The production is often beautiful, especially when seen from above. But grown-ups will marvel at Tim Hatley’s sets and costumes, Andrzej Goulding’s video and animation, Tim Lutkin’s lighting and Carolyn Downing’s sound design. Actual kids may be upset by the horrors that beset Pi on the traumatic journey from his hometown of Pondicherry in the 1970s-accompanied at first by his zookeeper father (Rajesh Bose), his protective mother (Mahira Kakkar) and his brainy sister (Sonya Venugopal)-to a doomed cargo ship, a hellish lifeboat, a paradisal island and finally the western coast of Mexico. The result is something like children’s theater for adults. Life of Pi | Photograph: Courtesy Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman But Finn Caldwell and Nick Barnes’s sensitively articulated puppet designs do not end there: The production’s menagerie also includes a zebra, a hyena, an orangutan and a turtle for larger groups of animals, swarms of actors wave butterfly poles and fish sticks. It takes a team of eight human puppeteers, alternating duties, to bring Richard Parker to theatrical life as the great cat prowls, shudders, leaps and purrs. The glory of this creation is the tiger, of course, whose comical name, Richard Parker-the result of a bureaucratic mix-up with its hunter-represents one of Life of Pi ’s running themes: the thinness of the line between man from beast, especially when survival is at stake. Animal puppetry, lights, action, music and sound flood the theater, especially in the show’s second half stage magic crashes out then gently recedes, tugging us into its currents. Its sea-tossed story-about a shipwrecked Indian teenager named Pi (Hiran Abeysekera) who spends hundreds of days afloat in the Pacific in the company of a Bengal tiger-demands imagination, and director Max Webster provides it in abundance. Adapted by Lolita Chakrabarti from Yann Martel’s bestselling 2001 novel, which also inspired a 2012 film by Ang Lee, this British import has been mounted to spectacular effect. Some plays offer a slice of life Life of Pi is a wedge of fantasy.

Life of Pi by Yann Martel