Arts & Culture

What: Life of Pi
Where: CAA Ed Mirvish Theatre, 244 Victoria St.
When: Now, until Sun., Oct. 6
Highlight: Director Max Webster’s innovative staging
Rating: NNNN (out of 5)
Why you should go: Tony Award-winning Yann Martel adaptation embraces theatricality.

WHILE ADAPTATION IS  an omnipresent force in the theatre industry, I most look forward to seeing artists tackle source material that doesn’t obviously lend itself to the stage. Where there are obstacles to overcome, creativity tends to follow.

So it goes with Lolita Chakrabarti’s Tony Award-winning Life of Pi, now playing at the CAA Ed Mirvish Theatre. Adapted from Yann Martel’s much-loved novel of the same name, the fable-like story luxuriates in the unbelievable, at one point depicting several zoo animals scrapping for their lives on a raft. Director Max Webster uses innovative stagecraft, including puppetry, to dramatize these outlandish happenings — an approach more appropriate to a tale about the importance of imagination than, uh, that version with the CGI tiger.

It’s 1977. After a bulky exposition, Pi (Divesh Subaskaran), a teenager from Pondicherry, India, ends up on a Japanese freighter heading to Canada. Political tensions had pushed his zookeeping family to emigrate, animals in tow. And then the iconic stuff: a tempest sinks the boat, leaving Pi on a raft with a hyena, an orangutan, a zebra and a tiger named Richard Parker. A couple of meals later, it’s just Pi and Richard Parker; they live at sea for 227 days before reaching the Mexican shore where a pair of investigators listen to Pi’s account in disbelief. Chakrabarti uses this final, hospital-set scene as a frame for the rest of the narrative — it’s always evident Pi is telling the story, not actively living it.

Running two hours and 10 minutes including intermission, Life of Pi at times feels rushed. Martel’s story concerns a drawn-out experience of suffering, so there’s something off about it flying by the way it does; by the end of the show, it’s in no way believable that hundreds of days have passed. The exposition, too, lives in an awkward in-between place — too lengthy to be brushed off as incidental, too speedy to have much impact.

But I only desire a little more Life of Pi because a solid portion of the production enchants. The puppets are the marquee event, with Nick Barnes and Finn Caldwell’s clever designs striking an elegant balance: they’re realistic but not overly so; playfulness never jumps ship. Gaps in Richard Parker’s skin ensure the many performers bringing him to life remain visible, a choice that foregrounds the act of adaptation by underlining the considerable degree of craft required to bring this feline to the stage.

For me, though, Life of Pi’s strongest moments don’t involve puppetry, flashing projections (designed by Andrzej Goulding) or swinging set pieces (designed by Tim Hatley). After all that sensory excitement, scenes involving stillness resonate with extra force: as we observe Pi sitting in his hospital bed, almost broken by trauma, it’s the very absence of whimsy — the emptiness of this stark, white room — that stirs.