Who knows where the art making impulse comes from? I certainly don’t. Considering all the people who, like me, are laboring daily to bring something new into existence even when it is thankless and difficult, this is a question best placed in the “no explanation” file.
For a culture that is doggedly focused on what can be measured and profitized, the art making impulse will never makes sense. Our world has a very Procrustean mindset, one that selectively neglects the things that don’t fit. The questions asked and the answers heard are kept within its perimeters. It’s a closed system, a locked loop.
Creativity is just one of many outliers that remind us there is plenty we don’t know and we can’t measure. In some ways these “non-pedigree” undertakings are seismographic: put an ear to the earth and hear what others are missing, the faint rumblings and distant tremors that don’t register on standard equipment.
Until they do.
I will admit, being delighted by what eludes measurement and can’t be predicted is just part of being a disruptive creative. For many of us in that camp, not knowing is sacred territory. “Surrender is the art of uncertainty: it’s the practice of giving in, not giving up,” wrote Jessica Helfand. In other words, the unknowing will have at you, and take you where it will.
After working on a manuscript for five years, unknown Canadian author Yann Martel published a book in 2001 that became an international best seller. Life of Pi went on to win the prestigious Booker Prize.
In its subject and its style, this enormously lovable novel is suffused with wonder: a willed innocence that produces a fresh, sideways look at our habitual assumptions, about religious divisions, or zoos versus the wild, or the possibility of freedom. As Martel promises in his author’s note, this is fiction probing the imaginative realm with scientific exactitude, twisting reality to ‘bring out its essence.’ (Justine Jordan, The Guardian)
It was, and still is, a book that defies categorization. It is after all a story unlike any other: A young boy named Pi survives a shipwreck by sharing a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger for 227 days. What is true, what is imagined? The story is told in a way that you can answer that question for yourself. As Pi says to the inspectors who question his preposterous account of his survival at sea, “You want a story that won’t surprise you. That will confirm what you already know. That won’t make you see higher or further or differently.”
Ten years after the book was published, Ang Lee made an award winning film. Ten years after that, Max Webster assembled a UK team to produce an award winning stage version, one that has now come to American Repertory Theater in Cambridge before leaving for Broadway in the spring.
The story continues to capture the collective imagination, and each variation of Martel’s tale plays to its particular strengths. The book enables Martel to dig deeply into to the philosophical constructs that are so fundamental to the story. Lee creates a startlingly realistic version of the arduous journey by way of masterful CGI. The stage production finds its own very particular voice by way of a phantasmagoria of puppets and inventive staging. Each respects Martel’s concern that the story itself be honored while offering answers that still allow the “mystical element of religion and of life to live within it.”
How refreshing to discover that Webster’s approach to this curious story, in its latest iteration, is more than just the irresistible challenge to attempt the near impossible. Webster actually seems more drawn to the mystery embedded in the story:
Some people think it’s a show about family. Some think it’s a show about faith and survival. Some think it’s a show about immigration. Some people think it’s a show about facing your inner demons. It’s about a boy and a tiger, but what that really means or what that’s a symbol of or what that resonates with in people’s lives is mysterious. It’s somehow an open metaphor, which is really beautiful…
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I often think when you work on a story for a long time, you understand it more and more, and in some ways it can become smaller—and you end up with a clearer sense of what it’s about. But for me, Life of Pi has done something else. The more I work on it, the less I know what it’s about.
The team behind the enchantment that is happening on stage– Scenic and Costume Design by Tim Hatley, Video Design by Andrzej Goulding, Lighting Design by Tim Lutkin, Puppetry and Movement Direction by Finn Caldwell, and Puppet Design by Nick Barnes & Finn Caldwell—has come up with a visual metaphor for an essential question that haunts the story: Were Pi’s animal companions actually stand ins for humans, masking what was in fact a gruesome and horrific ordeal? The animals in the production are part puppet and part puppeteers, bringing the human and the animal into effortless confluence. To portray them in this way is a lyrical and metaphorical tour de force.
There are moments in the production when the imaginative artistry playing out on stage hits some bare spots and exposes the thinness in the script. And yes, it is well known that philosophical musings do not usually make for compelling theater (Tom Stoppard being the outstanding exception to that rule.) Some of the human characters feel just a little wooden next to the eye-engaging, multi-dimensional animals. But those few rough moments fade into the background with the visual splendor unfolding on stage.
After a lifespan of 20 years, Life of Pi still feels like it is well suited for this moment in time. Released right after 9/11, the book came to life just as new terrors became part of contemporary life, bringing the quest for safety and security to heightened levels. Now, seasoned pandemicists that we all are, we share yet another collective sense of ordeals and journeys that must be conducted alone. Through it all, Pi is an exemplar of survival in the face of overwhelming odds.
It is the seismographic nature of Martel’s story that continues to resonate, to speak to forces and feelings that are often still inchoate. Deep loss runs right alongside a primal message of hope and renewal. The unknowns that are so essential in the story make Life of Pi a worthy palimpsest for these rocky times, a story that morphs easily to fit the shape of every new epoch.
An ear to the earth brought this curious, persistently compelling and unforgettable tale to life. Its deft blend of the known and unknown has enabled it to avoid the shelf life limitations that mark many other works as dated and out of touch. As Martel has written, a blinkered dedication to factuality can lead one to “miss the better story.” I think we can all agree, the better story has a tiger in it.
Life of Pi runs through January 29.
Deb, thank you for your review on this production and the concept of the creative juices delving into the unknown. We all have that idling feeling of something bigger than ourselves and an encounter with art that connects us to that feeling of intradependence hits the mark.