2011.03.05: March 5, 2011: Senegal RPCV Rajiv Joseph is a fresh and compelling voice in theater

Peace Corps Online: Directory: Senegal: Peace Corps Senegal : Peace Corps Senegal: Newest Stories: 2011.03.05: March 5, 2011: Senegal RPCV Rajiv Joseph is a fresh and compelling voice in theater

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With the world premier of his play "The North Pool," critics say Senegal RPCV Rajiv Joseph is a fresh and compelling voice in theater

With the world premier of his play The North Pool, critics say Senegal RPCV Rajiv Joseph is a fresh and compelling voice in theater

Fresh out of college, he was serving a three-year stint in the Peace Corps, working in a tiny village in Senegal where no one spoke English but him. Observant by nature, he took up writing in a journal at the end of every day. The discipline stuck. So did the fascination with the power of language. "It felt a little like being a child again, because your language skills are on the level of a 4-year-old, so the adults kind of ignore you, but the children cluster around you telling you what everything is called," says Joseph, sitting in a sun-dappled courtyard at Palo Alto's Lucie Stern Theatre. His play "The North Pool" is about to have its world premiere there in a TheatreWorks production. "Travel takes you out of your comfort zone. It made me think about America and America's place in the world in a new way," he continues. The hotshot playwright burst onto the scene as a Pulitzer finalist last year for "Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo," a haunting riff on the war in Iraq now headed to Broadway starring Robin Williams. His twisted love story "Gruesome Playground Injuries" is playing off-Broadway. In "The North Pool," he again plunges us into a dark netherworld where the bizarre rubs elbows with the mundane, and morality is a moving target.

With the world premier of his play "The North Pool," critics say Senegal RPCV Rajiv Joseph is a fresh and compelling voice in theater

Rajiv Joseph: A fresh and compelling voice in theater

By Karen D'Souza
kdsouza@mercurynews.com

Posted: 03/05/2011 12:00:00 PM PST
Updated: 03/06/2011 04:03:28 AM PST

Rajiv Joseph found his voice as a writer while living in West Africa.

Fresh out of college, he was serving a three-year stint in the Peace Corps, working in a tiny village in Senegal where no one spoke English but him. Observant by nature, he took up writing in a journal at the end of every day. The discipline stuck. So did the fascination with the power of language.

"It felt a little like being a child again, because your language skills are on the level of a 4-year-old, so the adults kind of ignore you, but the children cluster around you telling you what everything is called," says Joseph, sitting in a sun-dappled courtyard at Palo Alto's Lucie Stern Theatre. His play "The North Pool" is about to have its world premiere there in a TheatreWorks production.

"Travel takes you out of your comfort zone. It made me think about America and America's place in the world in a new way," he continues.

The mysterious nature of storytelling is now one of the central themes in his growing body of work, a category-defying canon in which red-hot topics often are framed by magical realism. Welcome to a quirky universe brimming with dismembered heads, talking tigers and ghostly figures.

The hotshot playwright burst onto the scene as a Pulitzer finalist last year for "Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo," a haunting riff on the war in Iraq now headed to Broadway starring Robin Williams. His twisted love story "Gruesome Playground Injuries" is playing off-Broadway. In "The North Pool," he again plunges us into a dark netherworld where the bizarre rubs elbows with the mundane, and morality is a moving target.

"This is no ordinary playwright," says Robert Kelley, artistic director of TheatreWorks. "Rajiv is both an engaging and provocative new voice in the American theater. Each play moves in fresh and unexpected directions, yet each seems to capture the essence of life in our times. His vision moves rapidly from the closely observed detail of everyday events and conversations to a world of metaphor and universal truths."

A soft-spoken fellow who writes for Showtime's dark comedy "Nurse Jackie" and teaches at New York University, Joseph seems poised to be a big name in the American theater some day soon.

During a break in rehearsals for "North Pool," Joseph bemoans having to jet back to New York to work on "Bengal." He is thrilled to get to work with Williams (who will play the title tiger) but regrets having to leave "North Pool" at this point in the process.

