Drama in a dead tiger's tale

It was a tiny article in a newspaper that caught the attention of playwright Rajiv Joseph.

An American soldier stationed in Baghdad reportedly had killed a Bengal tiger at the local zoo after the animal maimed a colleague who was trying to feed it.

The tiger had bitten off the man's finger and then clawed his arm before the soldier shot it dead, according to the zoo manager.

The article, which ran in September 2003, inspired Joseph to write a play about the incident.

Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, which opened recently at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City, California, contains the scene described in the newspaper, although the writer has changed the chewed-off finger to a severed hand.

There is no shortage of eye-averting moments in Joseph's play. Gunfire is plentiful and deaths are common. But the play's dominant mood is philosophical, almost existential.

In fact, Joseph said he wanted to create what might seem to some like a contradiction in terms — an apolitical drama about Iraq.

“I don't really consider this a war play. The title depoliticises it,'' he explained. “There are scenes that depict wartime conflict but the play has to do with other themes.''

Chief among those are the consequences of miscommunication and the persistence of traumatic memories.

The play follows the relationship between a translator named Mousa (Aryan Moayed), a pair of American soldiers (Glenn Davis and Brad Fleischer) and the ghost of the tiger (Kevin Tighe) that the latter two killed.

“I was touched by the tiger's death in a way I couldn't locate. I thought it was a tragic thing, which was strange because there were far worse things going on at the time,'' the playwright said.

Tiger is riding a wave of positive buzz — the playwright won two grant awards for his work before it even opened.

The drama took its first steps at the Lark Theatre Company in New York and has been workshopped extensively at theatre organisations around the United States.

But Joseph, 34, is leaving little to chance. A few weeks before the opening night, he was still rewriting and rearranging scenes, and conferring with director Moises Kaufman.

“I always have a hard time finding plays I want to direct but I recognised a new voice that was thrilling,'' said Kaufman, who was nominated for a 2009 Tony Award for his play 33 Variations.

After a rehearsal at the Kirk Douglas, the playwright and director were discussing the final scene.

Scattered on the rehearsal-room tables were a few nonfiction books on the Iraq conflict: The Long Road Home by Martha Raddatz, Generation Kill by Evan Wright and The Devil's Double by Latif Yahya.

But a more telling reference item was a DVD of the 2002 film Marooned in Iraq directed by Bahman Ghobadi.

The movie is a serio-comic tale set during the Iraq war that follows a Kurdish man and his two sons as they search for a missing family member.

“They're like the Three Stooges,'' Joseph explained. He said the film's incongruous sense of humour mixed with philosophical underpinnings was helping him write certain scenes of his play.

Despite a stint in the Peace Corps, most of Joseph's professional experience has been confined to the United States.

(He worked in the dot-com field before becoming a writer.) And even though passages of his play are spoken in Iraqi Arabic, he doesn't speak a word of the language.

Born in Ohio, Joseph is of mixed heritage — his father emigrated from India and his mother is of European descent.

He turned to playwriting while pursuing a graduate degree at the New York University and his plays have been produced at small but respected companies.

“Any fears about the ambition of this play had more to do with dramaturgy than politics. I've written a surreal story, so that allows me leeway as an artiste to explore Iraq in my own way.''