Adapting The Bluest Eye for the Stage.

Young, Harvey ; Prince, Jocelyn

Lydia Diamond's theatrical adaptation of Toni Morrison's novel, The Bluest Eye, opens with Pecola Breedlove, the story's eleven-year-old protagonist, standing at center stage. She holds a book and reads aloud from a "Dick and Jane"-style early childhood reader: "Here is the house. It is green and white. It has a red door. It is very pretty" (9). As she reads, the other members of Morrison and Diamond's fictional community arrive and add their voices to Pecola's narration. Her parents, Cholly and Mrs. Breedlove, are the first to appear, followed by her similarly aged friends Claudia and Frieda; Maureen Peal, a light-complexioned classmate; Claudia and Frieda's mother (Mama) and finally Soaphead Church, whom we later learn is "an interpreter of dreams." Rather than speak in harmony with Pecola, each character relays the exploits of "Dick and Jane" in a unique rhythm and with a distinct pacing designed to stand apart from Pecola's. Their words do not blend together. Instead, they step on one another. The cacophony that results from the multiple narrations renders the story completely unrecognizable and the voices indistinct. Following the arrival of Soaphead Church onstage, the babel abruptly ends. The characters stop speaking. The lights fade on everyone with the exception of Pecola, who stands in the flood of a spotlight. Slowly, she pivots, and shares her profile with the audience before exiting the stage. In this brief moment, Pecola's previously unannounced pregnancy reveals itself.

The disharmony that greets the spectator at the start of the play foreshadows the traumatizing effect that a discordant community, including a dysfunctional family unit, can have on its least empowered members. The abuses of society are projected upon Pecola. Her "friend" Maureen Peal ridicules her for her darker complexion and repeatedly calls her a "black-ee-mo." Pecola's mother, "Mrs. Breedlove," locates beauty in whiteness, and as a result, invests herself in the happiness of the white girl for whom she works and not her own daughter. The emotional distance that separates mother and daughter is evident in the fact that Pecola calls her mother "Mrs. Breedlove" whereas Mrs. Breedlove is simply "Polly" to the white girl. Pecola's father, an alcoholic who himself is a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, assaults and impregnates his daughter. It is the accumulation and weight of these experiences that transforms the narrative's protagonist into a prematurely old, "hunched" and mentally unstable tragic figure. As spectators of the play, we witness Pecola's decline. Following Morrison's lead, Diamond frames the story from the perspective of Claudia and Frieda, omniscient narrators who have "lived through it all" and reminisce about by theatrically restaging--their youthful experiences during "fall 1941," when they first met Pecola (7). We join them in their retreat into the past. This movement backwards in time grants us an opportunity to observe the destructive effects of racial self-hatred, but does not explain why it exists. Claudia, speaking in direct address, tells us matter-of-factly, "since why is difficult to answer, we must take refuge in how."

This article explores Lydia Diamond's 2005 stage adaptation of Toni Morrison's novel The Bluest Eye. The play, first commissioned by the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago, has been performed in theaters across the country, including the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, the New Victory Theatre in New York City, and the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre in San Francisco, in addition to university and college stages. In examining the 2005 world-premiere production, this article introduces the challenges of adapting the writings of Toni Morrison for the stage and other visual media, chronicles how expectations of a "successful" adaptation have changed over time, offers a brief history of the Steppenwolf Theatre company, addresses the role that The Bluest Eye played in diversifying Steppenwolf's acting ensemble, and spotlights the unique contributions--the voice and presence--of Lydia Diamond within her play. It engages with the process of adaptation and the act of translating across media, not by offering a close reading of the script in relation to the play text, but by revealing the negotiations and investments of the novelist, playwright, producing theater company, and theater critics who played a role in bringing Morrison's first novel to the stage.

A Long Shadow

Only two of Toni Morrison's nine novels have been translated across media and presented before audiences: Beloved and The Bluest Eye. These texts have yielded two mainstream productions: the 1998 feature film Beloved and Diamond's 2005 play. The limited number of adaptations of Morrison's work is explained, in part, by her frequent refusal to sell the rights or to grant permission to adaptors with an interest in re-presenting her novels. The published version (by Dramatic Publishing) of Diamond's play offers a glimpse at the persistence of authorial control. Diamond's byline on the cover appears in a similar manner and location as that of a translator of a text. In contrast, Morrison's name, presented in a bigger font and capitalized letters, looms large. It is dwarfed only by the title of the play. Beyond the cover, the reader is greeted with the biographies of both the playwright and the novel's author. Morrison's appears first, above Diamond's. The title page bills the play as "Toni Morrison's THE BLUEST EYE" (1). On the following page, the "IMPORTANT BILLING AND CREDIT REQUIREMENTS" note cautions, "All producers of the play must give credit to Toni Morrison as the author of the book and Lydia Diamond as the dramatizer of the play" in all programs, advertising and publicity (3; emphasis in original). In her "Playwright Note," Diamond deemphasizes her role in the crafting of the story for the stage. She humbly writes, "I am so pleased to have played a part in bringing Toni Morrison's exquisitely rendered novel to audiences in a new way and will always be appreciative that she agreed to let it have this new life" (4).

