tyger! tyger! burning bright
by Douglas Messerli
Rajiv Joseph Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo / Center Theatre Group/Kirk Douglas
Theatre, May 2009 / the production I saw was at the Center Theatre Group / Mark
Taper Forum, matinee of May 8, 2010
On September 18, 2003, Specialist Keith Mitchell, after sneaking a
cooler with beer into the zoo and drinking a bottle, had his arm severely
mauled by a male Bengal tiger. What happened to enrage the tiger is uncertain,
with varying reports, but two soldiers, hearing Mitchell's scream, ran to help.
One shot at the tiger, but missed; the second fired a pistol and hit the tiger
in the shoulder. The tiger later died of internal bleeding.
The two American soldiers involved in the tiger's death have been tossed
into such a insane world that neither can comprehend how to survive. Tom, the
brighter of the two, has participated in the raid on Uday's and Qusay's homes,
where he evidently shot Uday. From Uday's palace he has stolen two objects, a
gold pistol and a toilet seat also made of gold. Like the old testament
idolaters, Tom looks to these meaningless objects as the answer to his future,
to a life outside of the horrors in which he now finds himself.
Kev is a near idiot, who speaks in an American argot that even he cannot explain. One of the funniest scenes in the play revolves around Musa's attempt to understand the word "bitch," added to sentences, sometimes even endearments. Throughout most of the first act, Kev is like the proverbial Midwesterner who writes letters beginning: "How are you. I am fine."
The tiger changes everything for both. Tom's arm is torn away, and he
must return home for treatment and a prosthetic hand. Kev, as I have mentioned,
loses his mind, convinced he is being haunted by the tiger who follows him
everywhere. Meanwhile, he has lost Tom's golden gun in raid, the fact of which
enrages the returned soldier, and leads, ultimately, to Kev's suicide.
The only one seemingly less haunted—although he does see Kev—is Tom, a
man so deluded and selfish that he hires a prostitute, not for regular sex, but
to jack him off as he was once able to do with his own right hand. He is
determined to retrieve his ill-gotten booty; like the US soldiers he
represents, his only vision for a future is an abstract American dream fueled
by the promise of EBay checks.
When, in a fit of anger and true fear, Musa shoots and kills Tom with
Uday's golden gun, the soldier, unlike the others, does not become a shadow,
but like the lions before him, merely fades into death. In that act, however,
Musa has laid no ghosts to rest, but merely turned into another Uday, a
tortured man who enjoys torturing others. The tiger returns to its primal
needs, feeding on human flesh. The world, as Musa has suggested, is God's only
answer:
God has spoken.
This world—this is what he said.
Whether that is a horrible reality
or a hopeful one depends, it appears, on what each of us makes of our
existence.
Los Angeles, May 15, 2010
Reprinted from USTheater, Opera and Performance (May 2010).
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