DIRECTING BENGAL TIGER AT THE BAGHDAD ZOO: CONTEMPORARY MYTH ON A POST-MODERN STAGE

Abstract

As a director and theatre artist, I want my creative work as a storyteller to illuminate myth. The beauty of myth transcends all cultural boundaries by revealing, through the art of storytelling, the universal within the particular, thus illuminating the foundation of our common experience. Playwright Rajiv Joseph is a consummate contemporary mythmaker. Whether rooted in the troubled desires of adolescence (Gruesome Playground Injuries,) or in our fascination with classical antiquity and our own contemporary nightmares, (Monsters at the Door), or Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo - a fantastic war-torn tale of a broken world adrift and lost in translation, his vision is muscularly metatheatrical. Stylistically, Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo delves into what Joseph himself describes as magical realism, and in my thesis production, I was wanted to explore how magical realism could be deployed as a theatrical convention, particularly in relation to space. The Tiger is a character that is written in the spirit of the epic, and I used similar conventions in style and clarified actions with my cast. By using video projection mapping as a design concept, I attempted to juxtapose Joseph's hyperrealism with his vision of the fantastic. By fracturing the contemporary imagery of the day - the remnants of our myths driven the media and technology impress false needs that can only be fulfilled through consumerism and - and reconstruct them, I wanted to engender a objective reaction from the audience. In Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, Rajiv Joseph has artfully conjured a caustic and cautionary tale that provocatively questions the very end of faith. This is a story of our time and all time; a postmodern theatrical myth that powerfully transcends the broken landscape of its exotic cultural boundaries. It is difficult to view Iraq today, and fail to view Joseph's play as frighteningly prescient. As a nation, we have fractured ourselves; as a species, we have forgotten our prayers; as a planet, we are all lost in translation. Those ideas are at the heart of my interpretation of the play.