Once permission has been obtained, the difficulty of adapting Morrison appears not only in the limited number of attempts, but also within the mixed reviews which these few efforts have received from the mainstream press. The feature-length film adaptation of Beloved, the novel that brought Morrison widespread public recognition and won her the Pulitzer Prize in 1987, required nearly a decade, the efforts of three credited screenwriters, and the celebrity of producer and media mogul Oprah Winfrey to create. Considered "enticing yet daunting" by New York Times film critic Janet Maslin, the Beloved adaptation process resulted in a filmic text that was praised for its ability to create a coherent 172-minute narrative from a 350-page novel and critiqued for possessing a flaw common to most literary adaptations: an ongoing dependence on the novel for meaning and clarity (E1). Maslin writes that the film "works on its own but is much enhanced by familiarity with the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. In so ambitiously bringing this story to the screen, Ms. Winfrey underscores a favorite, invaluable credo: read the book." Washington Post critic Michael O'Sullivan, before dismissing his own critiques as "a minor niggling quibble about a great film," observes, "[director Jonathan] Demme's version of the poetic tale [toward the conclusion] begins to ring prosaic, rendering what was implicit in the book into the realm of the explained" (n.pag). (1) At least one major newspaper reviewer dismissed Diamond's version of The Bluest Eye as a "book talking to us from the stage" (Isherwood E5). In each adaptation, both the original source material and the novelist cast a long shadow. To see a good adaptation of a Toni Morrison novel is to be reminded of how great the book actually was.

The critiques of adaptations of Morrison's texts, including the few negative assessments of the Steppenwolf production, reinforce the notion that artistic media should be distinct from one another. A narrative presented within a novel should look and sound in a way that differs from a narrative expressed within the dramatic or cinematic arts. When a play feels like a book, it has failed to realize its potential as a form of theater. Similarly, when a book reads like a play, it has not maximized the uniqueness of its form. The attention given to the differences among media and the determination of success based upon a full exploitation of what sets each apart manufactures the belief that an adaptation should be materially different from its source. Indeed, the aspects of the film Beloved that garnered the best reviews were directorial "inventions" which were not present in the novel. Similarly, Time Out Chicago, in its review of the play The Bluest Eye, praised the elements that were decidedly not novelesque: "[Hallie] Gordon's staging is full of power and invention, and so many near-perfect performances ..." (Vire n. pag). Hedy Weiss, perhaps sympathetic to Diamond's status as a potentially underappreciated or overlooked adaptor/collaborator, remarked that the "adaptation by Lydia Diamond and directed by Gordon are so splendid and so seamlessly intertwined that it is hard to apportion credit" in her Chicago Sun-Times review (n. pag).

The labeling of a theatrical adaptation as "successful" by mainstream theater critics frequently anchors itself in an acknowledgement of the formal differences among media and a recognition of how those differences--design elements, direction, the presence of actors among others--were utilized in the development of the narrative. A good adaptation captures the feel of the novel without seeking to replicate the mechanics of the original author. In mid-twentieth-century theater criticism, the perspective that the adaptation had to be stylistically different than its source material gained traction. In contrast to an earlier wave of theater practitioners, like Robert Edmond Jones, who encouraged a synthesis among the emerging and traditional arts, later critics sought to portray theater as not only unique but also substantially different from other media. (2) This move on offense, which may ultimately have been a defensive gesture against the perceived threat of popular film and television, sought to cast theater as a medium apart from all others. In his 1962 article '[Adapting a Novel to the Stage," John Perry echoed the protectionist calls of his contemporaries to distinguish theater from other literary arts, especially poetry and literature. Identifying the challenges facing the playwright, Perry observed, "literary devices such as stream-of-consciousness, imagery, symbolism, or even basic description to identify characters and create atmosphere are of no avail to him" (1313). The adaptor to the stage, according to Perry, serves as a translator or, better yet, a conjurer who takes the abstract and gives it dimensionality on the stage. In addition, it is not nearly enough for her to merely render something on the stage. The adapted material, the play, must confront the audience, and in so doing, express its urgency. All of these are traits that temporally distinguish live theater and theater spectatorship from what he considers to be the more passive act of reading. Citing theater critic Kenneth Macgowan, Perry writes:

 The play, in turn, relates the present. It has an immediacy. In the
 novel, "the reader is, so to speak, personally conducted, the
 author is our guide. In the drama, so far as the dramatist is
 concerned, we must travel alone. A play is uniquely objective
 because the author must convey everything through the dialogue of
 living man and woman, and has no opportunity for personal
comment."
 (1315) 

Macgowan, a contemporary of and an occasional collaborator with Robert Edmund Jones, believed that the theater existed as an extension beyond other art forms. The challenge facing the dramatist was to master a form of expression that possessed different capabilities than the other literary arts. A skilled playwright transmutes novelesque description into action, including spoken dialogue. She transforms an imagined world into something seemingly real and inhabited by flesh-and-blood bodies, who in turn initiate a distinctive relationship between the audience and the drama.

