Black and Blue

Eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove is a young, black girl growing up in Ohio in the 1940s. But she’d like very much to be someone else. She prays that her eyes will turn blue, which will mean she’s no longer a poor, neglected black girl who’s carrying her father’s baby. She wishes other people had different eyes, as well. Her happiness will come, she knows, if only the world — a dark, turbulent, often unkind world — is able to view her through kinder eyes.

The Bluest Eye is adapted from Toni Morrison’s novel about a young girl’s coming of age in the racially charged, postwar Midwest. Playwright Lydia Diamond has maintained the original story’s complex series of narrative perspectives, so much so that New York critics carped that the play’s Broadway debut sometimes felt like a staged reading of Morrison’s book.

Thu., Feb. 19, 8 p.m.; Fri., Feb. 20, 8 p.m.; Sat., Feb. 21, 8 p.m.; Sun., Feb. 22, 3 p.m.; Thu., Feb. 26, 8 p.m.; Fri., Feb. 27, 8 p.m.; Sat., Feb. 28, 8 p.m.; Sun., March 1, 3 p.m.; Wed., March 4, 2 p.m.; Thu., March 5, 8 p.m.; Fri., March 6, 8 p.m.; Sat., March 7, 2 & 8 p.m.; Sun., March 8, 3 p.m., 2009