"Bengal Tiger At the Baghdad Zoo' in New York

Lights up on a cage. Two Marines stand guard with machine guns. The cage's bars are twisted and gnarled, and beware — the beast within it is about to be unleashed on us. He's Robin Williams, one of America's finest actors, playing, of all creatures, a Bengal tiger.

And not any normal tiger— no, a fast-talking tiger with a foul, funny mouth that's beyond sanitizing. And he's about to let loose a political/philosophical narrative that pierces to the heart of a nation that may or may not know that it's still in a post-war-trauma Purgatory.

The tiger's creator, the young American playwright Rajiv Joseph, has set his searing, absurdist tragicomedy on war and violence in (where else?) Iraq following the American invasion in 2003. His endlessly imaginative, thought-provoking and haunting new play is called, aptly, Bengal Tiger At The Baghdad Zoo, now in an open-ended run on Broadway.

His cast includes a cadre of assorted tortured souls"“ both man and beast"“ who wander the burning streets of ravaged Baghdad, looking for a variety of things— from ammunition to gold to prostitutes to God. Some pursue prey and others in turn are themselves pursued by strange apparitions.

Shot by Marines

One of those apparitions is our Bengal tiger, the leading character, who has gotten himself in a spot of trouble. In the very first scene, he bites off the hand of Tom, one of his guards, and so the other Marine, Kev, shoots him dead. To the tiger's surprise, he finds himself wandering around the rest of the play as a ghost, through the Purgatory that is now ruined Baghdad, searching for a meaning for his sorry state. This transformation is fortuitous for us, because his philosophical musings are the soul of the play, as well as the primary source of its scorching black humor.

Moreover, this existential tiger has not been shot with any gun; it's a Golden Gun, a trophy that Tom has snatched during the invasion of the Hussein brothers' lavish palace days earlier. This "smoking gun" serves as the catalyst for the play's plot. Tom returns from the US with a prosthetic hand to reclaim his Golden Gun, but it's now in the real hands of Musa, the gentle gardener of the Husseins' palace and the play's only non-violent character. Tom's trophy was left to Musa by Kev, who, haunted by the ghost of the tiger he has killed, suffers from post-war psychotic stress syndrome.

Saddam's psychopath son

Of special significance is the play's one historic character: Saddam's dead son Uday Hussein, a ghost like the Bengal tiger, who brings back the nightmare of the early weeks of Iraqi that we've buried in our collective memory. Uday is one of the most lurid characters to stalk the contemporary stage, an alleged psychopath who once bludgeoned his father's personal food taster to death in front of horrified guests, and who was known to capture women on the street and rape them, or murder men for failing to salute him or not allowing him to dance with the man's wife.

In the end, none of Joseph's characters can escape violence. The stage is filled with either predators or victims, living or ghosts, to the point that we can't tell the difference. Baghdad has become a modern Dante's Inferno of America's own making, where tortured souls wander through the burning streets.

Shades of Ionesco

So what's so funny about Bengal Tiger?

It's an enormously entertaining piece of absurdist theater, much the way Martin McDonagh's scathing black comedies about violence in Irish culture are entertaining, or Ionesco's shocking political plays are hilarious. For example, an entire scene is devoted to a riotously profane knock-knock joke that Musa earnestly tries to translate, in order to better communicate with the occupying American forces.

"Knock knock."

"Who's there?"

"Operation Iraqi Freedom."

"Operation Iraqi Freedom who?" etc.

The chief humor engine of the play, is of course, the Bengal tiger, played by Robin Williams with profane, razor-sharp wit and scathing brio, even while dressed in civilian clothes, with only a scruffy beard to suggest any beastliness"“ a shrewd directorial choice that only heightens Williams's effectiveness as the author's mouthpiece.

Failed vegetarian

After the tiger becomes a ghost, he spends the rest of the first act speaking directly to the audience, trying to justify his violent lifestyle (the children he's killed, the animals he's eaten, etc.). His justifications, of course, are absurd "“ and, at the same time, utterly logical. Later, deep into the philosophically rich Act II, the Tiger tries to eschew his predatory nature by becoming a vegetarian, only to discover that he hates vegetables. Finally he rants indignantly at God: "You knew I was a tiger when you made me, motherfucker!"

The play's ultimate surprise is that its moral center is not gentle Musa but rather the formerly predatory but ultimately God-seeking Bengal tiger, who spends the entire second act atoning for his sins. At the crux of this tiger's philosophical searchings lies the question: Who is responsible for all this carnage and destruction? Man? Man-as-beast? Or Man's Creator?

Ultimately, our tiger gets God's answer, although it's not the one he (or the audience) expected.