In the nearly fifty years since Perry penned his article, the challenges and expectations of theatrical adaptation have not changed. The labeling of contemporary cultural practices and the larger cultural moment as "postmodern"--as reflected in the increasing popularity of pastiche, parody, re-makes/remixes, and "mash-ups" among other forms of adaptation--has emboldened an academic cult of authenticity populated by individuals who read adaptations as having comparably lower cultural value than the texts upon which they were based. In her 2007 article "Where Is Hamlet?: Text, Performance, and Adaptation," Margaret Jane Kidnie spotlights the scholarly bias against both the performance of literature (i.e., staging a production of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet) and the adaptation of literature (i.e., Joe Calarco's film Shakespeare's R&J). She notes that these adaptations are deemed dismissively as "second-order" in relation to the source text (William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet). This bias, which Kidnie critiques, and the low respect accorded to adaptation are underscored when the author rhetorically asks: "At what point does a performance take so many liberties with a text that it gets downgraded to the status of an adaptation?" (104; emphasis added). In A Theory of Adaptation, literary theorist Linda Hutcheon offers a redemptive account of adaptations across a variety of media. In her brief treatment of stage work, which blurs Kidnie's distinction between performance and adaptation, Hutcheon credits the director, "who is held even more responsible for the form and impact of the whole," as the agentive figure in its creation (83).

Relegated to the sidelines in both accounts are the playwrights-as-adaptors who are the first people who must find a way to translate an experience envisioned for another medium into a form that can be expressed on a stage by a limited company of actors and before a live audience. Despite the constancy of their charge, playwright-adaptors have employed a variety of methods, inflected by their individual aesthetic tastes and the features of the media that they have selected for theatrical adaptation. The gamut of approaches range from Richard Schechner's Dionynus '69, a contemporary restaging of Euripides' The Bacchae; to Emily Mann's Execution of Justice, a documentary play about the murder of San Francisco City Supervisor Harvey Milk and influenced by television news reportage of Milk's murder; to Anna Deavere Smith's Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, a play based upon the Los Angeles urban uprising that saturated television and print media; to David Lindsay-Abaire's Shrek: The Musical, a Broadway musical based upon a popular animated film. The rising number of screen texts (films, television shows or news reportage, video games) being adapted for the stage has begun to alter conceptions of the successful adaptation.

Increasingly, playwrights now face the additional responsibility of attempting to recreate the experience of watching a film within the theater. When a play feels like the film upon which it was based, the adaptor has done her job well. This shift in perspective has begun to alter expectations of literary adaptations. Judith Graves Miller notes:

 Contemporary adaptations of novels are interesting precisely
 because adaptors attempt to pursue narrative techniques on the
 stage. Rather than turning novels into theatre pieces according to
 a dramatic formula, they often maintain the narrative voice,
 substituting storytellers for characters. In some cases adaptations
 even seem to objectify the act of reading. (433) 

Miller celebrates the same elements of novel-to-stage adaptations that have served as the basis of critique and criticism. To the French cultural historian, the skill of the playwright emerges not necessarily in fashioning a new narrative structure that is more suitable for the stage, but rather in attempting to retain as much of the original narrative as possible on the stage. The goal is to highlight, and perhaps pay homage to the novel by bestowing elements of the novelesque within the theater. Indeed, a compliment that one could pay to an adaptor is that she created a play that appears just like the book. Such praise suggests that she has mastered the form to an extent that she can import the style of another medium and cover the gaps separating them.

The celebration of the maintenance of the novel's style onstage underscores the necessity of relaying not only the "pulse" of the story, but also the markers of the original author. To preserve the narrative structure without attempting to capture the tone of the author's voice would threaten to strip the resulting adaptation of the element that most accounts for the success of the original source material. This difference, perhaps, the soul of the original, needs to be preserved and represented in the copy, the adaptation. While this approach certainly suggests a privileging of the source text over the adaptation and could imply that the adaptor is merely a transcriber or editor but not a theatrical innovator, it also highlights the skill required to preserve the essence of a singular form and to transfer it in a palatable manner within another medium.

Although the novel The Bluest Eye barely spans two hundred pages, its narrative structure, in which a variety of characters speak in first person about an event that happened within the past, poses significant challenges for the adaptor. How do you create a theatrical event even as a faithful adaptation--from a mostly descriptive text? If theater is driven by dialogue and physical action, then how do you wrestle with the challenges posed by continuous first-person narration? The answer, for Diamond, was to maintain Morrison's tone of address and import it to the stage. Her characters also speak in first-person, direct address. This choice preserves Morrison's absented presence as the authorial "guide," who takes the reader, and now, theatergoer, through the play. It also ensures that the story remains reflective--recounting a tragic fall over time from a temporally and spatially removed perspective. In addition, this descriptive narrative structure likely made the play easier to adapt, and indeed stage. Entire characters and subplots could be omitted, years could pass, and new locations could be introduced, thanks to the re-orientating function of first-person direct address. Director Walter Dallas demonstrated the power of Morrison's address, as theatricalized by Diamond, in his 2007 production of the play at the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre in San Francisco. One reviewer described the play in the following manner: "The drama is told in a narrative form with no set" (Connema n. pag.).

