‘Life of Pi’ Nat’l Tour @ Bass Performance Hall

Photos by Evan Zimmerman of MurphyMade

—Rickey Wax

The first words we hear are not about animals or shipwrecks but belief. Pi, a teenager recovering in a hospital bed, looks at Mr. Okamoto and asks, “Do you believe in God, sir? If you don’t, by the end of my story you will.”

It’s a daring way to begin, framing everything that follows as both testimony and challenge. Based on Yann Martel’s 2001 Booker Prize–winning novel and adapted for the stage by Lolita Chakrabarti, Life of Pi transforms a story many readers know into a spectacular theatrical event. From this moment, the play carries us back to Pondicherry in 1976: Pi’s family zoo, his childhood curiosity, and his tentative steps into temple, church, and mosque. That search for meaning lingers beneath the action, even as the shadow of disaster grows. When the voyage begins, the ocean takes his family and sweeps away his childhood. By intermission, Pi is stranded on the Pacific, storms of light and sound raging around him, with the audience holding its breath in silence.

At the center of the production (from the national tour company playing at Bass Performance Hall this week) is Taha Mandviwala, who throws himself into the role of Pi with both physical agility and emotional depth. Every leap and tumble feels like survival, every gesture etched with urgency. His voice carries the story’s extremes: cries that cut through percussion, and then quiet, prayer-like whispers that feel like shelter in a storm. His Pi is fragile yet determined, child and prophet. (If my knees attempted half his jumps, I’d be out before Act II filing for workers comp.)

The animals give the story its allegorical weight. Richard Parker, the Bengal tiger, embodies Pi’s fear and survival instinct, the violent willpower he needs when stripped of comfort and order. The zebra suggests innocence lost too soon, the orangutan grief in maternal form, and the hyena cruelty without restraint. Each encounter forces Pi to face both the world’s brutality and his own. By the end, when we question whether the animals were real or human stand-ins, the play unsettles us with another choice: do we believe in beasts, or in the darker truth of human savagery?

The ensemble shines as well. Sinclair Mitchell grounds the piece with stoic authority as Pi’s father, shifting like a chameleon into multiple roles, while Anna Leigh Gortner lends finesse to her puppeteering, moving seamlessly between human presence and the breath of beasts. And it would be criminal to overlook the team behind Richard Parker—Austin Wong Harper, Aaron Haskell, and Betsy Rosen—who conjure a tiger so visceral you forget the mechanics, and see only menace and majesty. Toussaint JeanLouis adds further heft, portraying the ship’s Cook with brute physicality, and supplying the deep, resonant voice of Richard Parker.

The ending refuses tidy answers. Pi’s testimony presses us to wrestle with faith from several angles. Was his survival divine intervention, or simply biology and willpower? If God intervened, which one—Vishnu, Christ, Allah—answered his call? The boy once eager to visit every house of worship now poses questions that feel urgent and unsettling. The play offers no solution, only the vast ambiguity of faith, as unfathomable as the ocean that kept him alive. (If you walk out smugly certain, you probably missed the point.)

Technically, the production is equally extraordinary. Tim Lutkin and Tim Deiling’s lighting design creates an entire ocean with a sweep of beautiful blues, or a storm with bursts of white and strobe lights. Carolyn Downing’s sound design layers waves with silence, pulling us between terror and calm. The stage feels infinite.

And then there is the puppetry. Nick Barnes and Finn Caldwell’s designs, drawing on traditions such as Indonesian wayang kulit shadow play, fuse myth with movement. Richard Parker, operated by multiple performers, breathes and prowls with startling realism. Shadow puppetry adds another layer of enchantment: trees sprout across walls, a zoo flickers like a dream. It’s a reminder of theater’s oldest trick. Who needs CGI when a few well-placed lights can do the heavy lifting?

In the end, Life of Pi is not solely a survival tale but also a meditation on truth and belief. Pi’s journey is physical, yes, but it is equally spiritual, a pilgrimage through loneliness, terror, and the act of choosing which story to live by. Do we accept the allegory, or the harsher human version? Director Max Webster leaves that choice to us, suggesting that faith itself lies in how we decide to tell the story.

And so the play closes where it began, with Pi’s challenge. “Do you believe in God, sir?” he asks. After final bows, the question follows you out the doors, like a tiger still pacing in the boat of your mind.

WHEN: September 23-28, 2025
WHERE: 525 Commerce St, Fort Worth
WEB: www.basshall.com