вЂњIn that moment she was made more vulnerable than we could ever imagine.вЂќ вЂњIt was at this moment that PecolaвЂ™s world changed,вЂќ Claudia helpfully tells us in the scene of PecolaвЂ™s confused first encounter with menstruation. They are constantly stepping outside the story to add transitional commentary that transforms them from characters caught in a drama to people with seemingly instantaneous perspectives on their experience. The actors give sharp, emotionally persuasive performances, but their effectiveness is limited by the playвЂ™s structure. The key scenes from the novel are enacted before us: a brutal brawl between PecolaвЂ™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 ChollyвЂ™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. PecolaвЂ™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 PecolaвЂ™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 В“The Bluest Eye.В” 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.ДЇrom left, Alana Arenas as Pecola, Libya V. вЂњNobel Prize-winning author Toni MorrisonвЂ™s acclaimed novel makes its New York stage debut,вЂќ the press release states, and thatвЂ™s about right. So too is much of Lydia DiamondвЂ™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 PecolaвЂ™s father had dropped his seeds in his own plot of black dirt.вЂќ вЂњWe thought, at the time, that it was because Pecola was having her fatherвЂ™s baby that the marigolds did not grow. Pugh) in the playвЂ™s opening moments, speaking of the cataclysm that marked a turning point in her own youth and ended her friendвЂ™s. вЂњQuiet as itвЂ™s kept, there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941,вЂќ recalls PecolaвЂ™s friend Claudia (Libya V. (Because of its sexual content, the production is aimed at вЂњteens and young adults,вЂќ the press materials say.) The complex narrative is faithfully translated to the stage in the Steppenwolf Theater CompanyвЂ™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 PecolaвЂ™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.Д®leven-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, doesnвЂ™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 MorrisonвЂ™s first novel, вЂњThe Bluest Eye,вЂќ published in 1970.

The bluest eye play