Giving birth to a new play is a painstaking task, more grunt work than glamour. In rehearsals, the director and actors go through the text line by line, musing on every comma, pondering every pause. This is their last chance to pick the playwright's brain before he takes off.

"I am suffering from some separation anxiety," Joseph says ruefully. "Leaving is scary. It's hard to let go. We are at a very intense part of rehearsals. We discuss, I rewrite, we try out the new pages and then we do it all over again. I like to rewrite right up until the deadline."

Given the brutal and perverse violence that flows through his works, his mild-mannered personality comes as something of a surprise. In "Gruesome Playground Injuries," two masochistic young lovebirds are turned on by open sores and gouged-out eye sockets.

"I have a macabre sensibility, and I think violence impacts us much more deeply and viscerally in the theater than in movies or television, where we are desensitized by it," says Joseph, 36, who grew up in Ohio and now lives in New York. "But I don't believe in violence just for its shock value."

"The North Pool," a cat-and-mouse thriller about a Syrian student raising suspicions at a suburban American high school, was inspired by Joseph's fears about the rise of xenophobia today.

"I started out writing a parable about Guantanamo with a sort of sinister interrogation scene at the core, but I'm not satisfied with parables. I don't want to write a play with an agenda. I do want to illuminate the issues of the day."

The specter of racial profiling remains the subtext of the play. But it's suspense that makes "The North Pool" ripple with electricity.

"You live this play, rather than simply watch it," Kelley says. "It has the twists and turns of a great thriller. Sometimes you can barely remember to breathe. Seeing or reading even one of his plays convinces you that he is tapped into the pulse of contemporary life and politics, and is acutely aware of the damage that can be done simply by living in these complex times.

"His plays live on subtext and metaphor, and his bloodline as a playwright flows directly from Albee and Sam Shepherd -- with a fair amount of Martin McDonough in there as well."

Keeping the audience off-balance is a hallmark of his work. His elusive narratives segue from the blood-spattered and the hard-hitting to the absurd with characters as delicate and complex as pieces of origami, an art form he muses on in "Animals Out of Paper."

"What sets him apart, I suppose, is his instinctive sense of structure," says Amy Glazer, who directed "Animals" in its regional premiere at SF Playhouse. "I also think what sets him apart is his ability to create worlds and pieces that can be experienced both on a metaphoric and poetic level but also in a very naturalistic, realistic, authentic and recognizable world."

"When I first came upon his work, I thought here was somebody with a great theatrical imagination, a young writer with a real ideas for a new vision of the stage," says San Jose Rep artistic director Rick Lombardo. "He sees the great things that the theater can do, the symbols, the metaphors, the language."

Primal urges always get the best of Joseph's characters, despite their civilized veneers. This sense of psychological depth grounds the surreal elements of his work. Right now, he is still trying to drill down into the minds of the two lost souls in "The North Pool" to give the play more heft.

"It felt a little lightweight; it needed more substance," he says. "Some parts were flimsy and needed to be beefed up. It needed 10 more pounds of muscle, not fat."

One of the things that gives the play gravitas is its bravery about exploring the murky politics of race. That fearlessness comes naturally to Joseph, whose father is from India, while his mother is of European descent. His father's experiences as an Indian college student in the U.S. led to Joseph's early play "Huck & Holden."

"Being mixed-race has always been a part of my identity. You are never fully one thing or the other. You always feel a little apart, a little bit of an outsider, even when you are with your own family. That's an interesting perspective for looking at the world."

Perhaps that's one reason unexpected juxtapositions are a hallmark of his plays. Certainly he combines the irreverent perspective of youth with a classicist's appreciation for well-crafted plots. Texting, sex videos and pop culture figure prominently in "The North Pool." "Bengal Tiger" is as influenced by movie iconography, from "Terminator" to "Pulp Fiction," as by "Hamlet."

"He explores the complexities of grief and loss as only an old soul can. I was stunned to see how beautiful and young he was," says Glazer, professor of theater and film at San Jose State University. "He is totally one of the next big things. He is one of the truest chroniclers of contemporary culture we have."




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Story Source: Mercury News

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