Life of Pi at the Peace Center
Life of Pi is a tricky story to adapt for the stage.
The acclaimed novel by Yann Martel about the titular teenage Indian boy’s epic survival at sea stretches the bounds of imagination while absolutely gutting those who experience it. The fantastical tale works extraordinarily well on the page and, through exceptional CGI and 3D effects, translated nicely to the screen under the direction of Ang Lee.
But it takes a synthesis of these versions to propel the stage adaptation by Lolita Chakrabarti and a gifted crew of technicians guided by director Ashley Brooke Monroe during its tour stop at the Peace Center. (Max Webster helmed the initial production at Sheffield Theatres’ U.K. complex in 2019, and also deserves his flowers for shaping the look and flow of this impressive undertaking.)
Reworking the source novel’s third and concluding section of Piscine Molitor “Pi” Patel (Taha Mandviwala) recovering in a Mexican hospital and recounting his chronicle to a pair of Japanese Ministry of Transport (JMT) officials, Life of Pi uses it as a framing device but has our protagonist talking with JMT rep Mr. Okamoto (Alan Ariano) and Canadian consulate Lulu Chen (Mi Kang), weaving in flashbacks to the boy's youth in Pondicherry, India, at his family's zoo. There, we’re introduced to Pi’s loving Amma (Jessica Angleskhan), tough but fair father (Sorab Wadia), math genius sister Rani (Sharayu Mahale), and other central friends and relatives. And thanks to Tim Hatley’s detailed scenic and costume design, and Andrew T. Mackay’s stirring original score, these characters’ lives in Pondicherry are presented in vivid fashion.
However, the most intriguing supporting players are the zoo’s animals. Carrying on the tradition of The Lion King, this production uses large-scale puppets, operated by one-to-three puppeteers, depending on the size and complexity of the beast. While it takes a few scenes to adjust one’s eyes to the neutral-clad puppeteers, their artistry and the colorful puppets — designed by Nick Barnes and Finn Caldwell, the latter of whom also marvelously steers them as puppetry and movement director — soon comes to the forefront and become a treat to behold as the Patels pack up their zoo, take a cargo ship to Canada, and the creatures overtake humans as the show's stars.
Precisely how that shift occurs deserves to be experienced firsthand, but suffice it to say that Mandviwala has to be great for this stretch — and the show at large — to work and, like Suraj Sharma in the film version, he delivers. His Pi transitions smoothly from speaking with Mr. Okamoto and Ms. Chen to enduring hardships on the Pacific Ocean in a lifeboat with a handful of surviving zoo animals. And as the days at sea wear on, his “visitations” by friends and family — Sinclair Mitchell’s no-nonsense survival book author Admiral Jackson is particularly delightful — keep Mandviwala from having to carry the show too much on his own, though the proverbial seams occasionally show.
These harrowing nautical scenes are further enhanced by Andrzej Goulding’s digital projections and fog machines that convincingly render rainstorms, made all the more realistic in tandem with Carolyn “Thunder God” Downing’s sound design and powerful lighting from the duo of Tim Lutkin and Tim Deiling. But few decisions are more inspired than the creative team’s choice not to turn Life of Pi into a musical. Though ill-fitting content hasn't kept music-and-lyrics teams from telling fraught stories through song (*cough* Miss Saigon *cough*), we fortunately aren't forced to endure Pi’s struggles and triumphs in this manner and this production is all the better for it.
Life of Pi runs through July 13 at the Peace Center. For details and tickets, visit peacecenter.org.
(Photo by Matthew Murphy & Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMade)
