Review: LIFE OF PI at Belk Theater

Not too many novels weigh the merits of imagination against observation, myth against reality, or fiction against truth: the author’s bias in favor of fabrication is implicit from the first word in his first chapter. But after relating an epic and fantastic tale of a boy’s survival on the open seas, Yann Martel did exactly that in his LIFE OF PI, questioning and testing Pi’s story and measuring it against an alternate narrative.

Son of a Pondicherry zookeeper and named after a Parisian swimming pool, Piscine Molitor Patel is the only survivor of the Tsimtsum, a mystically-named cargo ship that set sail from the shores of India, bound for Canada. Martel, brooding over reviews of a previous book and suffering from writer’s block, finds out that Patel, now a grown man with “a story that will make you believe in God,” is living in Toronto.

Nearly a year after taking notes at his meeting with Pi, Martel purportedly received a 1978 audiotape and an official report from the Japanese Ministry of Transport, completing his research. Martel’s book won the Man Booker Prize in 2002, the year after its publication. Ang Lee’s film version of 2012, based on a screenplay by David Magee, won four Academy Awards, including one for the director.

The stage adaptation of Life of Pi by Lolita Chakrabarti, now touring at Belk Theater in Charlotte, has gathered even more accolades since it premiered in the UK, first in Sheffield in 2019 and then in a 2020 London production that bridged the pandemic. By 2023, when the production – still directed by Max Webster – arrived on Broadway, the story of the teenager adrift on the Pacific Ocean with a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker must have seemed like an ancient relic to theatergoers, despite its technical dazzle.

Showered with enthusiastic reviews and five Tony Award nominations, the Broadway show ran less than four months, closing shortly after its design team nabbed three Tony wins. Looking around the Belk on opening night, you could see that a hefty amount of nosebleed seats had been sold in the uppermost balcony. Even though that performance was cancelled because of technical difficulties, it seemed like the Charlotte run would sell more tickets than any week of its NYC run.

The “worldwide phenomenon” touted in TV promos has not cooled in Charlotte, and it seems obvious that the tour will outgross the Broadway original. All of the original design team has remained intact through all of this production’s installations and transcontinental travels. Perhaps we should reserve the highest praises for puppet designers Nick Barnes and Finn Caldwell, winners of the Drama Desk Award, for their work likely travels even better than Carolyn Downey’s Tony Award-winning sound design.

An impromptu interview downstage on opening night confirmed that Tim Hatley’s scenic design had been trimmed for the road, so Pi’s lifeboat wouldn’t be rising up onto the stage from below when the tour’s turntable was fixed. Everything in the lighting booth looked calm and shipshape for the opening. It wasn’t too surprising, then, to see a projection greeting us on the front scrim two nights later when we redeemed our raincheck – a reassuring sign that this boat was ready to float.

Aside from the puppetry, delightfully engaging our imaginations all evening long, Chakrabarti takes a simplified, direct, yet convoluted path through Martel’s Pi, stripping away the narrative layers of Martel, his informant in Pondicherry, and the elder Patel in Toronto. The diary that Pi kept during his epic voyage, mentioned just once in Martel’s prefatory “Author’s Note,” is discreetly forgotten.

Chakrabarti wants to balance the veracity of Pi’s two tales more delicately, it seems. She takes us directly to the Benito Juárez in Tomatlán, Mexico, where Pi will be interrogated by Mr. Okamoto of the Japanese Ministry and the more empathetic Lulu Chen from the Canadian Embassy. That whisks us to Chapter 95 of Martel’s 100-chapter book, leaping over the narrative we have read without interruptions from Pi’s point of view by his investigators.

Further compromising the boy’s credibility, Pi isn’t visible immediately in his hospital room. He is nesting underneath his hospital bed, hidden behind his dangling bedsheets. When he is coaxed by food and other rewards into coming out, we readily observe that he is haunted, traumatized, and animalized by his experiences at sea – appropriate results for both versions of his story – and conditioned to fiercely hoarding his food.

Pi’s histrionics, which punctuate his narrative, give Taha Mandviwala fresh opportunities to rouse Okamoto’s skepticism and Chen’s empathy in the title role, but the added flash – along with the missing diary – must be scored as detrimental to the lad’s credibility.

Yet there’s a buoyancy to Mandviwala as he relives his adventures that wins us over, with plenty of moments that underline his irrepressibility: dancing in the dingy streets of Pondicherry, insouciantly entering Richard Parker’s lair at the zoo, and standing triumphantly on the stern of a lifeboat lost at sea – or on his hospital bed. With or without a paddle, he holds his fist up high. Yes, in a fine bit of theatre magic, bed and boat are the same in both locations.

Paradoxically, all the artifices of puppetry, lighting, and projection make us want to believe Pi’s story more and more. Even when Toussaint Jeanlouis, after playing the ship’s nasty cook, reappears out of Richard Parker’s head and becomes the tiger’s voice. The pushback from Alan Ariano as Okimoto and the caring of Mi Kang as Chen ultimately testify to our inborn needs for fiction, myth, and imagination.

Though I’ve read the book, it’s been a while. I’m not sure whether Martel’s Pi was blessed with family visitations during his animal story or whether these were additions from Chakrabarti’s fancy. Either way, the reappearances of Sorab Wadia as Father, reminding Pi how to tame a tiger, Jessica Angleskhan as Amma, counseling her son on staying vegetarian at sea, and Sharayu Mahale as Rani, scolding her brother for succumbing to fish and turtle meat, do more than keep the rust off these endearing characters after the Tsimtsum sinks.

Collectively, they endow this Life of Pi with more mythic aroma, like talismans or magical weapons gifted to heroes of sagas. They are Disney sprinklings of Tinkerbell’s fairy dust and Jiminy Cricket’s guidance. Of course, they don’t cross over when Pi’s fantastical story dissolves into an antiseptic hospital!

When God has been proven to you, a sinking ship, a shark-infested ocean, a vast flesh-eating island, and an arid Mexican shore with jungle in the distance are all better places to be, as long as there are stars above to wish on. In Martel’s novel and onstage, young Pi has sat devotedly at the feet of Hindu, Islamic, and Christian mentors concurrently for weeks on end because he is so hungry for God – while Martel attests to extensively studying zoology and the cosmogony of Isaac Luria, the great Jewish Kabbalist.

For Pi and Martel, preferring a beautiful, ennobling story to a plausible one is a way of life. Actually, Martel states it more politically than that at the end of his preface: If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams.