Theatre in Review: Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo (Richard Rodgers Theater)

	Arian Moayed and Sheila Vand. Photo: Carol Rosegg

"This place is lousy with ghosts," remarks the title character in Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo. The place he's talking about is Baghdad in 2003, in the months following Operation Iraqi Freedom. The comment turns out to be something of an understatement. Thanks to the fertile imagination of Rajiv Joseph, the author, Bengal Tiger offers an illuminating magical-realist view of that controversial war. In his telling, Baghdad is a place where the dead walk, wild animals wrestle with ontological questions, and the past and present are spliced together in a loop in which tragedy repeats itself endlessly.

The curtain rises on the title character -- persuasively impersonated by Robin Williams without benefit of animal costume or makeup -- in his cage at the Baghdad Zoo. Tiger's daily life has been altered beyond recognition, however. The city has been invaded, and, thanks to a lack of preparation on the part of American forces, chaos reigns. All major public institutions have been looted, and the zoo is no exception. As Tiger notes, all of the zoo's lions -- he wryly notes that all of them are named Leo -- have escaped, running off to an uncertain fate. (He adds that he's not surprised, as the lions were never very bright, anyway.) If only food would arrive, he'd be content to stay put.

Tiger is being guarded by a couple of U.S. soldiers. Kev, the younger and more naive of the two, yearns to prove himself in combat. Tom, his companion, has seen plenty, including a raid on the home occupied by Saddam Hussein's sons, from which he has stolen a solid gold gun and toilet seat. His plan is to sell them on Ebay, earning enough to take life easy forever after. Such hopes are dashed then Tiger, maddened by hunger, bites off Tom's right hand and is shot to death by Kev.

In Joseph's telling, however, death is only a provisional state; Tiger instantly reappears as a ghost. He is also fundamentally transformed in other ways: where he once worried only about food and sleep, he is now plagued by questions about the meaning of life and the existence of God. Meanwhile, Kev, having pocketed the golden gun, stages a raid on a Baghdad home, accompanied by Musa, his official interpreter. The event is a disaster -- as the terrified inhabitants correctly point out, there is nothing to find -- and Kev, stunned by a vision of Tiger, suffers a nervous breakdown.

This is only the beginning of a roundelay of misunderstanding and misfortune that will substantially add to the growing legion of ghosts walking the streets of Baghdad, importuning God for an explanation for the violence and squalor that surrounds them. Kev, his nerves stretched beyond endurance and shattered by Tom's refusal to help him, commits suicide. Tom, back in Baghdad with an artificial hand and tormented by guilt for turning Kev away in his hour of need, searches frantically for the golden gun, which has fallen into the hands of Musa. The object has a particular meaning for Musa, who, unbeknownst to the others, served as Uday Hussein's gardener; he is seared by memories of his sister's rape and murder at the hands of Saddam's vicious offspring.

And so it goes, with one disastrous encounter following another in an environment where death provides no escape, only a halfway house where one can contemplate God's silence. Joseph's highly original, blackly funny tale pits American invaders -- who think evil can be bombed to bits and replaced by a functioning democracy in a few weeks -- against the Iraqis, who know that history is something you cannot approach with an eraser. "Americans always think that when things die, they go away," smirks Uday Hussein, yet another of the play's legion of ghosts.

Under the direction of Moisés Kaufman, what might have become a star vehicle is treated as the tight ensemble piece it must be to succeed. Williams' standup and improv skills are put to good use as Tiger, creating a half-human, half-feral presence -- but he rightly never dominates the action. Instead, Tiger functions as a kind of chorus, tracking the downward progress of the other characters and offering increasingly mordant commentary on the nature of a universe that has room for such barbarity. Glenn Davis is fine as Tom, especially in a bizarre and gripping sequence in which he forces Musa to translate his special requests to a young prostitute. (No longer able to masturbate himself, thanks to his prosthetic hand, he wants the girl to do it for him.) Brad Fleischer falls apart spectacularly as Kev, a boy in a man's body who is in no way ready to face the horrors that constitute daily life in Baghdad. Arian Moayed wins us over as Musa, who signs on for more than be bargained for when he became a translator. ("I always work the wrong people. I always serve the tyrants," he notes bitterly.) In one of the play's most gripping moments, he hyperventilates in terror at the mere sight of Uday's golden gun, his wordless reaction evoking a multitude of terrors.

Derek McLane's large-scale setting consists of a series of distressed building facades, with a two-level interior that rolls in at stage left. In an especially magical moment, Uday Hussein's topiary garden, in which bushes have been trimmed by Musa into various animal shapes, appears out of the darkness. This is only one of many effective moments created by David Landers' tightly controlled lighting design. David Zinn's costumes mix military outfits with authentic-looking outfits for the Iraqi characters. Acme Sound Partners fills the air with a battery of effects ranging from sirens to bullets to explosions to calls to prayer.

People like to make cynical comments about Broadway being an entirely star-driven environment, but Bengal Tiger is fine case of a star putting himself at the disposal of a new playwright whose vision is distinctive and large enough for a Broadway house. (Kaufman has a knack for these projects; two seasons ago, he staged his own extremely interesting, play, 33 Variations, featuring a fine performance by Jane Fonda.) Joseph is an unusual writer -- I've seen three of his plays and each is startlingly different from the rest -- whose ability to treat this material with such a rich imagination and sense of the theatre can mean only one thing: We have been gifted with a major new talent.--David Barbour