A Conversation on Adaptation,
Visual Language and Community
Tyler James Greene, Artistic / Directing Resident, speaks with director Eric Ting about his production of The Bluest Eye.
TJG: Every director has to find their own way into a production. What was your entry point into The Bluest Eye?
ET: My entry point was Lydia Diamond's adaptation; in fact, I had not even read the book. That was intentional on my part. I did not have a relationship with the book, so I could understand the play for the play's sake. After reading the play, I turned to the novel - just lived with the novel for a very long time - in order to come to an understanding of what I felt to be Toni Morrison's initial objective or desire in writing the book.
You've said that Lydia's play seeks to "preserve the texture of Toni's tale." What did you do to preserve the texture of her voice specifically?
It's interesting. The book is structurally unusual. There are moments in the book that are very different. There are two specific chapters I call "The One on Mrs. Breedlove" and "The One on Cholly Breedlove," which are pauses that Toni Morrison takes to explore each of these two individuals.
In Mrs. Breedlove's chapter, for instance, there is a lot of text in italics that's structurally different from anything else you see in the book. It got me thinking about this idea in the play of what I called 'The Third Voice.' 'The First Voice' is the narrative voice, which is primarily the function of Claudia. Claudia is very much the narrator of the tale - she's our guide, she's the voice of Toni Morrison, she is the catalyst for the story, she's telling us the story.
'The Second Voice' is the voice of the dialogue, the voice of the world of the play, which is in those interactions where the characters are in a scene acting together. 'The Third Voice' is documentary. It's a voice that the characters occasionally speak in that is direct address to the audience but isn't narrative per se so much as it is "I'm going to tell you about me."
For me, it sparked this image of a filmmaker returning to Lorain, Ohio, after the events of the play and the book to interview various characters in the drama, in an effort to understand, through hindsight, how this tale came to be.
As with any adaptation, there are things [from the novel] that Lydia ultimately had to let go of in order to preserve a coherent story in the 90 minutes that we have for a theatre-going audience. And we were trying to make sure that . . . when there were occasions when we could evoke elements of the book within the production that maybe weren't directly in the play, that we would seek to do that.
There are several different instances of that. The most obvious is in the music choices. We make reference to a lot of the music that is in the book. In the play, really the only song that Lydia mentions is "Precious Lord" and we definitely use that. But we also use "Deep Purple," which is the song that Frieda sings to her sick sister Claudia early in the book. We use that as the recurring lullaby of the play.
[Another song we use] is "God Gave Noah the Rainbow Sign." Lydia jumps straight from the fight between Mrs. Breedlove and Cholly - which is described wonderfully in the novel and which we use as a framework for the choreography for the fight - all the way to Pecola's arrival at the MacTeer house. She skips over and reveals through exposition the fact that Cholly burned down the Breedlove apartment and that's why Pecola ended up with the MacTeers. "God Gave Noah the Rainbow Sign" is all about fire and burning. . . .
Pecola has very little dialogue in Morrison's novel despite being its central character. How does she come by her voice in the adaptation?
That's all Lydia. It's the thing that seems to be connecting to audiences most deeply. In the novel, as you said, Toni Morrison does not give a great deal of speech to Pecola. The reason she speaks a lot more [in the adaptation] is because Lydia has given what is narration in the book to Pecola as monologues. Her whole monologue about going on the candy adventure and her whole monologue about wanting to disappear is now shared in Pecola's voice. It becomes a real way for audiences to connect with this tragic figure.
What we ended up doing with the production, then, was also to commit to that idea: in the same way that the play gives voice to Pecola, we thought that we should find a way for the production to really speak to Pecola's experience.
In the book and in the play, a big deal is made out of being put outdoors. The worst thing that could happen to a person was to be put outdoors, to have nowhere left to go, to be put out and to have shelter taken away and to be forced into the elements.
We decided that we would look at the way within which Pecola is put outdoors psychologically in the course of the play because, ultimately, her journey in the play is towards madness.
We decided to create, around these two singular events in Pecola's life that drive the story, these moments wherein the elements invade what we establish as an interior space - they break through the shelter. One instance is the snow falling on Pecola's bed after she has her first period. And the second instance, of course, is the rain that fills the stage, as a substitute or metaphor for the incest.
