The Primal Power of Myth

Toni Morrison's first novel, "The Bluest Eye" (1970) is full of scenes — including two horrifying episodes of sexual violence — that would seem nigh-impossible to stage with a light hand. Yet Hallie Gordon, the director of the theater for young adults at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Company, has woven together an utterly engrossing stage version of Lydia Diamond's fluid but reverent adaptation of "The Bluest Eye." Under Ms. Gordon's deft direction, Ms. Morrison's heartbreaking fable vibrates with the primal power of myth.

Nearly everything in this transferred production is perfect, from the casting to the ingenious set (by Stephanie Nelson) — a tapestry of small houses and clotheslines. Throughout the play, the actors offhandedly pin and unpin tablecloths and sheets, changing the look of the space to suit the action. Soon the sight of these characters doing chores becomes second nature — as poor people living in a small town in the '40s, work is the fabric of their daily lives. In winter, these girls pick up coal lumps from the railroad tracks to feed the stove.

The set also contributes to a sense of community. This is a town where gossip flies over back fences, a town where a sharp-talking but goodhearted mother of two (Ta Ron Patton, with a terrific roar) takes in the neighbors' homeless daughter, Pecola Breedlove.

Pecola, played by the 20-something Alana Arenas, is meant to be 11, and in Ms. Arenas's revelatory performance, the character feels like a girl arrested between innocence and adolescence. Whether she's talking about buying her beloved Mary Jane candies or complaining bitterly about being born ugly, an indefinable sweetness suffuses her face. Periodically, she reads from her school primer in a beginner's singsong voice, and that voice — high, and so very vulnerable — could make you cry for what some children must bear.

Pecola wants blue eyes because she sees that the white girls with blue eyes are treated better than she is, and because, as we later learn, her own mother, a housekeeper, spends her days at a fancy house taking care of a little white girl. Pecola prays for blue eyes, dreams about Shirley Temple, and idolizes a white girl at school.

Pecola's obsession with blue eyes is an affront to Claudia (Libya V. Pugh, in a strikingly nuanced performance), one of the two sisters with whom Pecola shares a room after her house burns down. The white world that Pecola moons over makes Claudia itchy and irritable; she hates Shirley Temple. While Pecola and Claudia's sister Frieda (Monifa M. Days) play with a white baby doll, Claudia rips hers to shreds.

An adult world runs parallel to that of the children. Claudia and Frieda, played by actors in their 20s, also serve as part-time omniscient narrators; they (and one other character) explain the other characters in the community to the audience, while these characters re-enact crucial scenes from their lives.

There's the town's wizened fortuneteller, Soaphead Church. There's Pecola's mother, Mrs. Breedlove (Chavez Ravine), who married the wrong man and has spent years fighting him in ugly, physical brawls. And there's Mr. Breedlove, still in the painful throes of a sexual trauma from his youth; Pecola's defeated, cowering posture makes her father livid, and ultimately, his rage will destroy his daughter, too.

"The Bluest Eye" deals heavily in pivotal life events. In depicting these almost-cinematic episodes, Ms. Gordon knows when to use naturalism and when to deploy theatricality (slow-motion, mime, paradoxical restraint, even a doll with recorded lines). The same unerring judgment guides the remarkable cast through the play's mix of colloquial and exalted language; in particular, Ms. Pugh's Claudia has a way of making Ms. Morrison's poetic turns of phrase seem right at home next to plain talk.

As a result, Ms. Morrison's world comes vividly into being. And what a world it is — teeming with everything at once: pettiness alongside divine acts of kindness, goodness swirled together with aching cruelty, a laugh followed by a kick to the gut. Mrs. Breedlove is a hard-edged, frosty mother who sings "Precious Lord Take My Hand" with a throaty beauty that is impossible to resist, and limps her way through a grueling job. Pecola seems to have been born to suffer, but even for her, there is some crude mercy. Claudia may have been born into a town where "the soil was bad for certain kinds of flowers," but she was born with a keen, strong mind.

This is bittersweet, moving drama that preserves the vigor and the disquiet of Ms. Morrison's novel. The Steppenwolf's "Bluest Eye" may be billed as part of the New Victory's series of offerings for teenagers, but for theatergoers of any age, it is not to be missed.

Until November 19 (229 W. 42nd St., between Broadway and Eighth Avenue, 212-239-6200).