Artfully Rendering the Profane

The Steppenwolf Theatre Company, winner of the 1985 Tony Award for Best Regional Theatre, is one of the most successful theaters in the United States. Founded in 1974 by three Illinois State University students and six of their friends, the fledgling company quickly established its own niche within the Chicago theater scene by performing contemporary American dramatic texts, often by emerging playwrights, and with hyper-realistic stagings. A mostly male and entirely white ensemble, the company championed plays--such as those written by Sam Shepard--which interrogated not only the societal disillusionment of the post-Vietnam War period but also portrayed a less-refined, more rugged and physical masculinity. The Steppenwolf stage became a place where violence and profanity were artfully rendered within the frame of theater. It offered a window into the world and rarely shied away from showing life as it is lived and experienced. In 1985, theater critic Frank Rich, reviewing the Steppenwolf production of Orphans, noted that the company offers a "sizzling, idiosyncratic performance style as brawny, all-American and blunt as the windy city that spawned it" (C22). The acclaim accorded Steppenwolf, especially within major newspaper reviews, not only brought national recognition to the acting company, but also influenced popular characterizations of Chicago's theatrical style. Steppenwolf theater became Chicago theater, and Chicago theater was marked by gritty realism.

Despite its success, the theater--ensemble, administration, and audience--neither was racially diverse nor, as can be gleaned from Steppenwolf's early production history, made a concerted effort to reach out to Chicago's large minority population. (3) The first significant change in this direction was the 1993 invitation of K. Todd Freeman, who had received a Tony Award nomination for Best Actor for his role in the 1992 Steppenwolf production The Song of Jacob Zulu. With Freeman's presence, and presumably, his input in season selection, the twenty-year old company had the potential to feature at least one black actor regularly in their productions. The following year, Freeman co-starred in two plays, Libra and A Clockwork Orange. Six years would pass before he would appear again on the Steppenwolf stage. In the interim years, the company hired Martha Lavey, a Chicago actress, to serve as the company's new artistic director. Under Lavey's leadership, the company initiated a pronounced push to reach new audiences, especially nontraditional and first-time theater attendees. In 1998, the company opened School at Steppenwolf, a training academy for young actors interested in learning Steppenwolf style from ensemble members and frequent collaborators. Two years later, it launched New Plays Initiative, designed to develop new work and emerging playwrights and to introduce Steppenwolf audiences to both. In addition, it established Steppenwolf for Young Adults, in which the theater would either revive a classic play, or commission an adaptation of a seminal novel which would be given a short production run, including special weekday matinee performances "specifically geared to teachers, young adults and families" ("Steppenwolf" n. pag.).

The theatrical adaptation of The Bluest Eye was commissioned by Steppenwolf for Young Adults (SYA) and New Plays Initiafve (NPI). Ed Sobel, director of NPI, in consultation with Lavey, identified Lydia Diamond, an African American playwright who had written several well-received plays, including The Gift Horse (2002), winner of the Theodore C. Ward Prize as the preferred adaptor of the novel. For Diamond, who had moved away from Chicago and had recently given birth to a son, the Steppenwolf invitation arrived at a moment of transition, and as such helped to reaffirm her identity as a professional playwright. In addition, her new status as a mother changed her relationship to Morrison's novel.

 Suddenly things I had read many times before, that I thought made
 all the sense in the world, made SO much more sense, were so much
 more personal.... I realized that I was adapting The Bluest Eye
 for
 Baylor, my son, and it was the most empowering and frightening and
 wonderful thing. (Diamond, "Why" 33) 

Shortly after Diamond completed the script, the full production team was assembled. Hallie Gordon, director of SYA, agreed to direct the world-premiere production. Stephanie Nelson was hired to design the set. J. R. Lederle created the lighting design. Victoria Delorio oversaw sound elements, Lenora Inez Brown provided dramaturgical assistance, and Ann Boyd choreographed the fight scenes within the play. Deb Styer stage-managed the production, and Jocelyn Prince served as assistant director. The production team was tasked with creating a play that would attract new, younger, and more diverse audiences to the theater. Implicit in their charge was a call to develop a performance piece that had the potential to reach the city's large African American population. This latter motivation was made evident by Steppenwolf's decision to mount the show in February--Black History Month. The eventual success of the production, as measured by critical reviews and ticket sales, bolstered the theater company's diversity efforts. In 2007, Steppenwolf invited five actors to join the ensemble, including four African American actors--Alana Arenas, Jon Michael Hall, Ora Jones and James Meredith Vincent--of whom two, Arenas and Vincent, appeared in The Bluest Eye. (4) These four were the second, third, fourth, and fifth black actors invited to join the ensemble since the company's founding thirty-three years earlier.

Although information pertaining to the process by which the Steppenwolf Theatre Company determines when and whom to invite to join the ensemble has not been disclosed publicly, the success of The Bluest Eye--similar to that of The Song of Jacob Zulu--likely played a role. Consistently, Chicago theater reviewers heralded the play as the best production of the Steppenwolf season, including all plays performed on the theater company's three stages. Chris Jones, senior theater critic for the Chicago Tribune, called Diamond's play "one of the best literary adaptations of the last decade in Chicago--a city that knows a thing or two about such things" (1). He added, "this show works so well because it's true to the source material but also unafraid to explore independently how an audience might best understand" (1). Although reviewers rarely failed to address the adaptation's inability to stand fully apart from the novel, and also its over-reliance on Morrison's narrative structure, they were consistent in their praise for Diamond, the cast, and director Gordon. Capturing most of the accolades was Aloha Arenas, a twenty-two-year-old recent college graduate who performed the role of Pecola, the young woman whose personal misfortunes and growing disgust at her skin color prompts her to covet not only blue eyes but also the privileges of whiteness.

