REVIEW: Life of Pi Thrills Proctor’s Audiences
Photos by Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMade, 2024
“There are moments that will make your jaw drop with the ravishing imagery created right in front of you by seamless ensemble work.”
Life of Pi, the fantastic adventure story about a boy and a tiger adrift on a boat on the high seas for 227 days, is ready to captivate audiences all over again on the Proctor’s stage until this Sunday, 2/23.
The story has been a ten-million-copy, Booker Prize-winning novel by Yann Martel and a film that won four Academy Awards (including Best Director for Ang Lee) and was nominated for 11. It is now a stage play employing numerous theatrical devices, primarily puppets as animals, adapted by Lolita Chakrabarti and directed by Max Webster. The story is as strong as a cargo ship and works in every medium surrounding us with philosophical puzzles, CGI visuals or sleight of hand stagecraft.
Pi Patel (the heroically charming Taha Mandviwala) is a young man whose family leaves India with their zoo packed in crates and heads to Canada because of the horrendously divisive politics at home. “Man is the most dangerous animal in the zoo,” his father (solid Sorab Wadia) warns him.
Pi tells the horrific story of the shipwreck that occurs en route to a Mexican hospital and recounts how he came to share his boat with the family’s zebra, hyena, orangutan and 400 pound Bengal tiger named Richard Parker.
All the animals are brought to life by puppeteers as well as butterflies, a turtle and a wonderful school of fish. The animals are incredibly expressive and agile. You will see them enraged, hungry, tired and a high point for the audience was when Richard Parker, after ten days without water, started speaking to Pi wittily with a French accent.
Pi in his boyhood would attend temple, a mosque and a church seeking to love God. “When you take two steps towards faith, God runs to you.” Author Martel has said that he was looking for guidance in his life and the novel provided it to him. The aphorisms come flying towards the end when Pi’s story is doubted and he is challenged to come up with the true one.
The stage pictures are beyond beautiful thanks to scenic and costume design by Tim Hatley. The tremendous puppetry is directed by Finn Caldwell and designed by him with Nick Barnes and directed in the U.S. by Jon Hoche. There are moments that will make your jaw drop with the ravishing imagery created right in front of you by seamless ensemble work.
Life of Pi is a thrilling survival story that will make you stop and question the tenets we build a life on and what is necessary in the most trying circumstances.
Life of Pi plays through Sunday, 2/23 at Proctors. Tickets: www.atproctors.org or 518-346-6204
