This is the final, striking image in Long Wharf's production of The Bluest Eye, a stage adaptation of Nobel laureate Toni Morrison's debut novel. The girl is Pecola Breedlove, a troubled and abused soul who longs for blue eyes -- and for all the social and spiritual benefits she thinks they will bring.

Both novel and play begin, "Quiet as it's kept, there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941. We thought, at the time, that it was because Pecola was having her father's baby that the marigolds did not grow." The narrator warns us to observe the "how" and not the "why" of Pecola's tragic story, but it is clear that the "why" most interests Morrison. Over the course of the novel, Morrison weaves back and forth through memories of this year, quietly chronicling the state of American culture two full decades before "Black is Beautiful."

Morrison has said she was aiming for a particularly "speakerly" style in this novel, and it shows. The words sound right at home in the mouths of actors. Lydia Diamond's script faithfully transposes Morrison's novel from page to stage -- perhaps too faithfully at times. The compression of a 200-plus-page novel into a 90-minute performance leaves us feeling, at times, as if we are watching The Greatest Hits of Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye." The play sweeps us from one fraught event to another, but there never seems to be enough of a valley between these peaks for lush characterizations to take root. As a result, what should be a devastatingly tragic ending feels instead ... merely sad.

Also, presumably eager to preserve large swaths of Morrison's hauntingly beautiful prose, Ms. Diamond locks the actors into drawn-out passages of narration and commentary that threaten to overwhelm the dramatic action.

One performer, though, simply shines in delivering these narrative speeches. Adepero Oduye, the actress playing Pecola, gives as enchanting a performance as any I have seen this year. She captures Pecola's guileless youth without condescending to it. She delivers narrative commentary with an energy and specificity that blur the line between retelling and re-experiencing.

One unequivocal benefit of the stage lies in the rich soundscape created by director Eric Ting and composers/sound designers Rob Milburn and Michael Bodeen. Of Pecola's father, Morrison writes, "The pieces of Cholly's life could become coherent only in the head of a musician." It is clear that this production of The Bluest Eye also cohered in the mind of a musician. Period songs and original music lend a poetic depth to the stage that rivals that of Morrison's language. The play's most striking moments occur when non-verbal action and swelling song join together to show what only the stage can add to as rich a novel as The Bluest Eye.

Ultimately, the play has the feel, for better or for worse, of parable. It is the story of a girl who longs for white beauty -- a story told largely from the perspective of another girl who ritually dismembers the blonde, blue-eyed dolls that everyone tells her are so lovely. Social commentary and human drama blend in suitable measure, but like much parable, this adaptation sometimes sacrifices the clarity of the personal to the aurora of the poetic.