Rituals and a Need for Forgiveness: An Interview with Rajiv Joseph

Abstract

Rajiv Joseph is often characterized in the media as being highly influenced by his own mixed-ethnic heritage—his mother is a French/German Euro-American and his father is from India—and creating deeply conflicted characters, as seen in such plays as the Pulitzer Prize finalist Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo (the eponymous feline was played on Broadway by Robin Williams), Guards of the Taj, All This Intimacy, Gruesome Playground Injuries, and The North Pool. In a 2015 interview, however, Joseph argued that a prominent influence on his writing is actually his Catholic background, as seen most recently in the play Mr. Wolf, in which he engages “the way people relate to their belief systems, whether it's an utter faith in God or atheism, and how those two sets of beliefs are at such odds with each other.”1 Joseph has said that his Catholic background has “figured prominently in his writing process.”2 His work is infused with Catholic theology, even when the subject matter is not Catholic and even when the setting exclusively involves other faith traditions such as Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, which have all interested him since “an early age.”3 I have argued elsewhere “that all of [Joseph's plays] engage Joseph's own Catholic identity and present a sense of Catholic theology within his dramaturgy. In particular, Joseph seems interested in Catholic notions of sin, forgiveness and atonement, and suffering.”4 In short, Joseph is a playwright whose works are infused with a global spirituality rooted in his own sense of Catholic identity.Joseph grew up Catholic in Cleveland, Ohio. “In Southern India there is a large Catholic population and that's where my father was from,” he explains. “It's a huge part of who I am and how I approach writing.”5 He earned a BA in creative writing from Miami University and an MFA in playwriting from Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. He also served for three years in Senegal in the Peace Corps. It is his primary and secondary education, however, that interests us for the purposes of this survey. In 1987, at Gesu Catholic School in Cleveland, his eighth-grade classmates voted him “Most Likely to Become a Priest.”6 In an interview with Patrick Healy of the New York Times, Joseph observed, “As a writer I've come to think of myself, among other things, as a Catholic playwright because my plays really are informed by this love and connection to storytelling and ritual.”7In 2016, I sat down with Rajiv Joseph to discuss his theological dramaturgy, his dramatic theology, and why all of his plays seem heavily invested in ritual and a need for forgiveness.