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The Bluest Eye Study Guide Wurtele Thrust Stage / April 15 – May 21, 2017 For complete dramaturgical packet call: Jo Holcomb: 612.225.6117 adapted by LYDIA R. DIAMOND directed by LILEANA BLAIN-CRUZ STUDY GUIDE Inside THE PLAY Synopsis • 3 The Characters • 3,4 THE AUTHOR About the Adaptor • 5 About the Author • 7 In the Authors’ Words • 9 CULTURAL CONTEXT Setting: Lorain, Ohio • 10 THE GUTHRIE PRODUCTION Notes from the Creative Team • 15 ADDITIONAL INFORMATION For Further Understanding • 17 For complete dramaturgical packet call: Jo Holcomb: 612.225.6117 Carla Steen: 612.225.6118 Play guides are made possible by Guthrie Theater Study Guide Copyright 2017 DRAMATURG Jo Holcomb GRAPHIC DESIGNER Akemi Graves RESEARCH Jo Holcomb and Amy Slothower Guthrie Theater, 818 South 2nd Street, Minneapolis, MN 55415 All rights reserved. With the exception of classroom use by teachers and individual personal use, no part of this Play Guide may be reproduced ADMINISTRATION 612.225.6000 in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including BOX OFFICE 612.377.2224 or 1.877.44.STAGE TOLL-FREE photocopying or recording, or by an information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Some materials guthrietheater.org • Joseph Haj, artistic director published herein are written especially for our Guide. Others are reprinted by permission of their publishers. The Guthrie Theater receives support from the National Endowment The Guthrie Theater, founded in 1963, is an American center for theater performance, for the Arts. This activity is made possible in part by the Minnesota production, education and professional training. By presenting both classical literature and State Arts Board, through an appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature. The Minnesota State Arts Board received additional funds to new work from diverse cultures, the Guthrie illuminates the common humanity connecting support this activity from the National Endowment for the Arts. Minnesota to the peoples of the world. 2 \ GUTHRIE THEATER THE PLAY Brittany Bellizeare as Pecola PHOTO: LAUREN MUELLER Synopsis The Characters The Bluest Eye tells the story of Claudia MacTeer is the younger of Pecola Breedlove is the “little- one year in the life of a young two sisters in the MacTeer family. girl-gone-to-woman” in the story. black girl in 1940s Lorain, She contributes two “voices” She shares her family’s conviction Ohio. Eleven-year-old Pecola to the story — one as a child, that she is ugly and unworthy but Breedlove wants nothing more one as an adult — with curiosity, somehow has sufficient resolve to than to be loved by her family compassion and perspective, attempt a few self-help strategies. and schoolmates. Left to fend which she uses to reflect on the Of all the characters, Pecola for herself, she blames her fate of her childhood friend, has been most damaged by her dark skin and prays for blue Pecola. circumstances in life, beginning eyes, sure that love will follow. with having a family incapable of The events of The Bluest Eye Frieda MacTeer is the older of the normal expressions of love and take place primarily from the sisters, less adventuresome and protection. Nearly every event in Autumn of 1940 to the same witty than Claudia and, in some her life leaves her a victim, and the time in 1941, but in order to ways, dependent on her sister for story examines what influences explain the full stories behind judgment, despite her reserves of led to her fate and what influences those events, the narrative general, practical information. kept her from being helped. frequently moves back in time. GUTHRIE THEATER \ 3 THE PLAY Mrs. MacTeer/Mama is too busy Aunt Jimmy is Cholly’s aunt, maintaining a household on meager who rescues him at the age of resources to hover affectionately four days from the train tracks. over her children, but her love for She is a woman of great energy Claudia and Frieda is evident in the and warmth and, as a result, is work she does to keep the family surrounded by a bevy of older nourished, healthy and together. female friends who heap affection and concern onto Cholly. When Mr. MacTeer has little verbal she becomes ill and dies, Cholly is presence in his household, but overwhelmed with feelings of loss he works hard to keep the family but has no means of expressing going and is fiercely protective of them. Although Aunt Jimmy’s his children when it is necessary. friends would have stepped in to take charge of him, Cholly, with no Mr. Yacobowski, as a member immediate family members left, of the immigrant working class, flees. has also been marginalized by mainstream society, but as a Soaphead Church/Elihue Micah white male, he is “allowed” to feel Whitcomb His name Soaphead superior to a little black girl. His refers to the particular appearance interaction