Rick Pender — Theater Critic

Lolita Chakrabarti’s play Life of Pi, based on a 2001 novel by Yann Martel (that was also made into a 2012 movie), is a remarkable piece of stagecraft using remarkable puppetry to portray an astonishing array of animals, most particularly a Royal Bengal tiger, but including butterflies, a giraffe, a goat, a hyena, a zebra, an orangutan, monkeys and meerkats. A touring production of this award-winning production is currently onstage at downtown Cincinnati’s Aronoff Center for the Arts, presented by Broadway in Cincinnati.