LOS ANGELES — It takes three humans to operate the tiger puppet in “Life of Pi,” but it’s easy to forget they're there when caught up in the sheer magic of storytelling and artistry.

Taha Mandviwala plays Pi, and while he interacts with people in many scenes, he spends much of the play acting with incredibly well-made animal puppets.

“On the one hand, you have to have an awareness of your coworkers,” he said. “But then you have this other side, this ultimate peek of childhood that playfulness, of getting to create this living, breathing animal in front of you and the unpredictability of what that could bring.”

The award-winning film adaptation of the novel "Life of Pi" features a very convincing computer-generated tiger, but here the tiger, named Richard Parker, is very much alive. 

Each night, three actors embody the role — one as the head, one as the heart, and one as the tail. 

Aaron Haskell is one actor in the company who plays the head.

Like a highly trained musician, he uses one hand to control the movements of Richard Parker’s mouth and ears, expressions based on the softness or severity of the touch of his fingers.

“I can make it open just a little bit for slight breathing, especially if Richard Parker that is exhausted,” he said, demonstrating a rough pant. “And then obviously for the big roar, you see it open very large to give you that big roar.”

Center Theatre Group Artistic Director Snehal Desai was instantly smitten. Puppetry, he says, brings us the child in all of us.

“Whether you are 80 years old or you are ten years old, it makes you see the world anew,” he said.

Like he says, Pi does.

The teenage boy, whose family owns a zoo in India, is shipwrecked while on a journey to Canada, where they're moving because of political unrest.

That theme of immigration and political asylum resonates today, and so does Pi’s curiosity, Desai explained, that leads him to explore different religions.

"I think that curiosity and wonder are something that we all have in us and could use in this day and age, with everything that’s happening, instead of kind of the echo chamber that so many of us oftentimes live in just through social media," he said.

Even in his position, Desai also appreciated seeing a play at the Ahmanson, where the main character looked like him.

“Visibility matters,” he said. “And I can’t tell you how empowering it is when you see yourself reflected on our stages.”

Mandviwala grew up in rural Kentucky and didn’t have a lot of local South Asian artists to look up to until he became part of the Broadway production of “Life of Pi.”

“I found that so galvanizing, so validating in so many ways about people that shared a common vocabulary, a similar experience about being immigrants or the child of immigrants,” he said.

While LA is diverse, as Mandviwala takes this show to smaller towns across the U.S., he hopes it will inspire others.

"That other South Asian boy who hasn’t really seen much of themselves in media or in the arts, to inspire them to take bigger, bigger space for themselves and how they approach their own life," he said.