Broadway review by Adam Feldman
Some plays offer a slice of life; Life of Pi is a wedge of fantasy. Adapted by Lolita Chakrabarti from Yann Martel’s bestselling 2001 novel, which also inspired a 2012 film by Ang Lee, this British import has been mounted to spectacular effect. Its sea-tossed story—about a shipwrecked Indian teenager named Pi (Hiran Abeysekera) who spends hundreds of days afloat in the Pacific in the company of a Bengal tiger—demands imagination, and director Max Webster provides it in abundance. Animal puppetry, lights, action, music and sound flood the theater, especially in the show’s second half; stage magic crashes out then gently recedes, tugging us into its currents.
The glory of this creation is the tiger, of course, whose comical name, Richard Parker—the result of a bureaucratic mix-up with its hunter—represents one of Life of Pi’s running themes: the thinness of the line between man from beast, especially when survival is at stake. It takes a team of eight human puppeteers, alternating duties, to bring Richard Parker to theatrical life as the great cat prowls, shudders, leaps and purrs. But Finn Caldwell and Nick Barnes’s sensitively articulated puppet designs do not end there: The production’s menagerie also includes a zebra, a hyena, an orangutan and a turtle; for larger groups of animals, swarms of actors wave butterfly poles and fish sticks.
Life of Pi | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman
The result is something like childr