Arts Vanity: The Stage Play ‘Life of Pi’ Converted Me

“Life of Pi” by Yann Martel is one of the only books I ever abandoned before finishing.

I was 15. I didn’t even make it to the main event, when Pi winds up on a lifeboat with a tiger. I remember getting up to the part in Pi’s adolescence when he begins to ponder the nature of God. Raised Hindu, Pi visits the temple, the church, and the mosque, ultimately choosing to practice Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam simultaneously. I had never practiced a religion, and I found it all confusing and a bit tedious. I stopped reading.

In Jan. 2023, Lolita Chakrabarti’s stage adaptation of “Life of Pi” was playing at the American Repertory Theater, a 10-minute walk from my freshman dorm. My friend offered me her extra ticket just a few hours before the evening performance.

“Life of Pi” is a frame narrative, a story recounted by Pi Patel (Adi Dixit) as he recovers from 227 days stranded at sea.

He begins by announcing, “My story will make you believe in God.”

As his interviewers (Kirstin Louie and Daisuke Tsuji), officials from the Canadian and Japanese governments, attempt to extract the story of the shipwreck from him, Pi leads them on a fantastical tale of his youth as the son of the Pondicherry Zoo manager before his family ships their entire zoo — and themselves — to Canada on a freighter. When a storm hits the ship, Pi winds up on a lifeboat with several animals: a hyena, a zebra, an orangutan, and a tiger named Richard Parker.

After the show, I promptly called a couple of my friends in tears. The play’s sensory spectacle made it an unceasing spiritual experience that left me stunned: I rambled for hours about the score, brimming with life, the animals operated by packs of puppeteers, lithe and fluid and breathing, and the stage, flooded with the galloping sea and luminous sky.

There’s something about a night sky created on a stage, spattered with the stars now sparse in the actual sky. I’ve seen three. Confined as they are, they’re powerfully expansive and inevitably lonely. As the audience, we are regularly confronted with imitations of real things — a ship, a tiger, butterflies, blood — and the glimpses of artifice — scene transitions, the rectangular frame of the stage. Theater is an exercise in belief that demands more of us than a book.

So, the interviewers don’t believe Pi’s story. He spits out a replacement one: The hyena was actually the ship’s cook, the zebra a sailor, the orangutan Pi’s mother, and the tiger Pi himself.

I believe the animal story. That is easy. How could I have witnessed something so meaningful, so precious, and not believed in it?

The interviewers accept it as the better story, like me.

Pi triumphs. “And so it goes with God!”

As an English concentrator, sometimes I joke that I don’t even believe what I argue in my essays. Yet “Life of Pi” convinced me that multiple truths can coexist in the same space. When that space is life at large, I’m propelled by my yearning for the divine. That mysterious world beyond the one we understand draws me with its promise of something incomprehensibly beautiful, purposeful, and good. Art makes me feel like something higher exists. It’s hard for me to rationalize myself firmly into any belief, but when I come face to face with beauty, that sensation is instinct.

It’s time for a confession. The title of this article is misleading. I didn’t actually convert — at least any more than believing the animal story.

Instead, I went vegetarian because of this play (admittedly a much easier change). As Pi battled against his lifelong vegetarianism to kill and eat a sea turtle, I wondered why I would ever participate in taking life when I am privileged enough to have the option not to. When Pi’s broken faith brought him closer to savagery, it made me understand our humanity as a privilege that we must employ and a promise to those who cannot return it.

In adversity, faith in some kind of principle is a necessity for the survival of our humanity. I choose to set my faith in compassion, in contradictory interpretations, in the beauty that gets us to believe in the impossible and its impossibility at once.

—Incoming Theater Executive Isabelle A. Lu is taking a break from her regularly scheduled showtunes to blast “Pondicherry Market” from Andrew T. Mackay’s “Life of Pi” soundtrack on repeat. She can be reached at isabelle.lu@thecrimson.com.