Forget the artificially smooth features of CGI creatures. Perhaps the most marvelous thing about the touring production of Life of Pi, which is based on Yann Martel’s novel and is beautifully directed by Max Webster, is the fact that its plainly visible puppeteers enhance our enjoyment of the animal-filled show, rather than detracting from it. As a survival-at-sea story, the play is exciting, but the artistry of its cast and stagecraft – including the fabulous puppetry, projections and sound effects – are what really thrills.

The story begins in a hospital room in Mexico, where the teenager Pi Patel (Taha Mandviwala) is the sole survivor of a shipwreck after spending 227 days on a lifeboat in the ocean with little food to eat or water to drink. The hospital, which has a towering ceiling and pale walls that look as if they were made of concrete, is a cold, echoing place until two embassy officials (Mi Kang and Alan Ariano) question Pi about what happened to him, and he begins to tell a tale that, he says, “will make you believe in God.”  

The transformation of the colorless hospital room to the Patel family’s zoo in Pondicherry, India is a heavenly thing, indeed, and is one of the most magical moments in the show as a giraffe stretches its neck through an open window, festive music plays, and purple lights and shadows of leafy branches dance on the wall. Mandiviwala, who is a blissfully physical performer, exuberantly bounds around the stage, seeming to effortlessly spring from the ground, signifying what a joyful childhood Pi has until political unrest spurs the family to flee their homeland on a cargo ship.

When a storm featuring impressive thunder, lightning, and pouring rain (effectively rendered through projected imagery) hits, the ship sinks in the Pacific, and the now-orphaned Pi is stranded on a lifeboat with four zoo animals – a hyena, a zebra, an orangutan, and a 450-pound Royal Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. You can guess what happens here. Before long, it’s just Pi and the tiger left on the boat, with each one fighting for his bit of territory.

All of the puppets, which were designed by Nick Barnes and Finn Caldwell, are skeletal, sinewy things, allowing plenty of space for us to see the brown-clad puppeteers who manipulate them. For the April 8 show, it took three puppeteers – Shiloh Goodin, Aaron Hasell, and Betsy Rosen – to bring Richard Parker to life as he ducked his head, arched his spine or stretched his tail.

Parents beware: Animals die violent deaths in this show, and the sight of it to me was a lot more disturbing than watching wildlife videos on a little screen. While one mauled creature’s innards are represented by knotted red fabric that is in no way meant to look realistic, the terrorized sounds it makes when under attack could be especially upsetting, if not traumatic, for younger audience members.

In other ways, though, the puppetry is pure delight, such as when the air is full of hand-held butterflies, or a glowing green school of fish swims across the sea, or a turtle rhythmically flaps its way through the waves. In all these cases, the show is like a ballet of puppeteers and actors following a carefully controlled choreography that’s as graceful and muscular as the ocean’s tides.

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The lifeboat alone is a work of art. The play repeatedly moves between the hospital and the sea, and whenever the setting morphs back to Pi and Richard Parker in the ocean, the two halves of the boat are slowly and smoothly pushed together to form the craft. Likewise, for much of these scenes, the boat slowly turns as if drifting in unknown waters.

At no detriment to the show, this artistic spectacle takes precedence over ideas. A good portion of Martel’s book is devoted to Pi’s thoughts on faith. In the play, however, the fact that Pi is a Hindu, Christian, and Muslim all at once is played for gentle laughs rather than presenting a serious exploration of spirituality.

We see this when all three of Pi’s spiritual leaders are onstage together, with the Hindu priest Pandi-Ji (Rishi Jaiswal) wearing a marigold garland, the Christian Father Martin (Sinclair Mitchell) in a black robe, and the Muslim Zaida Kahn (Mi Kang) dressed all in white.

Life of Pi also references how fierce human animals can be when they’re fighting for survival, but this isn’t a revelatory idea for most of us. As a play that questions how we tell stories, though, the script runs deep. One clever device it employs is projecting maps that allow us to follow Pi’s various whereabouts. Projected letters also appear at times, along with the sound of manual typewriter keys hitting a page, to let us know how many days Pi has gone without water. Besides conveying information, such techniques are like little winks of humor that balance the dramatic – and sometimes horrific — nature of the story.

When the drably dressed embassy officials refuse to believe Pi’s account of sharing a lifeboat with a tiger, he tries again, giving them a different, more believable version. It’s a safe bet which iteration most people would prefer. Like the sight of the stars against a black sky or the fierce tiger’s paws slack from hunger and exhaustion, the play has found its own visually stunning lexicon for telling its tale.

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The Life of Pi will continue at Keller Auditorium, 222 SW Clay St., Portland, through April  13. Find tickets and schedules here.

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