NEW YORK — Oceans — let alone lethal Bengal tigers on lifeboats — are usually a nightmare for Broadway; just look at the trouble Disney’s “The Little Mermaid” had in going under the sea. But in the 2019 stage version of “Life of Pi,” which was scripted by Lolita Chakrabarti, debuted in Sheffield, England, and opened on Broadway last week at the Gerald Shoenfeld Theatre, the illusion of Piscine Molitor “Pi” Patel’s fateful voyage comes to life in director Max Webster’s production with so much visual panache and such phenomenal puppeteering that you’d swear his little boat is bobbing on ravenous waves with death awaiting him with each rise of the sun.
As fans of Ang Lee’s 2012 movie well know, 16-year-old Pi (Hiran Abeysekera) attempts a voyage from Pondicherry, India, to Canada on a Japanese cargo ship with his zoo-owning family, only for all creatures great and small to be catapulted into the Pacific Ocean during a terrible storm. Most all perish. But Pi survives on a lifeboat for 227 days. And he does so in the company of one “Richard Parker,” a Bengal tiger for whom he is the most logical — heck, eventually the only — choice for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
“The Life of Pi” involves the title character recounting a wild tale indeed: Richard Parker hardly was Pi’s only four-legged aggressor on the high seas. It’s like watching something by Rudyard Kipling or Robert Louis Stevenson without the colonialist baggage.
The movie used real animals, and not without some controversy, either. But the stage show uses huge puppets from Nick Barnes and Finn Caldwell that are walking examples of the single greatest innovation in puppetry ever to hit the stage: if you want an audience to believe in a puppet on a stage, you have to focus on its kinetic qualities or, more simply, attend to the joints that create movement. You have to have really good parts that can seem to breathe their way through space and time.
Barnes and Caldwell did not originate that development, of course; their work sometimes recalls Julie Taymor’s creatures in “The Lion King” and also Milky White in “Into the Woods,” but their creations are uncommonly robust and thus the animals feel genuinely aggressive. But that wouldn’t work without the broader environment, which carries on that movement-driven key: the stage design by Tim Hatley, the video design by Andrzej Goulding and the lighting by Tim Lutkin. They’re all in constant motion and it’s thrilling to watch.
If only the adaptation and the attention to character beyond Pi himself (Abeysekera’s performance is very much present tense and, at times, absolutely spectacular) were on that level. Alas not.
Here’s the thing: As penned in the 2001 novel by Yann Martel, Pi was not just an adventurer and a survivor but a philosopher, too. “The Life of Pi” became a phenomenon because its young hero figures out how to avoid drinking salt water — he is obsessed with the life, death and the nature of God. In this script, we see him following three religions (Hinduism, Christianity and Islam) while home in India and we hear many of his musings. But the choice here to go with so straight a narrative means that the emotional content of the piece will not do justice to what fans of the novel will expect and does not land as it could, especially given all of the other artistry on display.
I’d argue the script should have been more like the incredible puppets: floating, uncertain of anything, embracing of Pi’s philosophical digressions and, above all, more willing to embrace the complexity of which elements of this story really happened and which are maybe the potentially delusional creations of a young man who nearly died of thirst.
Martel is a fantastic explorer of storytelling and narrative, especially of how we express those deep human needs both in our memory and in our religious beliefs. In the theater, what matters most is what an audience feels, what it cares about. And although Abeysekera’s performance is one of Herculean effort and skill to match, he often seems to have no one else to really play against. Beyond the puppets, I mean.
I don’t think that’s mostly the fault of the other actors in the show, all of whom do fine ensemble work. It’s the emblematic nature of those characters and their inherent role as representatives of types rather than becoming living, breathing human beings. That’s particularly true in the problematic frame here, as Pi tells his story to mostly chilly embassy officials who don’t invest much emotionally in his story, which means that we don’t get the right cue to do the same. It is a missed opportunity.
Still, for many in the audience, the immersive nature of the experience will be more than enough. I do not overstate there. Despite watching decades worth of attempts, I’ve never seen a show that better conveys the sea or so many of the creatures trying to ride its waves and avoid being swallowed.
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At the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre, 236 W. 45th St., New York; www.lifeofpibway.com.
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