REVIEW:
'The Bluest Eye'
Plowshares Theatre Company at the City Theatre, inside the Hockeytown Cafe at 2301 Woodward Ave., Detroit. Thursday-Sunday, through Nov. 19. Tickets: $15-$28. For information: (313) 872-0279 or http://www.plowshares.org.
As I was sitting in the City Theatre last Friday night watching "The Bluest Eye," the opening production of Plowshares Theatre Company's 17th season, my thoughts drifted back 20 years to a conversation I had with my then-boss, an attractive black woman about 10 years my senior. What prompted the discussion I no longer recall, but its substance has stuck with me all these years. As a child growing up in the late 1940s and '50s, she told me – and as a young adult in the early '60s – it was rare to see another black face on television. So whenever Pearl Bailey, Louie Armstrong or some other early black entertainer appeared on their TV screens, everyone ran to their phones and called everyone else they knew with the same message: "Hurry! Look! One of us is on TV!" And sure enough, everyone dropped what they were doing and turned on that television show.
And that got me thinking. What must it have been like for minorities to live their lives without ever seeing positive images of themselves on TV, in the movies, on billboards or in mainstream newspapers and magazines? What affect did that invisibility have on them – if any?
Little did I know then that those same questions had already been pondered by Pulitzer-Prize-winning author Toni Morrison in her first book published in 1970. Reacting to the long-prevailing standards of female beauty – white with blonde hair and blue eyes – the civil rights era and Black Power movement ushered in a more racially inclusive standard: Black is Beautiful. However, that's not how a long-ago elementary school classmate of Morrison's viewed herself. So with that recollection in mind, the author set about to explore societal forces that helped shape the standards of beauty for women in the black community, and how those forces influenced their racial identity.
Set in Ohio in 1941, Lydia R. Diamond's adaptation of Morrison's book introduces us to 11-year-old Pecola Breedlove. The Breedloves, we're told, are poor, "peculiar" and "not particularly ugly, but they thought they were." Her abusive mother, now a domestic, once wanted to be like the happy white folk in the movies. Today, Pecola – tired of being invisible – prays for blue eyes so that people will see and love her.
After a fire damages their storefront home, Pecola is sent to live with the MacTeers, a happy, middle class black family with two daughters, Claudia and Frieda, who befriend the sad and lonely child. But after she's sent home, the magic Pecola prays for ends in tragedy.
Diamond, in her powerful adaptation originally staged last year by Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Company, wisely keeps the story focused on Pecola, the Breedloves and the MacTeers – and ignores most of the other characters and subplots from the book. Like the novel, much of the background we need to know is told through narrators and a Greek chorus of gossipy women, and each character is drawn to clearly represent the various views of beauty and identity that existed then within their community.
Likewise, director Walter Dallas has crafted a poignant production in a theater well-suited for such an intimate story. And the performances he's pulled from his talented actors are all first-rate.
Janee Ann Smith (Claudia), Lisa McCormick (Frieda), Rhonda Freya English (Mrs. MacTeer), Sandra Love Aldridge (Mrs. Breedlove) and James Cowans (Mr. MacTeer and Soaphead Church) are especially notable.
But Toni Walker's touching performance as Pecola will break your heart.