Your visual language does seem to highlight a particular battle between the interior world of your players and the exterior world. Was that your intention and, if so, what does that say about the world of the play?
In this amazing cast we have two young women, Bobbi Baker (Claudia) and Ronica Reddick (Frieda), who are remarkable in their ability to shift from an adult space to a more youthful space. It's a very subtle thing that happens onstage, where they change from adult women addressing the audience into their 9- and 10-year-old selves.
It's a fascinating thing to watch and that level of blending, that quality of subtle shifting is something that we were trying to find for the entire production. Scenes would start midway through scenes before [them] and would continue into other scenes . . . so that what you get is a delicate layering.
Toni Morrison suggests that no one person's story is uniquely isolated from anyone else's story, that all of our stories are in some way intertwined. It's in those connections, and the ways in which those connections occur, that we can only ever begin to understand the edges of the why of it, as Claudia says in the play.
Toni Morrison has also said, "My language has to have holes and spaces so the reader can come into it." Does the visual language of your production serve to "fill in some of the holes and spaces" of Toni's story?
No, I don't think so. If anything, I'd like to think that we actually add to the holes and spaces. That's an interesting quote, actually. I would describe the rain as "holes and spaces." The production itself has a very abstract quality to it, a very surreal quality to it.
I always knew that the most realistic component of the production would be costumes and that everything else would veer into a more theatrical space. In that sense, there are these moments of what I would describe as 'abstract gestures.'
Audiences who are asking for a specific explanation of what any of these gestures are won't be getting one from me. Because I think that the whole point of these 'abstract gestures' - in the same way that I think she's referring to "holes and spaces" - is to give audiences a place to invest their own experience into the story and, in that investment, somehow feel closer to it; that the rain should somehow be an interpretation of each individual audience member and not some larger idea. It merely is what it is and people apply to it what they will.
Can you talk about your use of krumping (a modern dance style) as a way of both connecting to young people and enhancing the physicality of your visual language?
I like to have a vibrant physical world in a lot of my work. You can't do a production of The Bluest Eye and not be cognizant of the fact that you are reaching out to younger audiences than many of our works regularly have an occasion to reach out to. We always look for ways in which we can make these bridges between the theatre and young audiences.
One of the ways is through krumping, and this ties in to the moments within the book that I tried to infuse into the play that maybe weren't immediately present in the play, [one of] which is this passage at the end of the book. It describes Pecola after she has lost her baby and has fallen into this madness:
"She spent her days, her tendril, sap-green days, walking up and down, her head jerking to the beat of a drummer so distant only she could hear. Elbows bent, hands on shoulders, she flailed her arms like a bird in an eternal, grotesquely futile effort to fly."
Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (pg.205)
I was reading that passage, in love with that image of Pecola as a worn, tired bird trying to take flight. I just happened to be doing some research and I came across these videos of krumpers and, in particular, this one excerpt from a trailer for Rize. It had this one woman krumping in slow-motion and it was truly the most stunning thing I had seen in a very long time. I knew what krumping was but I had never really seen it in a way that I understood it. I was watching this and I was seeing it through the filter of the tale of [Pecola]. It was really one of those "light bulb" moments.
We decided to track down a krumper, Akil Davis, who would come and work with some of the actors. Krumping is a very spiritual experience, this idea that the Holy Spirit takes you, that something just takes over the body and the body is able to move in ways that it shouldn't be able to move, to accomplish and do things that it shouldn't be able to do.
There's a certain freedom in it, a freedom that's also talked about in the play - a desperate, aching sense of freedom, violent freedom. To me, this is an uncanny description of what krumping is.
We discovered that the way that we would use this particular style of dance and movement would be as a metaphor for madness. What you see is Cholly caught up in it, especially when he's drunk and he's moving towards this place where he does this act, that there are these explosive movements and these gestures of krumping that he does as he's moving towards the kitchen. Pecola, of course, both at the beginning and the end, loses herself in that and there's this sort of dance that happens.
