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...
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