Fireflies Review: Sorrow and Frustrated Desire during the Civil Rights Era
October 19, 2018 Leave a comment
The Rev. Charles Emmanuel Grace, a hero of the Civil Rights Movement, and his pregnant wife Olivia, who writes his stirring sermons for him, seem to find great joy in one another when he lifts her up in the air for an embrace near the beginning of “Fireflies.” In this play by Donja R. Love, the two characters actually have little reason to be happy. They are surrounded by tragedy; it is 1963, and Charles has just come home from Birmingham, Alabama, where four little girls were killed in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church. The couple’s apparent happy home life is a sham. Olivia doesn’t want the baby; she doesn’t love Charles; she writes unsent love letters to a woman she met only once, who was murdered shortly afterward. Charles cheats, and drinks.
But for all the pile-up of sorrows for the characters, audiences themselves can find some joy in the production of “Fireflies” at Atlantic Theater directed by Saheem Ali, thanks to the lyrical design and especially to the splendid performances by Khris Davis as Charles and DeWanda Wise as Olivia.
Click on any photograph by Ahron R. Foster to see it enlarged.
A man stands in front of the army tanks during the Tiananmen Square protests. A woman helps topple a dictator, with surprising results. A man tries to rescue a child in a plane crash. Another man shoots and kills a group of children, in what he considers – just as much as the other actions — an act of heroism.
During the 2017–2018 season, the average age of Broadway theatergoers was 40.6, the lowest since 2000, according to 
Theater is often awesome, even when in need of repair, and this week is no different.
In this well-acted, finely directed Off-Broadway production of Alexi Kaye Campbell’s 2009 play, Stockard Channing portrays Kristin Miller, a long-time activist, American expatriate and noted art historian who has entitled her recently published memoir Apologia. Apologia is a word, she is quick to point out, that should not be confused with an apology. “It means a formal, written defense of one’s opinions or conduct,” she explains to the small gathering in her cottage in the English countryside to celebrate her birthday.
Kristina Grosspietsch and Devin O’Neill, the creators and cast of this funny hour-long Fringe show, aren’t content to present the sisters trading insults and trying to upstage one another at the two simultaneous one-woman shows — although I would certainly have been. They create six more characters who are also in the theater that night, in scenes that rapidly alternate with one another.
Edward Einhorn’s latest play is based on the jaw-dropping true story of a quack doctor who became rich and famous in the 1920s by implanting goat testicles as a cure for male impotence, and then in the 1930s ran for Governor of Kansas. It seems apt that “The Resistible Rise of JR Brinkley” was the first play in the first full day of the 21stannual New York International Fringe Festival, because it fully reflects both the promise and pitfalls of a Fringe show.
