Rajiv Joseph
Rajiv Joseph is an acclaimed American playwright born on June 16, 1974, in Cleveland, Ohio. Known for his thought-provoking works, he explores themes of race, identity, and violence, often drawing from his diverse cultural background—his father is Indian and his mother is of European descent. Joseph's career gained notable recognition with his play *Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo*, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2010 and features a unique narrative set against the backdrop of the Iraq War. Over the years, he has won the Obie Award for Best New American Play twice, showcasing his impact on contemporary theater.
After studying creative writing at Miami University and spending time in the Peace Corps in Senegal, Joseph moved to New York City to pursue playwriting. His works, including *Gruesome Playground Injuries* and *Guards at the Taj*, have received critical acclaim and have been produced in prestigious theaters. In addition to his stage contributions, Joseph has written for television series and film. He continues to engage with complex social issues through his writing while living in Brooklyn, New York.
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Subject Terms
Rajiv Joseph
Playwright
- Born: June 16, 1974
- Place of Birth: Cleveland, Ohio
Contribution: Rajiv Joseph is an award-winning playwright whose play Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2010. He has won the Obie Award for Best New American Play twice.
Background
Born on June 16, 1974, in Cleveland, Ohio, Rajiv Joseph deals with issues of race and identity in his work. His exploration of these themes likely stems from the fact that his father is from India and his mother is of European descent. He attended Gesu Catholic School in Cleveland and was fascinated with the rituals of Catholicism. He was even named “Most Likely to Become a Priest” at the age of thirteen, but he was already too interested in singing and musicals to realistically pursue the priesthood. Nonetheless, he incorporates themes from his Catholic upbringing in his plays. He performed in his first musical, Nine, based on the Federico Fellini film 8½, when he was eleven.
Joseph graduated from Miami University in Ohio with a degree in creative writing, though he spent more time participating as a member of the school’s male a cappella group, The Cheezies, than writing. After college, he joined the Peace Corps and spent three years living in Senegal in West Africa. He worked with farmers in a tiny village and chronicled his triumphs and failures with his hosts. The daily account rekindled his love of writing, and he moved to New York City in 2000 with dreams of becoming a writer. In 2002, he enrolled at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where he studied playwriting and screenwriting in the school’s dramatic writing program.
Career
Joseph’s play Huck and Holden, a coming-of-age tale born of his father’s experiences as an Indian college student, premiered at the Cherry Lane Theatre in 2006. His next play, All This Intimacy, a comedy about a young poet who impregnates three women in two weeks, premiered at the McGinn/Cazale Theatre in Manhattan in July of the same year. In October 2007, the Barrow Group Theatre in New York produced the premiere of Joseph’s The Leopard and the Fox. The play is set in Pakistan in 1977 and is about the overthrow of Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Benazir Bhutto’s father.
Joseph developed his play Animals out of Paper as a member of the Playwright’s Workshop at the Lark Play Development Center. It premiered at Second Stage in New York City in August 2008.
Joseph first wrote Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo as a ten-minute play in graduate school. His classmates were less than enthusiastic about the piece, and it sat in his desk drawer until he earned a spot in the Playwright’s Workshop at the Lark two years later. He spent the next three years developing the piece. Bengal Tiger premiered with the Center Theatre Group at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Los Angeles in May 2009. The production moved to the Mark Taper Forum, also in Los Angeles, soon after. The play is about the Iraq War but also deals with the complexities of violence in a strange and dreamlike way. It features a talking tiger in a crumbling Baghdad zoo and the ghost of Saddam Hussein's son, Uday. The play transferred to Broadway with Robin Williams in the role of the tiger; Bengal Tiger premiered at the Richard Rogers Theatre in April 2011 and opened to rave reviews. It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2010.
Joseph found inspiration for his play Gruesome Playground Injuries in a conversation with a friend about a number of strange injuries sustained during his childhood. Joseph took the story to another level, writing a play about two friends who are drawn together at intervals over thirty years by various, and gruesome, injuries. The play premiered in 2009. His play The North Pool, about a Syrian transfer student attending a suburban American high school, premiered at TheatreWorks in Palo Alto, California, in March 2011, earning a Glickman Award that year.
The Monster at the Door premiered at the Alley Theatre in April 2011. A fantastical take on a story about a visual artist who is hired to create a work for a corporate lobby, the play was developed through the Alley’s New Play Initiative. In 2013, Joseph teamed with Tony Award–winning musician Bill Sherman and playwright-lyricist Kirsten Childs to create the musical Fly, which was described as a dark retelling of the story of Peter Pan. The production opened at the Dallas Theater Center in July 2013. That same year, his family drama The Lake Effect had its world premiere at Chicago's Silk Road Rising theater.
Joseph's next play, Guards at the Taj, had its world premiere Off-Broadway at the Atlantic Theater Company's Linda Gross Theater in 2015. Exploring themes such as friendship and duty by focusing on two men assigned to guard the recently finished Taj Mahal, the play was largely well received, earning the 2016 Obie Award for Best New American Play as well as several Lucille Lortel Awards, including for Outstanding Play. His follow-up to this success, Describe the Night, had its official world premiere at Houston's Alley Theatre before premiering Off-Broadway at the Linda Gross Theater in 2017. The production garnered the 2018 Obie Award for Best New American Play.
