Customer Reviews

Gruesome Playground Injuries; Animals Out of Paper; Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo: Three Plays

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I started with Greusome Playground Injuries and read the plays in order. They get better and better. Seriously some of the best play writing I've read. LOVE these plays! And I would LOVE to see them on a stage!

The gem in this collection of three Rajiv Joseph plays is "Bengal Tiger in the Baghdad Zoo," a marvelously theatrical script in an era when most U.S. playwrights are consumed with naturalistic portrayals of family problems in America. He's a brave writer, willing to create discomfort in audiences to make us confront difficult truths. In discussing how he came to write what he rightly calls a "surrealist" play, he recalls how he first heard of the event that became the springboard for his story: "When I read the article, 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 [in Iraq] at the time."
The play is based on an actual event -- the killing of the tiger in the Baghdad zoo following the U.S. invasion -- but the most interesting structural aspect of the script is that Joseph makes the tiger the narrator who leads us through the world of violence that was (and is) Iraq. (For more on this use of narrators, see Playwriting Seminars 2.0: A Handbook on the Art and Craft of Dramatic Writing with an Introduction to Screenwriting.) Using a narrator is a common device, but in this case after the tiger is killed, he becomes a ghost-narrator interacting with both the living and the dead in addition to us in the audience. The message of the play -- the way extreme violence affects and changes people -- is emotionally compelling, but also highly complex: the tiger at one point calls to God, demanding to know how He could make the tiger a predator and then punish him for being one.
The tiger is not the only predator among these characters -- and there is a sense of the law of the jungle operating within the play's action. It's a gripping read, perhaps even more so than when staged. And Joseph is a playwright to watch with anticipation for his next plays.

I've seen two out of three of these plays performed live (Gruesome Playground Injuries and Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo), and am currently reading Animals out of Paper. From when I saw Gruesome Playground Injuries, the person that I went with asked me "is this something you'd go see again?" and I said probably not at that point. However, over the next several days things just sunk in and I realized what a brilliant masterpiece it was. Sadly, I saw it towards the end of its run at Second Stage and didn't get to see it again, but it'd be wonderful to see another director conceive the production, because you can go so many different ways with the staging.

Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo was another production that I admired, and I saw it on it's closing weekend on Broadway. Beyond the brilliant writing, the performance was awesome - Robin Williams really did well!

I'm currently reading Animals out of Paper (not quite done yet), and I would LOVE to see a production of it. The relationship between Ilana and Suresh is extremely complex and nuanced, and Suresh is a very interesting character in his own right, damaged yet extremely talented, much like Ilana, but I won't give away much more than that :)

I bought this book because I wanted to read this particular play as it is running on Broadway right now. I admire Robin Williams and the comments piqued my interest I heard the comments on the Today Show. I read the play and find it very avant garde. At times because of the bad language I felt like I did when I read Free Lunch by William Boroughs back in the sixties when I was a college student. The message was clear at the end of the play. Although it was sad, I agree with the author's viewpoint. War will always be with us. I have not read the other two plays in this book yet. The play I read was Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo.