Archive - April 6, 2011

Robin Williams is on Broadway in the New York premiere of Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, a play written by RPCV Rajiv Joseph (Senegal 1996-98). The story was the winner of the 2009 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) award for Outstanding New American Play and was a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Today, Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo is at the Richard Rodgers Theater in New York for a limited run. It stars Robin Williams in tattered clothes as the eponymous tiger, roaming the streets of present-day Baghdad.   The lives of two American Marines and an Iraqi translator are forever changed by an encounter with this quick-witted tiger who haunts the streets of war-torn Baghdad attempting to find meaning, forgiveness and redemption amidst the city’s ruins. The New York Times writes, “This boldly imagined, harrowing and surprisingly funny drama is wonderfully daring.” In a . . .

The Civilized World:  A Novel in Stories by Susi Wyss (Central African Republic, 1990–92) Henry Holt and Company $15.00 226 pages March, 2011 Reviewed by  Mary-Ann Tirone Smith (Cameroon 1965–67) IN HER DEBUT NOVEL, The Civilized World:  A Novel in Stories, Susi Wyss infuses her characters with the same affability and intimate pain that Alexander McCall Smith infused Precious Ramotswe, his #1 Private Lady Detective, but on a much wider and nuanced scale. Wyss has created contemporary African characters who are not look-alike, one-size-fits-all pieces of cardboard and too, American characters with equally distinguishable lives. The Americans live side-by-side with the Africans under circumstances both provocative and reasonable. Whether Ghanaian or U.S. military brat, Malawian or Washingtonian, each is a unique personality facing conflicts and heartbreaks and successes, sagas which will pull you into the page. Here is Ophelia, newly arrived in Malawi, wife of an American Embassy drone, making plans . . .