Interludes

THE HANGOVER REPORT – The explosive FIREFLIES continues Donja R. Love’s impassioned trilogy chronicling the African American experience

• By drediman
• October 20, 2018
• No Comments

DeWanda Wise and Khris Davis in Donja R. Love’s “Fireflies” at Atlantic Theater Company. Photo by Ahron R. Foster.

This week, Donja R. Love’s two-hander Fireflies opened Off-Broaday at the Atlantic Theater Company. The play, which takes place in the Deep South during the Civil Rights Movement, is the second of a planned trilogy of plays penned by Mr. Love chronicling the African American experience. The first installment, Sugar in Our Wounds, which is set during the Civil War, was produced earlier this summer by Manhattan Theater Club. Despite its flaws, I was ultimately won over by the overwhelming cumulative emotional wallop packed in by that first play.

I’m happy to report that I feel the same way about Fireflies, which at times suffers from slivers of emotionally overwrought writing (the same issue I had with Sugar in Our Wounds) but ends up being incredibly potent. The play begins more or less conventionally – on the surface, the piece seems like your typical 1960s-set domestic/relationship kitchen sink drama. But as the play unfolds, the play starts to blur then-standard issue roles and stereotypes, most strikingly as it relates to sexual orientation. By the last third of the one-act play, I quite frankly had no idea where Mr. Love was going to take his play. I don’t want to give much more away, but watching the two characters painfully peel off layers caked on by history and society is a jarring experience that’s both intimate yet profoundly cathartic.

The production at the Atlantic is helmed by Saheem Ali, who does a great job of giving the audience a sense of the internal and external turmoil just beyond the play’s domestic setting. He’s also coaxed two titanic performances from the charismatic Khris Davis (who plays a fictitious Dr. King stand-in) and the drop-dead gorgeous DeWanda Wise (his toiling, emotionally fragile wife). Ms. Wise in particular is giving a notably fierce performance, at once vulnerable and empowering, that took me to psychologically explosive places that will be hard to get out of my mind. I look forward to Mr. Love’s final installment, which I suspect will take place here and now.

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FIREFLIES
Off-Broadway, Play
Atlantic Theater Company 
1 hour, 40 minutes (without an intermission)
Through November 11