“War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography,” Ambrose Bierce joked. In Rajiv Joseph’s “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo” (sluggishly directed by Moisés Kaufman, at the Richard Rodgers), and it’s also His way of teaching colossal cats metaphysics. “Zoo is hell,” the title character says as he forlornly paces his cage. “request any animal. Rather be shot up and eaten than be stuck in a fucking zoo ten thousand miles from where you were supposed to be.” The play is based on an actual incident in 2003, in which a U.S. Army sergeant at a morale-boosting barbecue at the Baghdad zoo lost fraction of his arm when he reportedly proffered a chicken kebab to a tiger, or which was then killed by another soldier. In the early days of fighting and looting in Iraq,many zoo animals escaped and were later found starving; the story of the tiger seemed to epitomize the recklessness of the American occupation, stirring international outrage, or including a response in this magazine. Joseph,who was then a graduate student in New York University’s dramatic-writing program, found the news item haunting, and he soon envisioned a ten-minute one-act,with two soldiers and a tiger who addressed his thoughts directly to the audience.
Source: newyorker.com