Theater for Young Adults

In August 2005, six months after the world premiere of Diamond's adaptation, the Board of Education in Littleton, Colorado banned Morrison's book from both its curriculum and library bookshelves after receiving "complaints about its explicit sex, including the rape of an 11-year-old girl by her father" (ALA n. pag). Months earlier, several Chicago Public School administrators and teachers similarly expressed concern over the appropriateness of the play for high-school audiences. Considering that a pivotal moment in the novel is the sexual assault of Pecola--which Morrison delivers in exacting detail, the frequent question raised by principals and teachers was how Steppenwolf, which had attained a reputation for gritty, in-your-face realism--would portray this scene. Jean Kahler, the theater's education coordinator, recalled in a 2007 interview that "[we] sent the script out to everyone who asked for a copy of it because many teachers had to be reassured that the rape wouldn't visually happen onstage" (n. pag). In her adaptation, Diamond eliminated the most explicit lines from Morrison's account of the scene. Whereas the source text is filled with references to sexual organs and acts, the play relies upon innuendo and the audience's imagination to restore the image vividly described by Morrison. In addition, the playwright was adamant that the Steppenwolf production resist any attempt to realistically stage the assault, or for that matter, any act of violence. In the "Playwright Note" to the published version of her play, Diamond offers the same caution to her reader: "I think it is very important that the piece be spared graphic, realistic representations of sexual violence" (4).

In the Steppenwolf staging of the scene, the main action occurred on a small, elevated platform, stage left, which through the course of the performance had been established as the Breedlove's home. At stage right stood the actors playing Mrs. Breedlove, Soaphead Church, Frieda, and Claudia, who watched as a drunken Cholly returned home, and after a while noticed his daughter washing dishes. In order to heighten the dramatic intensity of the moment, choreographer Ann Boyd and director Hallie Gordon presented it in a stylized, nearly expressionistic manner. Cholly's drunken movements were performed in an exaggeratedly slow motion. With each step, the audience could appreciate not only the extent of his inebriation but also the threat that was closing in on Pecola. As he moved closer and closer to his daughter, the other actors on stage, now having paired up, began to circle one another. One actor, intently focused upon the other, would walk around his or her partner, like a stalker or a predator. Their actions were intended to inform the audience's reading of Cholly's behavior in the Breedlove home. Diamond ensures that the assault will not "visually occur" onstage by insisting that Cholly stops moving before he reaches his daughter. He stands still, at a distance, and narrates his actions while the motion of the other characters, the witnesses to Pecola's assault, continues. Alongside these movements, edited portions of Morrison's prose--spoken by all of the actors onstage, with the noticeable exception of Pecola, recount both the swelling desires within Cholly and the community's disapproval of his actions.

SOAPHEAD CHURCH: The drunken, confused mixture of his memories of Pauline and the doing of a wild and forbidden thing excited him.

CHOLLY: No matter it was wrong.

SOAPHEAD CHURCH: For what was wrong to Cholly? Even if he had the power to discern wrong from right, it wouldn't matter for he lived only in the want of it.

CHOLLY: The next thing he knew, or maybe remembered, or maybe it didn't happen at all....

SOAPHEAD CHURCH: It happened.

CLAUDIA: It happened.

PECOLA: It happened. (66)

The presentation of this scene enhances Morrison and Diamond's attempt to demonstrate how environment shaped the actions and outcomes of their characters. Having learned earlier of Cholly's abandonment by his parents, and later, how the intrusion of a pair of white, gun-toting men during a romantic picnic with an ex-girlfriend (Pauline) permanently contributed toward his association of violence with intimacy, the audience possesses the tools to understand how those past events inform his narrativized actions. This understanding is bolstered by Gordon's and Boyd's staging, which enables Cholly to retrospectively comment upon the sexual assault before it had occurred (within the play's narrative). This performance of assault as reverie dilutes the moment of its potential traumatic effect, and in turn enables a more sympathetic identification with Cholly. Aiding this interpretation, the characters stop moving and stand apart, like Cholly and Pecola, in the as-narrated moment of the actual assault. The distance separating the two characters and their stillness underscores the sensation that the event being described happened in the past and is not happening now, not even as a re-creation, within the space of the theater.

In the stage directions to the "rape" scene, Diamond is adamant that Cholly and Pecola "stand, never touching or moving" (65). This choice likely anchors itself in the playwright's understanding that any movement or touching could serve as an invitation for production personnel to create a realistic staging of the event that would render it unsuitable for younger audiences. It is also possible that Diamond's stern warning could have been inserted to assuage the concerns of school administrators and teachers who wanted to review the script, and more specifically, the rape scene, before deciding whether to attend the production. In addition to the playwright's and school administrators' concerns over the depiction of Cholly's drunken encounter with Pecola, there was an awareness among Steppenwolf personnel that even a stylized depiction of a fictional sexual assault could prove traumatizing for audience members who had actually survived it. Steppenwolf producers arranged for rape crisis counselors from the Chicago YWCA to operate an information table with referrals and resources for victims of sexual assault before, during, and after the matinee performances for school groups. Counselors also were available for on-site counseling for students who requested services.

