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Thursday, July 19, 2007
‘The Bluest Eye’ @ Horizon
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
THEATER REVIEW “The Bluest Eye” Grade: B- 8 p.m. Wednesdays-Fridays. 8:30 p.m. Saturdays. 5 p.m. Fridays. Through Sept. 2. $20-$25. Horizon Theatre, 1083 Austin Ave., Little Five Points. 404-584-7450, horizontheatre.com.
The verdict: Morrison classic makes a respectable transition from page to stage.
Pecola Breedlove is a memorable character, as anyone who has read Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” will tell you. Her essential tragedy is her persistent belief in her own ugliness, a condition that causes her to wish for a kind of genetic intervention.
“Each night, without fail, she prayed for blue eyes,” Morrison writes of the 11-year-old girl, who is the subject of scorn and abuse from nearly everyone she encounters, including her own parents.
Among the problems with Morrison’s lush and poetic first novel is that it has three beginnings. It also gives away the ending right from the start.
Just in time for the National Black Arts Festival, playwright Lydia R. Diamond’s fastidiously faithful stage treatment of the Nobel Prize winner’s beloved little book has arrived at Horizon Theatre, and no one seems to mind that Diamond has failed to tidy up the novel’s ever-shifting point of view or capitalize on Morrison’s nakedly dancing dialogue.
It would be unfair to say that director Thomas W. Jones II’s staging is poorly done. It’s not. But the heavily populated show is busy, and the contemporary music is all wrong for a story set in the 1940s. This, however, is not grounds for dismissal. For Morrison’s characters are so indelibly sculpted here, their stories such a whirlwind of sadness and music, that the show somehow manages to ring true.
Truly, bluely.
Like raindrops falling on a scorching hot roof, Morrison’s feverish language almost evaporates in a cloud of plot and personalities. Jones seems determined to make this show clock in at two hours, and by Jove he makes it at warp speed.
Here is the set. It is very spare. Here are the actresses. They are very pretty. Here is Pecola’s Mommy and Daddy. They are not very nice. Here are her friends. Aren’t they cute? Play, everyone, play. Is it time to go home yet? Yes, it is time.
The good news is that 11-year-old Pecola is played by Joaquina Kalukango, a mesmerizing young actress who recently graduated Tri-Cities High School and is headed to the Juilliard School. Keep your eyes peeled for Kalukango. She’s the real deal.
Carol Mitchell-Leon and Neal Hazard are quite acceptable as Pecola’s parents, Cholly and Polly. Their fight scene — which Morrison so exactingly choreographs in the novel — is a classic. Hazard’s interpretation of Cholly is so incisive that his horrific crime becomes understandable: The man is numb with self-loathing.
As the Mama of Pecola’s friends Claudia (Bobbi Lynne Scott) and Frieda (Jessica Frances Dukes), Veronica Byrd gives a deliciously sassy approximation of a high-strutting, feather-ruffling mother hen. This is the one character who can be fully over-the-top and still authentic. Her comedic presence is mandatory.
In the end, here’s what matters: Diamond could have done better by “The Bluest Eye.” But Horizon probably could not have done much better by Diamond. “The Bluest Eye” is flawed, but even under the bright lights of theater, it’s still a gem. The National Black Arts Festival should be proud to wear it.
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Just browsing: Essential Theatre Festival
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Year after year, Peter Hardy’s Essential Theatre Festival keeps plugging along. Hardy’s mission is to produce three new-to-Atlanta plays, including a world premiere selected from a competition open only to Georgia writers.
The 2007 winner is Jean Sterrett’s “Fix Me So I Can Stand,” featuring Spencer Stephens as an African-American man who is wrongly blamed for a double murder during the 1970s. Happily, one of last year’s honorees, Larry Larson and Eddie Levi Lee’s “Charm School,” recently got a well-received production at Horizon Theatre.
The festival itself is a sweet idea, more admirable in design, generally, than execution. So when the director’s cell phone rings during his curtain speech, you can’t help but twitter when he says: “Essential Theatre. No, we didn’t win the regional Tony Award. That was the Alliance.”
Good one.
Cheap shots aside, Hardy sometimes picks screamers that no one else in town will touch. “Betty’s Summer Vacation” by Christopher Durang. David and Amy Sedaris’ “The Book of Liz.” Karen Wurl’s backstage farce “Miss Macbeth.”
Too bad, then, that this year’s funny play — a “Christmas Carol” send-up by Durang called “Mrs. Bob Cratchit’s Wild Christmas Binge”— is possessed of so little brilliance. Hardy’s flimsy, stand-and-mug staging makes the Dickens parody feel like community theater, although this approach may be intentional, given that the source material is often treated as such.
Durang’s riff is that Mrs. Cratchit is more a Gladys Kravitz-meets-Leona Helmsley than a dutifully invisible 19th century hausfrau. Johanna Linden nails the vitriolic boil of this overburdened mother, and Jeffrey C. Zwartjes’ Mr. Cratchit is a wonderfully chirpy foil.
Alex Van’s lispy Scrooge debunks preconceptions of the character’s irascibility, but his performance is a dud. What redeems here are the outlandish transformations of Topher Payne and Bobby Labartino, particularly the latter’s riotous take on Mr. Fezziwig, as an over-the-top, falling-down-drunk clown in a carrot-top wig.
For another festival entry called “Night Travels,” Hardy has conceived an evening of one-act meditations on love and loss, dreams and journeys. The four pieces are wildly uneven, the choreography hokey, but the experience is likely to stick with you like an unsolved mystery or a partly remembered dream.
Karen Wurl’s “Movies,” a nervous confessional by a country woman who is seduced by a video-store cashier, comes alive through the terrific acting of Laurie Beasley, who pops up again in Charlotte Fleck’s haunting final story, “Night Travels.”
Fleck’s poetry is rough around the edges. But the playwright has a gift for capturing the blurry space between consciousness and sleep. By train, plane and boat, three women move across time and space. But their souls seem to pull them in other directions, as if they are following their own maps, charting their own internal navigations. With memories of their mothers as beacons, the characters glide over disturbances and bumps toward a new morning.
This is a project that deserves further development.
Through Sunday. $10-$40. 7 Stages, 1005 Euclid Ave., Little Five Points. 404-523-7647; essentialtheatre.com
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