Perhaps classic Toni Morrison novels should be simply left alone, to be best appreciated as beautifully constructed and profoundly expressed words on a page, as opposed to being spelled out and condensed for the screen or stage. Consider the first case in point: Even as a vehicle produced by and for superstar Oprah Winfrey, Oscar-winning director Jonathan Demme’s 1998 film version of Morrison’s “Beloved” was a much-maligned critical and commercial flop.
The only other officially sanctioned case in point is playwright Lydia R. Diamond’s 2005 theatrical adaptation of Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye.” Based solely on director Ibi Owolabi’s sluggish new staging of the drama for Synchronicity Theatre, however authorized its origins or admirable its objectives, the results are mainly misguided and fundamentally forced.
The story’s ostensible focus is an underprivileged 11-year-old Black girl named Pecola Breedlove (portrayed by young adult actress Niara Robinson), who’s growing up in rural Ohio during the early 1940s. Spurned by her mother (Dionna D. Davis) and molested by her father (Daisean L. Garrett), she’s regularly defined as “ugly” by everyone else around her, so it’s no wonder she often dreams of looking like blonde-haired, blue-eyed Hollywood child star Shirley Temple.
Credit: Casey Gardner Ford
Credit: Casey Gardner Ford
But Diamond’s rendering essentially relegates Pecola to a supporting role. As in the book, the primary point of view belongs to a precocious neighbor girl (delightfully enacted here by Brittany Deneen Hines), who shares narrating duties with her sister (Kerri Garrett). Additional characters also take turns diverting our attention by recounting their own arguably peripheral plotlines, including both of Pecola’s pitiable parents, and a charismatic roving spiritualist and interpreter of dreams (Enoch King).
As a piece of theater, the dramatic momentum lags without a more singular driving force to unify all the storytelling fragments. (A number of drawn-out scene changes don’t help.) The play tends to rely a tad too much on talky exposition and tedious descriptions of events, instead of attempting to actually envision or depict a lot of the action.
Moreover, the script transcribes whole passages of Morrison’s language from the novel, which is only a problem in the sense that it results in dialogue or monologues that sound slightly stilted on stage — coming from characters who are basically speaking with a wisdom and eloquence beyond their years or life experiences, less like realistic people of a particular time and place than like a gifted novelist commenting from a distance.
Synchronicity’s production values are somewhat lacking, notwithstanding designer Toni Sterling’s periodically moody lighting. Natalie Hart’s roughhewn set incorporates hanging sheets of laundry that are suitable for intermittent flourishes of shadow play, among other projections designed by Bradley Bergeron that are virtually impossible to discern against one odd section of a backdrop covered in a clinging patch of weeds.
As those two young sisters so aptly put it, Pecola is “sorely in need of somebody to care about her,” but Diamond’s “Bluest Eye” doesn’t always make that sentiment very accessible to her audience. For all the analytical talk about the rapist father’s “perverted freedom,” the repercussions of his abuse on poor Pecola ought to have a greater emotional impact on us.
When she ventures into a local candy store, for example, weighing the difference between the “promise of something sweet” and the unseen white proprietor’s “total absence of human recognition” in even acknowledging her presence, there’s no question that we care much more for Pecola than we’re given enough chances to truly feel.
THEATER REVIEW
“The Bluest Eye”
Through Oct. 17. 8 p.m. Wednesdays-Saturdays; 5 p.m. Sundays; 8 p.m. Monday (Oct. 4 only). $25-$40. Synchronicity Theatre (at Peachtree Pointe), 1545 Peachtree St. NE, Atlanta. 404-484-8636. www.synchrotheatre.com.
Bottom line: A rather static staging of Toni Morrison’s classic novel.
