Northlight Theatre brings to the stage a Civil Rights Movement play where a charismatic reverend travels throughout the South seeking to galvanize his people with the help of his wife. Playwright Donja R. Love Fireflies is a story that details the overshadowing that black women played during the Civil Rights Movement and seeks to highlight the passion and the struggles they experience as being black in America.

The Rev. Charles Grace is well known for speeches that electrified congregations; however, his wife Olivia was the power behind these brilliant speeches. As his wife that supports the movement, she wrote all of Charles’s speeches and scheduled his dates, but inside she is suffocating with the thoughts of living a life with Charles, a man she doesn’t love, and with a pregnancy she doesn’t want to keep.

Fireflies deals with the traumatic times when being black was a death sentence, and most pregnant black mothers feared. Olivia is a strong and devoted wife to Charles; however, she received something in the mail that changed her entire perspective of life. After coming home from his travels, Charles is grateful to be with Olivia and their expecting child, drowns his anguish and fears in a bottle of Bourbon while Olivia prepares his next speech. But there are secrets within this marriage that will destroy them both. Secrets unfold through a package, some letters, and a cigarette.

Fireflies is part of Love’s trilogy, the first being Love’s Sugar in Our Wounds, where a family living on a plantation during the Civil War witnesses a mystical tree stretching toward heaven while waiting for their freedom. In Fireflies, Love probes the nuance of Blackness and Queerness during the critical moments of Black American history. Directed by Mikael Burke, Fireflies is a 90-minute play that seems to tackle several different points but, unfortunately, never seems to find its focus.

Olivia, who sees flashes of fire that temporarily paralyzes her, appears to be struggling with her life as a preacher’s wife and her desire to be more involved in the movement. She also fears bringing a child into a world that deprives the color of their skin. This expecting mother asks God to remove it; her child is also battling her desire to be with a woman named Ruby, whom she only met once. At the same time, Charles’s faith seems to be more in lies and deception than being a devoted husband and a Godly man.

The cast of Fireflies features the talented Chanell Bell (Olivia) and Al’Jaleel McGhee (Charles). Their chemistry on stage aided this confusing and disconnected storyline that ventured from fears to infidelities. Fireflies touch on a few consequential subject matters. Civil Rights Movement, the fear of bringing a Black child into a world filled with hate, and how hostility can affect any relationship. Still, instead of staying the course and riding with one main focal point, the storyline maneuvers more like a television soap opera with multiple angles running in different directions.

Fireflies also compare Olivia and Charles to the late Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott King. Suppose the suggestive comparison of this play to the relationship with Coretta Scott and Martin Luther King, Jr is what the playwright envisioned. In that case, it’s both disappointing and boarders of disgrace to one of America’s most honored and respected black preachers, his legacy, his wife, and the legacy of his family.

Charles is a drunken, mean-spirited, and adulterous man. A man called (picked out) by God to preach is himself, incapable of writing speeches or having any inspiration from God. At the same time, Olivia comes off somewhat schizophrenic, needing psychiatric help and religiously battling with an inappropriate biblical relationship. The only thing that stops her from aborting her pregnancy is an unprofessional physician who forces her into an indecent sexual proposition; and still doesn’t perform the extraction because he knew she was the preacher’s wife.

So many stories sought to tarnish the legacy of King, which ultimately filtered into killing any honorable history of black Americans. Hypothetically, suppose the playwright compared the actors on stage to the King and his graceful wife, Coretta Scott? I say the storyline of Fireflies has enough problems without dishonoring the legacy of King.

Let’s Play Somewhat Recommends Fireflies at the Northlight Theatre.

Northlight Theatre
Fireflies
By Donja R. Love
Directed by Mikael Burke
January 20 – February 20, 2022