The actors give sharp, emotionally persuasive performances, but their effectiveness is limited by the play’s structure. The key scenes from the novel are enacted before us: a brutal brawl between Pecola’s parents the traumatic day when Pecola gets her first period while she is staying with Claudia and Frieda the humiliating sexual experience that poisoned Cholly’s life. They share her sense of unbelonging in the world but are saved from her sense of worthlessness by the loving warmth of their own home, presided over by their sharp-tongued but compassionate mother (TaRon Patton). Days), observe her plight with a mixture of pity and distaste. Pecola’s friends, Claudia and her sister, Frieda (Monifa M. Cole), and her worn and embittered mother, Pauline (Chavez Ravine), represented on a lower platform at the side of the stage. It could hardly be more pitifully different from the grim storefront where Pecola (Alana Arenas) resides with her alcoholic father, Cholly (Victor J. (Green floral sheets signify the coming of spring.) At the center of the stage is a small, red-trimmed white house from a storybook, the kind of place where little white girls named Jane live, girls whose happy lives fill Pecola’s daydreams. The play is mounted with simplicity on a set by Stephanie Nelson that cleverly uses lines of wash hung out to dry to create distinct playing spaces and also to mark the changing of the seasons. Days as Frieda in The Bluest Eye. Credit. Pugh as Claudia, Chavez Ravine as Pauline and Monifa M. What we have here is essentially a book talking to us from the stage, with its specific narrative points of view and literary style intact, more or less undistorted by any serious theatrical reconsideration.įrom left, Alana Arenas as Pecola, Libya V. “Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison’s acclaimed novel makes its New York stage debut,” the press release states, and that’s about right. So too is much of Lydia Diamond’s adaptation, which is directed by Hallie Gordon. Those blunt and painful words are drawn directly from Ms. We had dropped our seeds in our own little plot of black dirt, just as Pecola’s father had dropped his seeds in his own plot of black dirt.” “We thought, at the time, that it was because Pecola was having her father’s baby that the marigolds did not grow. Pugh) in the play’s opening moments, speaking of the cataclysm that marked a turning point in her own youth and ended her friend’s. “Quiet as it’s kept, there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941,” recalls Pecola’s friend Claudia (Libya V. (Because of its sexual content, the production is aimed at “teens and young adults,” the press materials say.) The complex narrative is faithfully translated to the stage in the Steppenwolf Theater Company’s adaptation of the book, which is being presented by the New Victory Theater at the Duke Theater on 42nd Street. Morrison who explores the cultural pathology behind them with lyrical grace in her impressionistic novel, which unfolds Pecola’s sad story from a variety of perspectives. The blue eyes she dreams of will allow the world to see Pecola herself anew, through a lens unclouded by racism and norms of beauty shaped by a myopic white culture.Įleven-year-old Pecola can articulate only her own desperate hopes of course, not the sociological and psychological toxins they signify. But Pecola Breedlove, the heartsick, lonely and abused central character in the novel, doesn’t really want to change her own perspective. A young black girl growing up in Ohio in the 1940s yearns to see the world through a different set of eyes in Toni Morrison’s first novel, “The Bluest Eye,” published in 1970.