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.
For the last few years before he died in 2017 at the age of 86, playwright A.R. Gurney had been experiencing a resurgence of a career that had already produced some 40 plays over 50 years, best-known for his elegantly-structured chronicles of dying WASP culture, like “The Dining Room” and “The Cocktail Hour.” A couple of his plays, “
La Femme’s revival of Tennessee Williams’ late, little-known play about four women living and working and bickering with one another, offers something you won’t find in A Glass Menagerie — though it’s set in the same year (1937) and place (a rundown section of St. Louis), contains a familiar dose of heartbreak, and reflects the playwright’s poetic sensibility and deep compassion. But “A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur,” despite its precious title, is also wickedly witty, Williams creating smart-mouthed characters and letting them loose on one another.
As the family gathers for a Thanksgiving right before everything starts to fall apart, Knox (Russell Harvard) gives thanks for “three things I used to think weren’t gifts at all: Deafness… Being gay…. Addiction. They are gifts… Each brought me to great clarity.”
