Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo

Robin Williams is not my favorite actor by any stretch of the imagination. When I heard he was making his Broadway acting debut in Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo…as the tiger, I thought, “Well, there’s one less show I’ll feel compelled to see.

Then I saw Gruesome Playground Injuries by the same playwright, Rajiv Joseph, and I loved it. Everyone else hated it, it seemed, but I thought it was a wonderful, frank, funny, disturbing, if a bit thin, romantic dramedy about self-destruction, flesh wounds, and love. You know how these things go.

So I bought and read Bengal Tiger in the hopes that I wouldn’t like it and would thus avoid “the Robin Williams play.” I didn’t hate it. Off to the play it was.

Long story short: tiger in a zoo during the war attacks soldiers caring for it, eats one of their hands, and is shot dead (that’s scene one, so no spoilers, really). The ghost of the tiger haunts his killer, a dim-witted American soldier who works with an Iraqi translator who used to be the gardener for Uday and Qusay Hussein. The soldier who lost his hand was actually the one who killed Uday whose ghost haunts the gardener/translator. Over the course of the play…well, pretty much everyone dies. And philosophizes.

There’s a lot about the writing here that’s brilliantly done. It’s blackly comic and manages to work through incredibly complicated ideas without ever seeming preachy. I did have problems with the production, though. This scores highest when it’s also at its bleakest. Uday Hussein is the most riveting character on stage which was fascinating since I feel like putting him into the play as a character is the ballsiest of choices. Hrach Titzian (besides having the best name) plays him with a scary intensity and an even scarier sense of humor. It’s a perfect performance. Musa, the translator, is wonderfully complex—a man who sees himself as an artist, having dedicated himself to a stunning topiary garden that makes up much of the set decoration, but who decides to work for the American military and sees the possibility of ending up bereft, having lost everything when the war is over due to his penchant for “always working for the wrong people.” Arian Moayed plays him with dignity even when he’s being slightly pathetic, and it just works so well.

I liked the dopey American soldier least, and that was entirely unexpected. On the page, he was charming and affable, dim-witted but sympathetic, trapped in a war that is much bigger and more confusing than he is prepared to process. Brad Fleischer plays him nicely and finds very sweet and very funny moments, but I just didn’t find the character as convincing as he was when I read him. Which really made me wonder how much of my response was based on expectations from having read the play.

And that brings us back to Robin Williams. Blissfully, he avoids going full Robin and playing the tiger as, y’know…him. It’s a much more subdued performance than I expected, which I was delighted by. Except it was almost too much of a good thing, and the character started to play a little flat. He was less melancholy than I hoped and more affectless. Pulling off “tiger ghost” can’t be easy, and I do appreciate that he almost got there. It just didn’t really register.

In the end, the play just felt a bit less than I expected it to. The pieces didn’t quite add up. And I noticed that just like Joseph’s other play that I saw, it just kind of ended. He doesn’t seem to have really identified the difference between an ending and a stopping. I’m fine with something open-ended, but it’s something else to just get a blackout and that feeling of, “Uh…is that it? Are we done?” If there were cheap seats, I’d tell people to go see this. I don’t know that it’s really worth full price. Which isn’t the worst thing, but it’s a disappointment considering how wonderful I think it could have been.