Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo at Crow’s Theatre
Photo by Dahlia Katz
Bengal Tiger is an odd beast. The Pulitzer-nominated play, set in Baghdad just after the 2003 American invasion of Iraq, stars an audience-addressing tiger (Kristen Thomson).
That concept would be enough for most plays. But Bengal Tiger pushes further. Just minutes after we meet Tiger, she bites off the hand of Tom (Andrew Chown), a US Marine who stuck his hand into her cage to feed her; and in response, Tom’s partner, Kev (Christopher Allen), shoots her. With a golden gun.
Then, Tiger dies, becomes a ghost, slinks through the bars of her cage, takes control of the theatrical space, and haunts Kev.
This is all in the first ten minutes of the two act Bengal Tiger. What follows is more violence, more death, and, yes: more ghosts.
And though each of these ghosts seems to haunt one person, they flow in and out of the space, brushing shoulders as they take turns speaking to the haunted. At one point, Iraqi translator Musa (Ahmed Moneka), the closest thing Bengal Tiger has to a protagonist, asks one of the ghosts how their ghostliness functions. The ghost’s response? “I don’t know the fucking rules.”
That tracks: the rules of Bengal Tiger’s theatrical world are porous, continually (d)evolving, and often nonsensical. Which makes a whole lot of sense for a play about a senselessly violent war.
Accordingly, this production leans into that violence at every turn: director Rouvan Silogix wrings as much adrenaline as possible out of every scene, the actors blast the stakes through the roof, John Gzowski’s sound design roars, and there’s a whole lot of yelling.
While this maximalist approach may be overwhelming for some, it’s also quite moving at times: this is a play of fragments — fragmented relationships, conversations, cities, minds — and this production smashes those fragments together with immense force. Hearts break, golden toilet seats are lost, sand falls from the sky, and we’re all just along for the ride. The people who have the power to stop this chaos are not here.
The first act is fragmentary, but it feels linear. In each scene, the play — and the production — builds on its ideas. Adds new ones. But the second act doesn’t seem to offer much else. It takes already introduced concepts and splinters them further. This sudden stasis threatens the show’s momentum, but it is also admirable: playwright Rajiv Joseph seems eager to challenge, complexify, and deepen his existing theatrical world. It’s not to be taken granted. It threatens collapse.
Bengal Tiger drops us into an already fragmented city and violently rips it into even smaller fragments. It’s a lot — but maybe it needs to be.