It becomes clear after experiencing The Bluest Eye that a close-knit community of artists is vital to the success of the production. What was it like to investigate this play with this particular group of people?
I was lucky. I was able to meet with most of the actors even before first rehearsal. I was able to go down to New York and talk to each of them independently.
The big question I had is the fact that I'm not African-American and the fact that I have not had experience directing African-American plays, which shouldn't mean anything at all. It's kind of funny because any play that I direct is a play that is outside of my own personal experience.
The tendency is to say that we should be past that. But we're not. My general sense of race in this country is that race is a fundamental facet of what this country is. This country cannot and will likely never be separated from race. Too much of it is literally built into its foundation. And to suggest that we're past that is actually doing a disservice, on some level, because you are being reductive, pretending that it's not there when, in fact, it is there and it will always be there.
The best thing that we can do is acknowledge that it's there and then ask how we rise above it. But you can't rise above it if you don't believe that it's there to begin with. The worst thing one can do is to say that it's not there. It's important to be able to have those conversations.
I was lucky enough to have a cast that fell into a very intimate and very comfortable space with each other from day one. It was a cast that I was able to speak with and was able to speak with me in a frank and open way that allowed us to start much further into the process from the very beginning than normal.
I was very fortunate to have cast a group of actors that were unafraid and fearless. There have been moments where things have come up that we have stopped rehearsal altogether and just talked. You have to take care of those moments. You have to give those moments the space to breathe, the space to either catch on fire and go out or the space to not catch on fire. But you have to give it the space because anything less than that is a disservice to everyone involved in the process. It's been a remarkable journey.
Your efforts as Long Wharf Theatre's Associate Artistic
Director have served, in many ways, to promote civic dialogue and community
engagement. How does this play satisfy your goals for conversation and
community, in regard to the audience?
We've very fortunate with The Bluest Eye in that we have a play
which is deeply moving to audiences and addresses issues that are far-reaching
and multi-faceted.
It deals with issues of incest, it deals with issues of racism, it deals with issues of beauty and self-loathing and self-esteem and body image. It deals with issues of class, with poverty and the role poverty plays - many, many issues and it deals with them in a way that is both frank and unforgiving, yet provocative in the best of ways.
In terms of conversation, all I can say is this: it will always be a challenge of theatre to create a diverse audience. What's nice about this play is that it has had quite a great deal of success in generating a diverse audience. And that is the best place within which conversation can take place.
If there is to be a civic dialogue, if there is to be a dialogue, the dialogue must be between people of different experiences. If it's a dialogue between people of the same experience, then you're not really having a dialogue, you're just having a shared monologue. So, you have to find people from different backgrounds assembling in a space so that those different experiences can be bounced off each other in a way that is illuminating.
If what you want to do is create dialogue for humanitarian purposes, you do that by putting on stories that make us examine things that we would not otherwise be forced to examine.
What questions would you like the audience to come away asking after your production?
I like it when people leave a theatre with questions, without answers; and that's the nature of this story. This story has no real answer, it only has questions -"the how and the why."
This play is also about the many shapes and forms that love and violence take. There are acts of love that seem very violent. There are acts of violence that are in fact love, albeit twisted. When audiences talk about the rain, that's really what they are talking about. They are talking about why that choice was made around what most people perceive to be the most awful act that is committed in the piece, which is the moment of incest.
I think that's a great question and I think that it's true. There are very few things in this world more awful than incest. It makes my body ache with the wrongness of it. But that said, again we return to this idea that there is no simple answer. Even this, which is in some ways the most awful act in the play, I would describe as an act of love and not of violence.
It is Cholly Breedlove who grew up with no father, whose mother abandoned him as a baby, whose aunt died when he was a young boy, who is basically set adrift in a world that, at that time - in '20s and '30s Georgia - was not a friendly world for a young black man.
He is someone who does not know how to love and has never been taught how to love, certainly not taught how to love and raise a child. He comes upon this girl in this moment in this kitchen and he is overcome. He's overcome. And he doesn't know what to do. And something in him just twists in that moment and he confuses her with her mother. And this thing happens. It is an awful act but it's just not that simple.
