Iraqi Ghosts in the Heart of America: Rajiv Joseph's Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo

1. Iraq and the Crisis in Representing War on the American Stage

In the contemplative place theater provides, we might become citizens of the times in which we live. It is at the intersect between public moral dilemma and the individual capacity to understand and feel that theater of war and witness enters, useful and meaningful, to create a communal gathering space in which we might consider together the sorts of societal choices, their reasons and consequences, we fail to fully grasp in isolation.

—Karen Malpede, Acts of War xvii

Warfare, which might be considered the most radical expression of conflict and crisis, has been from ancient times a topic of theatrical representation.¹ In fact, as Karen Malpede argues, dramatic art arose as a complement to and perhaps also as an antidote to war: "Athens, a warrior democracy, needed its great theater Festival to Dionysius (god of ecstasy and madness), in order to remember, reflect upon, and, perhaps, to somehow mediate if not actually redeem the multiple losses and sacrifices of its people" (xv). Over 2,500 years later, the ultimate reasons—if there can be any—that might justify the need to engage in the perversions, barbarities, betrayals, and pain produced by current wars that are so different from those ancient battles, and even from the military engagements of just a few decades ago, still need to be understood and negotiated. Drama might be thought of as an inevitably displaced and obsolete medium to understand war in the twenty-first century, amidst a mediatized reality of digital culture where the hegemony of images is hard to defy. Yet, despite its relegation to the fringe of American cultural imagination, I want to argue that drama and performative representations still have the power to engage with current military conflicts in ways that differ from traditional narratives and the manner in which conflicts are portrayed by mainstream media channels, thus opening up a space for the emergence of critical assessment, ethical judgment, and resistance that should not be overlooked. In what follows I will focus on one of the most original responses to the Iraq war, Rajiv Joseph's Pulitzer Prize-nominated Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, a play whose "use of an animal figure to explore something as troubling as George Bush's 'pre-emptive,' 'regime-change war' in Iraq, and the strange, unwanted alliances that it forced into existence" is turned into a surprising and powerful means to bring up "questions that arise from the radical displacements and dismemberments that characterize global warfare" (Chaudhuri 135, 136).

Joseph's play, which premiered in May 2009 at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City, California, is, to my knowledge, the only American play set in Iraq and openly portraying the Iraq War to have reached Broadway. In fact, it was the 2011 Broadway production directed by Moisés Kaufman and starring the late Robin Williams as the Bengal Tiger (in his last theatrical performance before his death in 2014) that put Joseph in the national spotlight.² This unique achievement raises a few questions as to why a bizarre war play with a loquacious tiger in the leading role is likely to be the sole play set in war-torn Iraq that more conventional American theater audiences might have come across as well as to why Iraq has been generally neglected as an apt crisis to be publicly examined on the stage, considering the magnitude of the conflict. The invasion proved to be catastrophic, undermining, as Kitchen and Cox argue, "America's soft power appeal in several countries and causing immense damage to the international order more generally—damage that will take several years to repair, if of course it can ever be repaired at all" (65).

The claim made by theater critic Alexis Solosky that "few would argue that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have produced any great American plays" could still be made, but that these wars have motivated some good pieces produced at regional not...