Puppeteers Bring Animals to Life in Life of Pi

Rowan Magee, Celia Mei Rubin, and Nikki Calonge in LIFE OF PI – Photo by Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMade

The life of Pi has been long and fruitful, although full of challenges for the title character. The peregrinations of Piscine Molitor Patel began with the best-selling 2001 novel by Canadian author Yann Martel, continuing 11 years later with the Ang Lee film, which won four Academy Awards. In 2023, it moved to Broadway in an adaptation by British playwright and actor Lolita Chakrabaty, in a production that won three Tony Awards and five Olivier Awards.

With the self-given nickname Pi, young Pi explores and adopts as his own Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity while helping his family run their zoo in Pondicherry, India. Leaving the repressive government of Indira Gandhi in India, the family emigrates to Canada with the zoo. But when a storm sinks their ship, Pi is left adrift on a lifeboat with a hyena, a zebra, an orangutan, and a tiger named Richard Parker for company.

As the boat drifts, so too does the story, an examination of domination, cooperation and the quest for survival. The novel was considered unfilmable but instead emerged as a critical success. Onstage, animalistic natures are recreated through puppetry, created for the London stage by Nick Barnes and Finn Caldwell. Last month, the stage production began its North American tour in Washington, D.C., with Jon Hoche as the associate puppetry and movement director.

“The puppets in Life of Pi are like no other,” Hoche says. “You could say that they use concepts and ideas from Bunraku puppetry, a Japanese traditional puppetry style, where a small human-like puppet is puppeteered by three people.”

In fact, three actors are required to puppeteer Richard Parker, in order to give him both lithe felinity and man-eating ferocity. Animals are not the only parts of the award-winning set brought to life by the puppeteers.

“Besides the animals, there are objects in the show being puppeteered to act as objects in the ocean after a massive shipwreck,” Hoche says. “We have eight dedicated puppeteers in our cast that focus mainly on the animals but every member of the acting ensemble also puppeteers something in the show.”

Hoche’s own love of puppetry began as a child, watching TV shows including “The Muppet Show” and “Eureeka’s Castle.” As a young actor in New York, he was cast by the downtown company Vampire Cowboys in a sci-fi comic play called Fight Girl/Battle World. On the first day of rehearsal, he was told his character had become a puppet.

“I took to it rather quickly,” he says. He continued performing with them as a puppeteer, leading him to study with The Jim Henson Company and serve as puppet captain on the national tour of War Horse. Hoche made his Broadway debut in King Kong as the title character.

“I think we all are puppeteers as children,” Hoche says. “We have such active imaginations, we bring action figures, dolls, or stuffed animals to life. I love to keep that essence, that spark alive through puppetry. I also love the ensemble nature of multiple people coming together to bring a single entity to life.”

Puppets are often thought of as children’s fare, but those in Life of Pi can be terrifying and vicious. The tiger alone had to jump, climb, attack prey, and even swim. Barnes and Caldwell began their design process by experimenting with simple shapes cut from wood, then moved on to computer aided design and manufacturing. Puppets were milled, 3D printed, and laser cut.

“Richard Parker is made to look weather beaten and like driftwood, but the audience will consistently see the form of the tiger,” Barnes says. “The orangutan is more like a traditional Japanese bunraku puppet with a flexible nylon rod creating its rib cage. The operation of the giraffe is more like object puppetry, whilst Richard Parker and the orangutan are operated by three people and are the most complex puppets in the show.”

As former performers, Barnes and Caldwell were aware that the puppeteers had to create character as well as manipulate the puppets.

“The most important thing to remember is that the audience needs to believe the puppet is alive. If that doesn’t happen, everything else is lost,” Caldwell says. “Puppets appeal to the audience’s sense of play, and there is a silent contract between the audience and the puppeteers to suspend all disbelief. It’s the same as two children agreeing to play with a toy. There’s an unspoken agreement that the object is alive.”

That tacit agreement reflects the play’s themes through its design. When Pi eventually arrives in Mexico, the police there prefer one version of his story to the other. The question of a reliable narrator and storytelling in general pervade the tale, much as the puppets create a flexible reality.

Nearly every member of the cast takes on at least one puppet during the play. Bringing them to life requires precise breath control and flexible bodies with backgrounds in dance, acrobatics or martial arts. All of that physical labor onstage takes a toll offstage, says Fred Davis, one of the puppeteers who originated the role of the tiger Richard Parker.

“We all had to do quite intense weight, endurance and stamina training in order to be able to puppeteer the tiger effectively,” he says. “We achieved this with thorough physical warm-ups, wearing ankle, wrist, or chest weights while rehearsing, and by just using the puppets for as long as we could bear to in each rehearsal session. It was essential to build the required muscles as early on as possible so as to reduce the chance of injury and to facilitate us to be able to rehearse the show and not have to stop for a rest because of fatigue.”

The puppets and actors are coworkers, bringing the mystical, spiritual essence of Life of Pi to live performance, says Hoche.

“I could not imagine this amazing story being told on stage any other way.”

Supplemental material for this story was provided by the company of Life of Pi.

DETAILS
Life of Pi
Mar 18 – 30 • Buell Theatre
Tickets