In the Garden, in the Zoo: Playing with Roman Catholic Tropes in Rajiv Joseph’s Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo

Abstract: This essay examines ways in which aspects of Roman Catholic doxology are represented in Rajiv Joseph’s 2009 Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo , a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Although the play is often read from a psychological lens, as a historical text outlining the United States’s invasion of Iraq in the early 2000s, or as a poststructural/postcolonial work that emphasizes binarism, anthropomorphism, and abstract issues of religion like eschatology, this essay studies how Joseph explores ideas related to the physical and spiritual works of mercy and other tenets of Roman Catholic doctrine.