with Pecola supplies the of his hair—tight and curly that held narrative with a vignette portraying “a sheen and wave when pomaded the dynamics of class division in with soap lather.” Soaphead’s chief American society. attribute is his fastidiousness, which creates the necessity for a Mrs. Breedlove/Pauline, originally pristine and lifeless “life.” He uses from the South, fails to find his “special powers” to grant Pecola community, intimacy or sustaining her wish for blue eyes. work in Ohio. She falls under the spell of lifestyle and beauty standards that she cannot achieve and consequently drifts into resentment, self- righteousness and greater isolation. Cut off from any source of emotional self-nourishment, she is unable to nurture her children. Her daughter, Pecola, calls her Mrs. Breedlove. Mr. Breedlove/Cholly, Pauline’s husband and Pecola’s father, knew nothing about his father and was abandoned by his mother at four days of age. He is, nonetheless, vigorous, sensual and spirited — perhaps because he was rescued and raised by Aunt Jimmy and her warmhearted female friends — and has no trouble calling attention to himself once he leaves home after his aunt’s death and enters the world. 4 \ GUTHRIE THEATER THE AUTHORS was Vera in Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians. Although the character is involved in a romance, she recalls, “They wouldn’t let us kiss at the end because I was black. I was the only black kid doing theatre.” Diamond graduated to being virtually the only African American college student doing theater at Northwestern. Her aim was to be an actor — she spent 10 years identifying herself as one, while waiting tables, teaching and writing: “I was writing plays long before I thought of myself as a playwright.” She wrote her first adult play for an undergraduate course, and decided in 1992 to produce it herself in the basement of a vegetarian restaurant in Chicago called Cafe Voltaire, where she also worked as a cook. Diamond created her own theater company to do so, and called it Another Small Black Theatre Company With Good Things to Say and a Lot of Nerve Productions. Her husband, sociologist John Diamond, saw one of her early plays and was, in his words, “Blown away. She grappled with the About the Adaptor issues of race, class, sexuality and marginality that are infused in all Lydia Diamond was born Lydia As a child, Diamond studied violin of her work but, because it was Gartin in Detroit, Michigan in April and piano, met famous artists essentially a one-woman show and 1969. She began seeing Broadway through her mother, and never somewhat autobiographical, it was shows at around age eight — lived anywhere longer than a few very personal. I felt like I knew her a touring productions presented in years, as her mother pursued lot better.” the University of Massachusetts her academic career in Detroit, Fine Arts Center that her mother Carbondale, Ill.; Itta Bena, Miss.; Diamond’s subjects have varied, managed. “I grew up with no Amherst, Mass.; and Waco, Tex. but her work generally alternates money, lots and lots of books The only geographical constant between black history plays and a single mother with a Ph.D.” came during summers, which she and contemporary dramas with The first “grown-up play” she saw spent with her grandparents, both autobiographical elements that use at her mother’s theater was The educators, in the little town of humor to sweeten a sometimes Elephant Man. “The audience was Sparta, Ill. dark exploration of family disturbed that I was there, because relationships, race, gender and I was so young.” (American Theatre Diamond’s high school in Waco had class. Magazine, December, 2011) “a pretty decent theatre program,” and among the parts she played GUTHRIE THEATER \ 5 THE AUTHORS Why I Had to Adapt by Lydia R. Diamond The Bluest Eye Adaptor In high school I was given Toni Morrison’s Beloved as a gift from my English teacher, who had picked me out as someone she wanted to mentor. I read it, but it went over my head. I think I was so young that I just shut down in places where it was hurtful or too close to the truth. When I got to college, I realized get the opportunity to say, “This I’m also a playwright, and people that I wasn’t being given the canon is the source of my dysfunction, still know that I’m a playwright.” I of African American writers in my and it’s not all my fault.” To be needed that affirmation at exactly literature classes or in the theater shown that when you are young that time. department, so I went looking for is painful, horrible. On the other them myself. I made it my mission hand, it’s affirming to have all these So I said “yes” without thinking, to go out and get every one of Toni things made clear; things that I and then I thought, “Oh my God, Morrison’s books and read them.
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