Now prowling at Crow’s Theatre: a tough, magnetic Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo

As befits its fierce and independent titular animal, Rajiv Joseph’s Pulitzer Prize-nominated Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo is a tough play.

It’s tough to consume because of profanity, violence, and ugliness. 

And it’s tough to reckon with as a whole: what does its unrelenting and incongruous juxtaposition of trauma and the search for meaning add up to? What does it mean? 

And yet . . . at the same time, it’s easy. 

In the Crow’s Theatre and Modern Times Stage Company production directed by Modern Times Artistic Director Rouvan Silogix, it’s easy to lose yourself entirely in individual scenes which surprise, engross, and enthrall. 

It’s easy to grasp the sparsely decorated setting  – in the center of the theatre, with the audience in the round. It’s Baghdad in 2003 after the American invasion and the fall of Saddam Hussein. We begin at the zoo, with a cage center-stage. 

In the cage is the Tiger, played by a mercurial Kristen Thompson. She is the last animal left in a zoo split open by bombs, whose animals have fled.  

No facile tiger costume here – just tiger essence. Ferocity. Savage judgment – at first directed at the lions who fled the zoo for false freedom that’s been cut short by the reality of war. And restless, sardonic reflection that will launch her hunt for meaning in the streets of Baghdad.  

It’s easy to watch the fluid Thompson prowl the stage – by turns instinctive and erudite, cunning and otherworldly.

It’s equally easy to lose ourselves in the performances of Andrew Chown’s Tom and Christopher Allen’s Kev. The two US Marines – tense and taut, rifles in hand – soon enter the zoo. Their crisp dialogue is mundane and self-important, yet oddly compelling. It – and their interaction with the tiger, with each other and with others, including  Sara Jaffri’s bemused Iraqi prostitute – epitomizes man’s savagery and smallness, aspiration and self-delusion. 

It’s so easy to watch Ahmed Moneka’s Musa, Iraqi gardener-turned-translator. The play’s always compelling moral center, he pivots from comical dialogue with Tom and Kev to guilt-wracked reflection on the path that’s led him here, to a life-and-death battle for self-definition.

And – it feels almost dirty to say it – it’s especially easy to watch Ali Zazmi as Uday Hussein, son of Saddam. Magnetically vile, he chews the scenery whispering to the spectre of Saddam and launching despicable, twisted truth bombs.  

Finally, it’s easy to appreciate the simple, muscular work of sound designer John Gzowski  and set and lighting designer Lorenzo Savoini – which telescopes our focus on these harrowing situations and brilliant acting performances. 

But despite all this ease, there’s no escaping the truth. At an aggregate level, Bengal Tiger in the Baghdad Zoo is really, really tough. 

Like a leathery Baghdad-set alloy of Waiting for Godot and Pride of Baghdad (the 2006 graphic novel by Brian K Vaughan and Niko Henrichon about the lions whom the Tiger lambastes at the opening of the show), this is a tough show about self-interest and selflessness, divinity and freedom, and the near-impossibility of escaping our myopic subjectivity. 

It’s a tough show in which Saddam’s golden toilet seat is an absurdist MacGuffin connecting the disparate characters. And where his golden gun – passing like a baton from one character to another – confers ironic agency and catalyzes tense moments of reckoning, death and change.  

It’s oh-so-easy to be by turns sickened, illuminated, enraged, and intrigued. To gawk at the crucible situations depicted. To bathe in the deep vein of humanity that is slowly, bloodily ripped open by raw, revelatory dialogue delivered in these consistently captivating acting performances. 

But what to make of it all? 

Once it’s all said and done, and – like that tiger – we’ve slipped our cage, and we’re prowling Carlaw Avenue . . . where, exactly, have we gotten to? 

That’s tough to say. 

Reserve tickets to Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo on crowstheatre.com. 

© Scott Sneddon, SesayArts Magazine, 2022