Like many stage writers, Joseph also writes for the screen. He was a staff writer on seasons three and four (2011–12) of the television show Nurse Jackie. He is also the coauthor, with screenwriter Scott Rothman, of a film called Draft Day (2014), about a fictional Cleveland Browns coach vying for the top pick of the NFL Draft. The pair teamed up once more to cowrite the screenplay for Army of One (2016), starring Nicolas Cage and Russell Brand. He also wrote episodes of Little America (2020), Theater, Interrupted (2021), and Extrapolations (2023). He was nominated for an NAACP Image Award for outstanding writing in a comedy series for the Little America episode "The Manager." He produced and wrote scripts for the 2022-23 miniseries Welcome to Chippendales and the series Dear Edward (2023).
Steppenwolf Theater Company commissioned Joseph to write the play King James, which is about the friendship between Shawn and Matt, two young men in Cleveland, Ohio. The James of the title is basketball star LeBron James, whose 2010 announcement that he was leaving Cleveland to play in Miami, Florida, left Ohio fans devastated. James did not renew his contract in Miami in 2014 and returned to Cleveland. The scope of the play is a dozen years, ending with the 2016 championship season. The world premiere of the work had been planned for the 2019-2020 season, but the COVID-19 pandemic forced Steppenwolf to postpone it until 2022. In 2024, he was at Boise State University conducting a workshop and staging of his play Horoscope.
Impact
Joseph’s plays explore themes of race, ethnicity, and violence through a personal lens. His experiences in the Peace Corps led him to reexamine his own life as an American. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, happened a year after he returned to the United States, and he was horrified and baffled as he watched Muslims, who make up most of the population of Senegal, being maligned in the media for the actions of a few extremists. Joseph has said that he finds it easiest to write when he has an urgent question in his mind; his work could be viewed as meditations on these complex subjects.
Personal Life
Joseph lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Bibliography
Bahr, Sarah. "LeBron Fandom, and the Making of a Friendship in 'King James.'" The New York Times, 10 Mar. 2022, www.nytimes.com/2022/03/10/theater/king-james-play-chicago-steppenwolf.html. Accessed 20 Sept. 2024.
Byerley, Sarah. “The Alley’s Puzzling The Monster at the Door Assumes You Paid Close Attention in High School Mythology.” CultureMap Houston. CultureMap, 21 May 2011. Web. 23 July 2013.
"Department of Theatre, Film and Creative Writing Partners with Sun Valley Playwright's Residency and Award-Winning Playwright Rajiv Joseph." Boise State University, 9 Sept. 2024, www.boisestate.edu/coas/2024/09/09/department-of-theatre-film-and-creative-writing-partners-with-sun-valley-playwrights-residency-and-award-winning-playwright-rajiv-joseph/. Accessed 25 Sept. 2024.
D’Souza, Karen. “Rajiv Joseph: A Fresh and Compelling Voice in Theater.” San Jose Mercury News [CA]. San Jose Mercury News, 5 Mar. 2011. Web. 23 July 2013.
Healy, Patrick. “A Little Good, a Little Evil, a Lot of Ritual.” New York Times. New York Times, 2 Jan. 2011. Web. 22 July 2013.
Healy, Patrick. “Rajiv Joseph Teams on a Musical.” New York Times. New York Times, 30 Mar. 2012. Web. 22 July 2013.
Hetrick, Adam. “World Premiere of Rajiv Joseph’s The Monster at the Door Bows at the Alley Theatre April 29.” Playbill.com. Playbill, 29 Apr. 2011. Web. 23 July 2013.
Joseph, Rajiv. “I Interview Playwrights Part 91.” Interview by Adam Szymkowicz. Adam Szymkowicz (blog), 10 Nov. 2009. Web. 23 July 2013.
La Rocco, Claudia. “An Old Story, with No End in Sight.” New York Times. New York Times, 31 Oct. 2007. Web. 23 July 2013.
Murray, Matthew. “All This Intimacy.” Talkinbroadway.com. TalkinBroadway.com, 26 July 2006. Web. 23 July 2013.
"Rajiv Joseph." IMDb, 2024, www.imdb.com/name/nm4396670/. Accessed 20 Sept. 2024.
Rizzo, Frank. Review of Describe the Night, directed by Giovanna Sardelli. Variety, 5 Dec. 2017, variety.com/2017/legit/reviews/describe-the-night-review-rajiv-joseph-1202631310/. Accessed 31 Jan. 2020.
Theis, David. “Funny, Gruesome, Beautiful Monster at the Door.” Houston Press. Houston Press, 5 May 2011. Web. 23 July 2013.
“There’s a Little Pain, Plenty of Gain for Rajiv Joseph.” Toronto Star. Toronto Star Newspapers, 3 May 2012. Web. 22 July 2013.
Verini, Bob. “Rajiv Joseph and Scott Rothman; Duo Overcomes Differences for ‘Day.’” Daily Variety. Variety Media, 29 Nov. 2012. Web. 23 July 2013.