Painful truths in her coming of age

Most stage adaptations of novels re-imagine the text for the sake of a dramatic arc. But Lydia Diamond's theatrical version of Toni Morrison's "The Bluest Eye," now getting a stunning production by Company One at the Boston Center for the Arts, maintains Morrison's rich, impressionistic structure while breathing passion and pathos into her characters.

Eleven-year-old Pecola (a luminous Adobuere J. Ebiama) comes of age bombarded by images of white beauty but surrounded by racism's destructive labels of ugliness. The play opens with Pecola lovingly reading from the primer "Dick and Jane," which overflows with white ideals of happy families, while her own parents fight constantly and violently, and, eventually, her father rapes her.

Pecola's situation is viewed through the eyes of two sisters whose family takes in Pecola for a while. Claudia (Tasia A. Jones) and Frieda (Marvelyn McFarlane) live in a home filled with the love Pecola lacks, and while they bicker and banter, they look upon Pecola as both a friend and someone to be pitied. The why is difficult to handle, the girls agree, when they attempt to understand Pecola's pregnancy, so they'll settle for how.

As Claudia and Frieda sift through the events that led to Pecola's rape, Diamond's script moves swiftly through exposition, moments of memory, and sharply drawn action scenes. Although the constant shifts in voice and perspective can be distracting, Summer L. Williams' direction is imaginative and wonderfully detailed. Whether the three friends try to jump rope together or trade nighttime confidences with their heads hanging over the bed they share, Williams captures their joyful innocence and the looming specter of disaster.

All three actresses are easy and comfortable with each other while displaying an awareness of impending adulthood just around the corner. Scenes in which the girls care for or destroy their Shirley Temple-style dolls resonate to embrace all the unrealistic images girls are expected to emulate. The pressure to fit in, so familiar to 12-year-olds everywhere, becomes perfectly clear when Rachael Hunt (outstanding in Company One's "Mr. Marmalade" last summer) appears as the most popular girl, who happens to have the lightest skin, and then later appears as the Shirley Temple look-alike who lives in the home where Pecola's mother works.

After the girls explain the "how," another character, Soaphead Church (Aaron Andrade), an "interpreter of dreams," offers some insight into the "why," the events that brought Pecola's parents to the point where they stumble through life barely able to lift their heads. Eventually we come full circle and return to a community where everyone has been changed by Pecola's experience.

Williams stays tightly in control of the transitions and shifts in perspective, and gets such transparent performances from every member of the ensemble that the actors disappear into the haunting and utterly believable portrayals.