"Bengal Tiger" and the Abu Ghraib Prison

The titular big cat in Rajiv Joseph's distinctive drama “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo” is a laconic, fatalistic type, whom we first meet inside a cage in the bombed-out Baghdad Zoo guarded by an edgy pair of U.S. Marines scared by what they've experienced as part of their ill-defined mission to Iraq and unsure whether their job is to liberate or loot.

“Bengal Tiger” is about many things: the war in Iraq, of course; the impact of conflict on soldiers; the difficulty of surviving with your body and your dignity attached; and the horrors of destroying an ancient culture (the zoo is, in many ways, a metaphor for all the Iraqi assets, be they antiquities or living people, in great peril).

Reference:  At Lookingglass, a tiger tale set in Iraq.

I discovered this play in the Theater in Chicago community on Google+, and it looks to be quite an intense drama.

I was traveling between the US and the Middle East, where I was actively consulting, in the lead-up to the Iraqi War; the tragicomic "Mission Accomplished" pronouncement by then-President George Bush; and the repeated atrocities in post-combat Iraq.  In particular, I was managing a project for Saudi Aramco in Bahrain when the Abu Ghraib prisoner torture surfaced, and shamed the US and the victims of its abusive soldiers.

I was conducting a program briefing, when one of the Saudi managers made a catty remark.  I must've smiled, thinking it was a joke.  It was not, as he repeated his remark twice more, and while his tone was never harsh, he was clearly very angry about the Abu Ghraib incident.  Forthrightly I kept all of us focused on the briefing, and kept going.  Thankfully the gentleman stopped, and there were no issues over the four-day program.

JJ Phillips, as Kev, and Anish Jethmalani, as Musa

At the start of the evening, our narrator, played by Troy West, makes the ill-considered decision, being hungry and all, to bite off the hand of one of his guards (played, sturdily, by Walter Owen Briggs). That leads the other, younger guard (the lively JJ Phillips) to blow the tiger away. But the beast is only killed in one layer of reality. He continues to pad his way through the soldiers' dreams.