AIRDATE:  05/14/10, 2:30 -3:00 pm

GUESTS:

Actors, Glenn Davis & Arian Moayed (Actors from the Mark Taper Forum production of “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo”)

Director Leslie Zemeckis, “Behind the Burly Q”

Rajiv Joseph’s “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo”, a finalist for this year’s Pulitzer Prize is an absurdly funny, tragically poignant rendering of lives haunted by the tragedies of the Iraq war.  Glenn Davis plays Tom, one of two American soldiers assigned to guard the remaining tiger at the Baghdad Zoo after the Americans invaded Iraq.  Characters ask themselves, “Why am I here? Why aren’t I gone?”   Arian Moayed, plays Musa, an Iraqi translator, who has suffered personal loss at the hands of Uday Hussein and is now working for the Americans.  Says director Moises Kaufman, “Rajiv’s was some of the best writing I’ve seen…He takes a world that is part Quentin Tarantino and part Gabriel Garcia Marquez and he makes it work.  His voice is really, really unique in American Theatre.”

In the second half, filmmaker Leslie Zemeckis, (wife of Robert Zemeckis, Academy Award winning director for “Forrest Gump”) talks about her new documentary “Behind the Burly Q,” a history of burlesque told through the stories of the men and women who lived it, including Alan Alda, whose father was a classic straightman and singer, Tempest Storm, Bingo Bingler and Lily Ann Rose.  From the 1800’s through the Great Depression, we associate burlesque with strip tease, but it was much, much more – variety show, comic skits, and song, this lost American artform gave way to the world of cinema in the popular culture of the day.

Copies of this show can be ordered through the Pacifica Radio Archives at www.pacificaradioarchives.org