Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo jars and haunts
Hunters and haunters share the stage in Rajiv Joseph’s Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, the latest co-production between the Unicorn Theatre and UMKC Theatre.
As the play opens, it’s 2003, and U.S. Marines Kev and Tom guard a caged Bengal tiger at Baghdad’s zoo. It’s a disorienting scene, full of pingpong talk. While the soldiers spar over a gold-plated gun, the tiger (played by Theodore Swetz) launches into a monologue that neither man seems able to hear. The chaotic voices occasionally veer close enough to harmonize. “Zoo is hell,” the tiger deadpans, and other double-voiced lines distill method from the madness. Both man and tiger, the playwright insinuates, are thousands of miles from where they’re supposed to be.
When Tom (Danny Fleming) approaches the cage with a piece of beef jerky, the scenes collide. The tiger mauls Tom’s hand, and Kev (Matthew Lindblom) shoots the animal instinctively, trying to save his friend.
It’s a tense moment rooted in reality: A U.S. soldier did lose part of his hand to a caged tiger at the start of the Iraq war. The similarities to our world end, however, when the tiger sheds its skin and haunts Kev as a ghost, pontificating on Dante and the afterlife.
Swetz, a UMKC professor, is superb as the jocular tiger, offering a relaxed and physically precise performance. The stakes may be philosophical, but they’re no less pressing in Swetz’s command. His wry delivery keeps the weighty material from seeming stiff or staid.
Lindblom commits wholeheartedly to Kev, a high-strung soldier with sex (and little else) on the brain. The actor’s energy never dips, but Act 2 allows him to take a more nuanced, expressive tack.
Michael Thayer is sympathetic as the gentle Musa, an Iraqi gardener turned U.S. military interpreter after a family tragedy stokes the fires of revenge. And Fleming makes an explosive Tom, though his character’s arc is less compelling than those of the others.
The production design beautifully manifests the vision of a ruined Garden of Eden. Scenic designer Sarah White offers handsome twists on a familiar ground plan. Fragments of ruined columns fuzz the stage’s clean lines, and graffitied animal silhouettes add a threatening edge. The spade-patterned floor is especially intricate.
Lighting designer Kristopher Kirkwood trims the Baghdad skyline in rich purples, aiming his colors at an unusually rough-spun cyclorama. The textured fabric adds age and interest, preventing the saturated hues from coming off too slick. Lindsay W. Davis’ costumes are impeccably detailed, from mud stains on the soldiers’ soles to the faded stripes on Swetz’s tunic.
The most evocative design elements, however, are the enormous animal-shaped topiaries, plants that Musa once pruned for Uday Hussein’s lavish garden. White resists the temptation to create a manicured menagerie; instead, the animals are scraggly and overgrown, luxuries made wild by nature and neglect.
Actors in two of the smallest roles make the largest impressions. As the ghost of Uday Hussein, Damron Russel Armstrong is chilling, a tiger in his own right. Armstrong masters Uday’s manic turns and sadistic smiles, enunciating each word so crisply that even the most innocent proclamations drip like poison from his tongue.
As a leper, Manon Halliburton is onstage for less time than it typically takes to find a parking space near the theater, but her moaning Arabic speeches — throttled by a gruesome mask of bandages — haunted me long after the show.
This is a dark script, and Joseph’s monologues offer us a lot to chew on: a silent God, a chatterbox tiger, human cruelty dressed with the divine. But the play’s most affecting moments are often its least intelligible. Much of the dramatic dialogue occurs entirely in Arabic, and Musa frustrates us — and the U.S. soldiers — with simple translations that we sense don’t capture every intended meaning. It’s the right dramatic choice to avoid momentum-sucking repetition, and it adds to the play’s jazzy, at times intentionally dissonant structure.
Some truths, after all, can’t be expressed with language. That’s another of the play’s themes, best embodied by a scene in which Tom asks Musa to explain a hand job to an Iraqi prostitute. “This is a crude act,” the interpreter protests. “It doesn’t need to be explained.”
Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo is full of crude acts, and it raises aching questions that it neither answers nor explains. Human excuses serve only so well. War is hell. Zoo is hell. And even ghosts tremble at the roar of the tiger, the cry of its prey.
