Fair warning if you haven't spent a lot of time with American drama lately. There's a new kid in town at New York's Richard Rogers Theatre. We are not in Our Town anymore, and we are sinking lower than even Willy could imagine in our own horrific Zoo Story. Rajiv Joseph's Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo will push you around and take away your god no matter how powerful you thought he, she, or it was. If a tiger bites off a man's hand, he should be shot and killed, right? Religion is so over in the estranged world of Baghdad after the U.S. mission was, uh, accomplished. But there are some lingering questions about morality.
Evil, it seems, is omnipotent. Luckily for us, actor Robin Williams is, too. Understated, lonely as a dead tiger talking trash, the fantastic conceit of man as beast works in his interpretation, and poignantly well, with a full spectrum of humor to accompany the animal's acquisition of knowledge after he falls into the afterlife. The audience may egg him on, but Williams will not mug. In this production, Kaufman allows the two American marines and Uday Hussein to overact a bit, and that is too bad. Joseph's scripting of the character of Uday, in particular, is so painstakingly cruel that it isn't necessary. The torment by Uday of the well-acted character Musa and his innocent sister, Hadia, is unspeakable, and we cannot stop watching it.
This is a play about the utter demeaning of words and The Word. Hats off to the writer who can compel us to listen to animals speaking as men and deliver a significant portion of the plot in Arabic, often the language of women, with very little need of translation, which often fails anyway. We cannot mistake what is going on here. The knowledge this play brings to a ruined topiary garden in the afterlife on this extraordinary set is not what we want to know. But we have to do something about it. Fast.
Evil, it seems, is omnipotent. Luckily for us, actor Robin Williams is, too. Understated, lonely as a dead tiger talking trash, the fantastic conceit of man as beast works in his interpretation, and poignantly well, with a full spectrum of humor to accompany the animal's acquisition of knowledge after he falls into the afterlife. The audience may egg him on, but Williams will not mug. In this production, Kaufman allows the two American marines and Uday Hussein to overact a bit, and that is too bad. Joseph's scripting of the character of Uday, in particular, is so painstakingly cruel that it isn't necessary. The torment by Uday of the well-acted character Musa and his innocent sister, Hadia, is unspeakable, and we cannot stop watching it.
This is a play about the utter demeaning of words and The Word. Hats off to the writer who can compel us to listen to animals speaking as men and deliver a significant portion of the plot in Arabic, often the language of women, with very little need of translation, which often fails anyway. We cannot mistake what is going on here. The knowledge this play brings to a ruined topiary garden in the afterlife on this extraordinary set is not what we want to know. But we have to do something about it. Fast.
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