In light of Steppenwolf's efforts to present the core of Pecola's narrative, while either editing out or presenting at a remove the most explicit details of her traumatic experiences, Diamond succeeded in creating a theatrical text that could be offered to younger audiences. In Charles Isherwood's review of the fully intact remount of the Steppenwolf production at the New Victory Theater in New York City, the New York Times reviewer centered his critique on Diamond's efforts to render Pecola's experiences more palatable. Isherwood, echoing Perry, writes, "theater thrives on immediacy and the evocation of experience that hasn't already been mediated for us. The destruction of the soul and mind of an 11-year-old girl should be a shattering thing to watch, but 'The Bluest Eye' evokes only a mild sadness, not a wrenching sorrow" (E5). For the theater critic, the decision to incorporate not only first-person narrative address, but also the stylized staging of violence, prevents spectator identification with Pecola. A person watches her story, but does not identify with, or become Pecola throughout the ninety-minute performance. While Diamond's approach does echo Brechtian social commentary--using theater to reflect the ills of society by keeping the audience at a critical distance it does not place spectators in the stead of Pecola and invite them to imaginatively experience her succession of personal traumas. The demand of the commission, the anxieties of the school administrators, the concerns of Steppenwolf producers and the emotional well-being of young, and perhaps impressionable audiences would not allow such an approach.

It is in these moments of skillful editing and willful omission that Diamond's presence as adaptor appears most clearly. The theatrical world that her characters inhabit is not nearly as dark as the environment crafted by Morrison. This is aided in part by Diamond's insistence that all acts of violence appear in a stylized and nonrealistic manner. In addition to the Cholly-Pecola scene, the playwright describes a scene of domestic abuse, as Mrs. Breedlove eventually knocks her husband unconscious in "a highly choreographed slow-motion fight" (21). Positioning Claudia and Frieda as witnesses to and narrators of the assault, Diamond writes, "the speed of the 'dance' slows in opposition to the animation of CLAUDIA's words. The dance repeats itself." The dance, which consists of Mrs. Breedlove getting a pan and miming hitting Cholly with it, is repeated by a chorus of characters which stands stage right of the Breedlove's home and reenact the assault. Each holds a pan and swings it in rhythm with Mrs. Breedlove. Presented in asynchronous time (relative to Claudia's narration), the dance as staged by Diamond lessens spectators' identification or empathetic attachment to the featured characters in a manner similar to the later scene involving Cholly and Pecola. The "slow" staging suggests that the witnessed behavior is atypical of the characters, and therefore is not their defining quality. Indeed, two scenes later, Cholly and Mrs. Breedlove reenact their courtship, and before the eyes of the audience become young lovers again. In these loving moments, the distance imposed by alienating techniques gets replaced by dramatic realism. The characters move in real time and can now touch one another. With the audience invited to identify with the characters, the prior abuse despite foreshadowing the later breakdown of their relationship--seems less consequential, and likely a moment when the characters were not behaving like themselves.

In the scene when Pecola, Claudia, and Frieda, visit Mrs. Breedlove, a domestic worker at the home of her white employer, Diamond again incorporates stylization to depict a moment of violence. Awaiting the return of Mrs. Breedlove, the three girls stand in her employer's kitchen. A "white GIRL" enters the scene and, afraid of Claudia, Frieda, and Pecola, calls aloud for "Polly," referring to Mrs. Breedlove, who as Claudia notes in the scene, "was Mrs. Breedlove even to Pecola." Startled, Frieda knocks over a pie; Mrs. Breedlove returns to the kitchen and slaps Pecola, whom she believes caused the mess, scoops up Girl in her arms, and sends her daughter and friends away. When Girl asks who the other three children were, Pecola's mother replies, "They weren't nobody" (61). The violence, more emotional than physical, consists of the manner in which all three black girls, especially Pecola, are made to feel inferior to the white girl. As Mrs. Breedlove implies, they do not matter. She erases them. The staging of this scene appears in truly expressionistic fashion. Instead of casting a young woman to play the role, Diamond insists that a doll play Girl. In her stage directions, she writes: "The little white GIRL is either represented by a white, life-sized doll, manipulated by the actress who plays MAUREEN PEAL, wearing an identical outfit, or the door opens to reveal a doll and her lines are in V.O [Voice Over]" (60). In the Steppenwolf productions, Gordon represented Girl with a standard-sized doll manipulated by the actress playing Maureen Peal. The decision to use a doll within the production draws attention to the social structure that could make a mother behave more maternally to a stranger than her own daughter. In the closing moments of the scene, in which Mrs. Breedlove holds and comforts the "crying" doll and brusquely sends Pecola away, the dysfunction and discord that exists within the social community are highlighted. These moments spotlight the effects of parental neglect and white privilege on families.

Diamond further softens the edges of Morrison's story by creating a play with fewer flawed black male characters. This intervention could have been inspired by Diamond's decision to adapt the play "for" her son. In the world-premiere production at the Steppenwolf, only two black male characters appear onstage: Cholly and Soaphead Church. Diamond's embrace of stylized staging practices helped to mute potential critiques of Cholly and to rescue him from being dismissed as the play's antagonist. Although Cholly assaults Pecola, the playwright seems to suggest that he is not solely responsible for his actions. His earlier abuse played a role. One of the more extreme examples of Diamond's skillful editing appears in her treatment of Soaphead Chuch. In the novel, Morrison characterizes him as a pedophile (179). Such an inference does not appear within the play. Instead, Soaphead Church is a redeeming figure. Although he tricks Pecola into poisoning the dog of his landlord, and through this action pushes the play's protagonist into insanity, Soaphead Church is one of the few characters who express sympathy for her experiences and predicament. He literally prays for her.

