The Lady or the Tiger?

IN CASE YOU WERE WONDERING, ME WRITING IN ALL CAPS IS AN
APPROXIMATION OF HOW BENGAL TIGER AT THE
BAGHDAD ZOO SOUNDS. ISN’T IT ANNOYING? DON’T YOU WANT TO COVER YOUR EYES?

That’s enough of that. Unlike director Moisés Kaufman, I
believe in modulation. And a little variety when it comes to the performances
in Rajiv Joseph’s Pulitzer Prize-nominated drama would not have been amiss.

Joseph, who already flopped once this season with Gruesome Playground Injuries, here takes
the shocking stance that war is bad. Yep, war is bad in general, but the Iraq
war is particularly bad because Americans over there are so amped up, mercenary
or stupid that they just can’t control themselves. So they run around, burying
pilfered toilet seats made out of gold, hallucinating the ghost of an upright
tiger and generally acting like ugly Americans.

But Joseph’s play isn’t the thing here—that would be Robin
Williams, making his Broadway debut as the titular animal. Killed in the
opening scene, Williams spends the rest of the show questioning the existence
of God while suffering from a post-mortem existential crisis. His trademark
excesses are tamed (for the moment, but one should check back later in the run)
by an expedient solution: He does a Regis Philbin impression, bellowing out the
final words in mock fury as that philosophical cat. All he needs is a coffee
mug and a perky co-star to make the illusion complete.

Reege vocal tics aside, Williams’ casting throws the play
off balance. A name star in what is not a starring role keeps the audience
wondering why his character disappears for large chunks of the play; another
actor would have kept the focus on the trio of morally ambiguous, ambivalent and
prone-to-screaming men that comprise the heart of Joseph’s play.

Those three are American soldiers Tom (Glenn Davis) and Kev
(Brad Fleischer), and Iraqi translator Musa (Arian Moayed). Tom has no moral
center; Kev is too eye-rollingly stupid to care about; and Musa is deeply
conflicted about the people he has worked with over the course of his career.
First he was Saddam Hussein’s gardener, now he’s working for the Americans. Is
it any wonder he insists on being paid for a favor in weapons and ammo?

Joseph has been riding a wave of publicity this year, but
there’s nothing in Bengal Tiger to
burnish his reputation. He brings a poetic imagery to the world of war-torn
Baghdad (Musa’s ruined topiary garden is a major feature of Derek McLane’s
endlessly fascinating set), but while the way he’s writing is fresh, it’s just
spraying a new scent on the same soldier tropes. Tom, who has lost a hand, is
outfitted with a prosthetic that causes him some emotional turmoil for much of
the play. But Harold Russell did it better in the ’40s in The Best Years of Our Lives.

The problems evident in Joseph’s writing in Gruesome Playground Injuries are on full
display in this more ambitious work, mainly a tendency to skimp on the play’s
architecture in favor of the meatier dramatic moments. We have multiple
instances of sudden, spontaneous bleeding, hauntingly staged by Kaufman, but
Joseph neglects to give us any reason to empathize with Kev or Tom, other than
that they’re American soldiers far from home. (At least in Bengal Tiger, Joseph doesn’t attempt to write a female character,
preferring to play it safe with mere concepts: a virginal memory, a
non-English-speaking whore and a mostly silent leper.) A shared nationality,
however, is not enough to pin camaraderie on. Just ask Musa and his former
boss, Saddam.

Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo

Open run, Richard Rodgers Theatre, 226 W. 46th St. (betw.
B’way & 8th Ave.), 877-250-2929; $74.50–$134.75.