Yann Martel’s 2001 novel “Life of Pi” is a coming-of-age story, the story of “one boy, one boat, one tiger.” Walker/Canongate published Martel’s Booker Prize novel in 2010 as a young adult novel which found its way onto school bookshelves across the United States (and beyond). It was a popular read in the high school where I taught. My colleagues in the Language Arts Department and I had to make several requests for the book to be reordered because of its following among our students. Martel’s rich and often dense text provides readers with a protagonist Piscine Molitor (“Pi”) who is easily identifiable in their quest to understand faith, friendship, and perseverance. The novel’s themes of the importance of life, the importance of stories, and identity further the importance of Martel’s text.

These themes and the rich and enduring questions they raise are also evident in Ang Lee’s 2012 film, and in the highly successful run of “Life of Pi” on the London stage. The play’s arrival on Broadway at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre has been highly anticipated and is finally opening in March 2023. Although Lolita Chakrabarti’s adaptation does not elicit the strength of Martell’s novel, the play’s cast led by Hiran Abeysekera  (who portrays Pi), its expansive and multipurposed set by Tim Hatley, the remarkable puppetry by Nick Barnes and Finn Caldwell, the realistic ocean waves proved by Andrzej Goulding’s video design, and the mood-inducing lighting by Tim Lutkin successfully engage the audience in Piscine Molitor’s (“Pi”) shipwrecked adventure from his father’s Pondicherry Botanical Garden in India to a hospital in Canada. Pi’s only companion on his 227-day epic adventure is the four-hundred-fifty-pound Bengal tiger Richard Parker.

Lolita Chakrabarti’s adaptation does not follow the chronological text of Martell’s novel; rather, she begins Pi’s story in the Canadian hospital where Tomohiro Okamoto (Daisuke Tsuji) from the Maritime Department in the Japanese Ministry of Transport questions Pi (Hiran Abeysekera) about his “recollection of events [he needs to] compile the official report about the tragedy” at sea. Adequately directed by Max Webster, the play alternates between the present in the Canadian hospital and the events at sea in the lifeboat with Richard Parker.

It is not necessary nor prudent to give the details of Pi’s journey. The audience needs to experience the richness of Piscine Molitor’s spiritual journey from his near death to his new life in Canada. What is important is to recognize the thirty-seven-year-old Hiran Abeysekera’s exceptional portrayal of the seventeen-year-old Pi and to recognize the members of the cast of “Life of Pi” for giving authentic and believable performances. The scores of high school students in the audience at the Wednesday matinee I attended were silently leaning forward in their seats at Pi’s tale of the quest for agency and identity connected with their same quest.

This “Life of Pi” on stage is not entirely successful. As previously noted, the adaptation is not strong enough, and the staging is sometimes clumsy with the need for the many skilled puppeteers to be on the stage at the same time. Despite these insurmountable issues, “Life of Pi” endures as a tale of a young man facing his demons from without and within as he judiciously and carefully tames the Bengal tiger Richard Parker on a small lifeboat in the expansive Pacific Ocean.