Diamond distinguishes herself from Morrison in her effort to spotlight the underlying humanity of the majority of the play's characters. Each possesses flaws, but those flaws were created by the corrupting influence of society. At the outset of the play, Claudia and Frieda spotlight this condition within the Breedlove household: "Actually the Breedloves were not ugly so much as they were just poor and black and believed that they were ugly" (15). The inner-subjectivity or self-perception of the play's characters appears best in the final moments of The Bluest Eye when Diamond creates a monologue for Pecola. Whereas the novel abruptly transitions from a scene in which Soaphead Church hands Pecola a poisoned parcel of meat to the next scene in which she appears deranged, schizophrenic and speaks adoringly about her new blue eyes, the play incorporates a new scene in which the protagonist talks about her experience delivering the poisoned parcel to the dog. With the inclusion of the monologue, the only scene in which the words were authored entirely by the playwright and not adapted or edited from the novel, Diamond offers her audience their first and only glimpse into the subjectivity of Pecola.

 He was happy to see me ... and he licked the back of my hand like
 he was grateful that I saw him.... He gobbled the meat in the
 parcel up in one big gulp ... and then it all happened quicker than
 I thought anything could happen. He barked and the bark turned into
 a cough, then into a horrible whine like a scream almost ... then
 his eyes, rolled back into his head and he started to panting,
 trying to catch his breath, and scratching at the ground, all the
 time looking at me like it was my fault ... like how could I do
 that to him. Like I'm his only friend in the world and how could
 I.... (75-76). 

The monologue allows us to see the parallels between Pecola and the dog. Both are frequently overlooked. Both have a desire to be seen and treated well. As Pecola tells Soaphead Church in the previous scene, she desires blue eyes "so people won't turn away from me ... so my mama love me and I have friends" (74). For a girl who has survived parental abuse and communal neglect, the act of witnessing the dog's death proves devastating to her mental health. She remembers the dog's look as being accusatory, an act of betrayal. How could you ...? The monologue helps to explain her schizophrenia in the next scene. This disorder, combined with her many other negative experiences as replayed and staged within the play, also constructs the comfort that a psychic escape from the everyday can provide. Arguably, the monologue provides a moment for Pecola to realize her unconscious complicity in the abuse and death of another.

Looking and Talking Back

Following the majority of the Steppenwolf productions, "talkbacks," audience question-and-answer sessions, were held with the play's production personnel. Beyond the standard questions that occur in such post-show discussions--"How did you remember so many lines?"--audience members, especially older black female spectators, used the session to offer brief biographical snippets of their own lives as a way to comment upon the inherent truth of Morrison's story and Diamond's theatrical adaptation. Despite being a work chosen to speak to school-age audiences, the adaptation had the greatest impact on the school administrators and teachers, as well as on the parents, guardians, and grandparents of those students. The success of the production among adult, as opposed to young adult, audiences likely anchors itself in Morrison's ability to stitch together intensely complicated and emotionally jarring histories in a lyrical manner that often overwhelms younger readers. In "Why I Had to Adapt The Bluest Eye," her contribution to the Steppenwolf Study Guide, Diamond recalls her own difficulty comprehending Morrison's prose as a high school student: "In high school, I was given Toni Morrison's Beloved as a gift by an English teacher.... I read the whole thing, and it went over my head. I think that I was so young that I just shut down in places where it was hurtful or too close to the truth" (32). Although Diamond's efforts to present those hurtful and/or truthful elements of the adaptation through an expressionistic filter demonstrates her desire to reach younger audiences, and perhaps also to prevent young audiences from "[shutting] down" during parts of the performance, her play was nonetheless received best by older audiences who could recognize both the truth and the pain of the story in their own experiences.

Those older audiences were also raised before or during the Black Arts and Black Power movements; these individuals witnessed and likely also participated in organized efforts to celebrate the beauty and desirability of black skin, culture and identity. In the afterword to the 1993 edition of The Bluest Eye, Morrison locates herself within this generation and acknowledges that her novel was written in reaction to the "reclamation of racial beauty in the sixties" and her personal desire to interrogate the "necessity of the claim" (210). She remembers:

 Why, although reviled by others, could this beauty not be taken for
 granted within the community? Why did it need wide public
 articulation to exist? These are not clever questions. But in 1962
 when I began this story, and in 1965 when it began to be a book,
 the answers were not as obvious to me as they quickly became and
 are now. (210) 

The novel and the play reflect a sociohistorical moment that existed before the radical transformation caused by the social movements of the late 1950s and 1960s. In the talkbacks, audience members repeatedly spoke about their contributions to these various movements and/or revealed how their parents actively worked to instill confidence and pride in their children. In all of the responses, the pain of that period was acknowledged, but also understood to be an aspect of the past, and not the present. In a 2008 Time interview, Morrison agrees that the times have changed: "When I wrote the book, the young women who read it liked it [but] were unhappy because I had sort of exposed an area of shame. Nowadays I find young African-American women much more complete. They seem to have a confidence that they take for granted" (n. pag). This shift in perspective accounts for the difference in audience reactions. Although intended for high-school audiences, The Bluest Eye is not really their story. It does not reflect the needs and problems of their generation. As Hedy Weiss succinctly notes in her review, "[W]hile its central character is a preteen girl, the essence of Morrison's story could not be more adult" (n. pag). Despite the fact that color prejudice certainly exists and societal beauty standards frequently privilege specific ethnic looks over others, the plethora of black role models, in the areas of politics, business, and entertainment, challenges the racist beliefs of the past and chips away at its legacy in the present. This change in outlook explains why reflections upon past race relations served as the subject matter for the talkbacks among adult audiences and how the most pressing concern for contemporary administrators and teachers was not the representation of race or racism, but rather the depiction of sexual violence.

