life, certainly life in the midst of war zone. 

As the tiger understates, "Life in a zoo is hell. Ask any animal."