In the 'Eye' of the Beholders

In 2004, playwright Lydia Diamond adapted Toni Morrison's debut novel, "The Bluest Eye," for the stage, and the Nobel laureate's story of young black girls in mid-20th-century Ohio came to life at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre. David Muse directs the East Coast premiere of the play, which opens Saturday, at the H Street Playhouse in a production by Theater Alliance.

Before they were cast, three of the four actresses playing the girls had never read Morrison's book. After signing on, Jessica Frances Dukes says she read the novel and immediately thought, "What did I get myself into?"

Dukes and Erika Rose play Frieda and Claudia, two sisters who befriend 11-year-old classmate Pecola Breedlove (Carleen Troy), whose abusive parents and secret desire for blue eyes drive the story. Dukes also plays Darlene, the young girl who was Pecola's father's first girlfriend, while Lia LaCour plays the sisters' nemesis, the rich and light-skinned Maureen Peal. All four actresses reveal the hurdles they faced in getting to the bottom of the story.

The women describe their first rehearsals as involving discussions that proved vital to understanding the play. Diamond attended, sitting down with the cast to dissect the story. "She definitely gave us everything we needed," Dukes says.

It was at the first rehearsal, Rose says, that the actors began discussing the heart of the play and how to interpret what happens to Pecola and how her family and her community came to reject her and put her in a situation that ultimately destroyed her. As Morrison writes in the book's first pages, "since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how ."

Rose says the cast quickly discovered "that [the play] wasn't an indictment of this black family or this community, but rather the soil that they were living in, what things they were barred from, what kinds of hatred they all faced in so many different ways."

The actors' job was to make sure that audiences "didn't walk away from this play thinking, 'That black mother and that black father didn't take care of that black girl, and that's what's happening today in Southeast -- that's what the problem is,' " Rose says. "It wasn't until the first rehearsal that I thought about what people might come away with. It's also about what people are ready to hear."

The actresses themselves admit that the first couple of rehearsals brought up topics they weren't ready to discuss. They recall Muse gamely entering the discussions, too. Dukes says: "We talked about having a white director for an all-black cast. It definitely was something that was put on the table right away." Muse himself addressed that topic, the actresses recall, and the discussion was fruitful, if touchy.

Dukes's cast mates nod when she says, "I was very uncomfortable the first couple of days."

Rose points out that, in this day and age, it's not just about black and white. "African Americans are probably the most represented of the minorities on stage and on film. So what does a young Hispanic girl, a young Asian girl, do? Not only are they not the ideal, but they don't get to see themselves that often. It's a very important story" for those reasons.

The actresses all say they're eager to have audiences for their work. Rose says, "Right now, I'm looking out at empty seats, trying to bring them along on the journey." LaCour adds, "It's powerful even when there's not anybody in the audience," but "it would be nice to have someone else involved."

The Bluest Eye Theater Alliance 866-811-4111 Through Nov. 5