It also explains why the world created by Diamond, who is a generation younger than Morrison, is more optimistic than the one depicted in the novel. In the final moments of the play, Pecola is pregnant and has descended into madness. Whereas the novel ends in the same way, the lasting lesson of Diamond's adaptation is that the society in which she lived played a determining role in her tragic fall. Pecola, as witness to ongoing domestic abuse within her household, as victim of sexual assault, as a pawn in another's plan to kill a dog, is damaged to such an extent that race and racism appear only to serve as concomitant, rather than determining factors in her emotional unraveling. A lasting lesson of the play is that Pecola's misfortune could have been averted had someone--an adult--intervened in her life. Race is in the background. Neglect occupies the foreground.

Works Cited

American Library Association. "Censorship Dateline: Schools: Littleton, Colorado." Rocky Mountain News 7 Oct. 2005: n. pag. Web. 10 June 2009.

Connema, Richard. "The Bluest Eye, Ruthless! The Musical, and Chekhov in Yalta." Talkin' Broadway Regional News & Reviews: San Francisco. 2 Nov. 2007. Web. 28 July 2008.

Diamond, Lydia. The Bluest Eye. New York: Dramatic, 2007.

--. "Why I Had to Adapt The Bluest Eye." Study Guide: Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. Chicago: Steppenwolf Art Exchange, 2006. 32-33. Web. 10 June 2009.

Dobrin, Peter. "Debut Good but not Beloved." Philadelphia Inquirer 12 Feb. 2006: B6.

Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge, 2006.

Isherwood, Charles. "In a Time of Unbelonging, There Were No Marigolds." New York Times 7 Nov. 2006: E5.

Jones, Chris. "A Childhood Denied; In Steppenwolf's 'Bluest Eye,' a Girl Craves What Society Refuses to Give." Chicago Tribune 9 Oct. 2006: 1. Web. 10 June 2009.

Jones, Robert Edmond. "Thirty Years Behind." New York Times 6 Aug. 1944: X1.

Kahler, Jean. Telephone interview. 10 July 2007.

Kidnie, Margaret Jane. "Where is Hamlet?: Text, Performance, and Adaptation." A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance. Eds. Barbara Hodgdon and William B. Worthen. Malden, M.A: Blackwell, 2007. 101-20.

Maslin, Janet. "Peace from a Brutal Legacy." New York Times 16 Oct. 1998: El.

Miller, Judith Graves. "From Novel to Theatre: Contemporary Adaptations of Narrative to the French Stage." Theatre Journal 33.4 (December 1981): 431-52.

O'Sullivan, Michael. "Beloved: A Lyrically Harrowing Journey." Washington Post 16 Oct. 1998: n.pag.

Perry, John. "Adapting a Novel to the Stage." The English Journal 57.9 (December 1968): 1312-15.

Rich, Frank. "Steppenwolf Presents 'Orphans.'" New York Times 8 May 1985: C22.

Sachs, Andrea. "Ten Questions for Toni Morrison." Time (May 2008): n. pag. Web. 10 June 2009.

"Steppenwolf for Young Adults." Steppenwolf Theatre Company. n.d. Web. 26 Nov. 2012.

Vire, Kris. "The Bluest Eye." Time Out Chicago 85 (12-18 Oct. 2006): n. pag. Web. 10 June 2009.

Weiss, Hedy. "The Bluest Eye." Chicago Sun-Times 7 Feb. 2005: n.pag.

Notes

(1.) Even original work that shares the same source material as Morrison's novels is subject to similar critiques. Critics, in their mixed reviews of Margaret Garner (2005), an original opera inspired by the story of an escaped black captive who murdered her own child to prevent her from experiencing the abuses of slavery and whose actions motivated Morrison to pen Beloved, praised the subject matter but critiqued the production as lacking complexity and being overly sentimental. For example, Dobrin titled his review "Debut Good but not Beloved" (B6).

(2.) R. E. Jones lamented, "Why is it I asked myself that the theatre--the so-called 'legitimate' theatre--so persistently avoids the possibilities of any contagion from the other arts?" (X1).

(3.) The Steppenwolf Theatre Company was one of the first--if not the first--Chicago theater companies to institute "Vets Night," the final dress performance of each show which is made available to military veterans for free. The "Vets Night" crowd is considerably more diverse than the company's subscription audience. While "Vets Night" is an example of a "concerted effort," the phrase here is intended to refer to paying audiences.

(4.) Vincent did not appear in the world-premiere production of The Bluest Eye. He appeared in the 2006 Steppenwolf Theatre remounts. He was double-cast, as Soaphead Church and as the father of Claudia and Frieda, a role that only existed within these two productions, and was not included within the published version of Diamond's play.