An oversexed Martin Luther King-like preacher and his overstressed wife find the cracks in their marriage increasingly tough to overlook in Fireflies, Donja R. Love’s overwrought Civil Rights-era two-hander whose melodramatic overload proves distressingly underwhelming.

Not that Fireflies’ first half-hour suggests there’ll be anywhere near enough dramatic meat to fill its ninety-minute running time.

Olivia (Christianna Clark) sprays perfume around the kitchen to mask her secret smoking just in time for husband Charles’s (Lester Purry) return home from his latest out-of-town assignment, upon which the couple flirt, dance, and recoil from the horrors of a recent church bombing.

Charles orates a paragraph or two from the speech he’s just come back from delivering at the victims’ funeral, then says grace before dinner.

The couple discuss Olivia’s pregnancy (she’s four months along with their first baby), she describes last night’s latest nightmare and the bombs she keeps hearing even when awake, and they then head off to make love.

At breakfast the following morning, Charles guzzles down a bottle of beer (the first sign that Olivia may have gone and married herself an alcoholic), and after giving his wife a totally uncalled for scare, he and the missus recall their youthful romance as preteen sharecroppers during which she once again she hears bombs inside her head.

Indeed it’s not until a good half-hour into Fireflies that playwright Love drops the first but far from the last of so many bombshells, this reviewer got to thinking the writer was going to throw in everything including the kitchen sink that is part of Vicki Smith’s meticulously detailed scenic design.

Charles may be a masterful orator when he’s standing behind the pulpit, but his expertise in speechifying is due at least in part to Olivia’s coaching and even more to the fact that it’s she who’s been ghostwriting her pastor husband’s speeches since he started preaching, and that’s just the beginning of a succession of ever more shocking revelations.

Anyone still planning on seeing Fireflies is advised to skip the following spoiler filled paragraph. Others might want to know what they’ll be missing.

To begin with, there’s Charles’ philandering (thank you FBI for providing Olivia with auditory evidence of her hubby and his latest conquest’s moans and groans), followed by Olivia’s failed attempt to abort their child (seems the good doctor won’t perform the operation until she lets him have his way with her, upon which he has the nerve to renege post-coitus when he finds out she’s Pastor Charles’s wife). Oh, and it turns out that Olivia is a would-be lesbian who’s been writing (but not sending) love letters to a woman she met just one (and never did anything but talk to), which means that when Charles finds out about all this (as of course he will), the shit will really hit the fan.

Director Lou Bellamy has both Clark and Purry doing a whole lot of emoting, and for the most part they do it quite powerfully indeed, but casting choices that run counter to Love’s inventions that both Charles and Olivia should be in their early thirties (and not a whole lot older as Purry most definitely is, though Clark less so) prove detrimental to the story Fireflies has to tell, if not downright wrong.

Not surprisingly, South Coast Rep’s latest does deliver in the production design department, from Smith’s aforementioned kitchen set to Don Darnutzer’s subtly effective lighting, David Kay Mickelsen’s just-right early ‘60s costumes, Scott W. Edwards’s dramatic sound design, and most especially Jeffrey Elias Teeter’s explosion-filled projections. (Rarely has one designer done so much with a single sky backdrop.)

Macelle Mahala is dramaturg. Alyssa Escalante is stage manager. Casting is by Joanne DeNaut, CSA.

Fireflies ought by rights to have moved me the way countless plays and movies set in the same time and place have before, and I ought to have cared about Charles and Olivia. In the end, however, both play and protagonists left me cold.

South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa.
www.scr.org

–Steven Stanley
January 12, 2020
Photos: Jordan Kubat/SCR

Tags: Donja R. Love, Orange County Theater Review, South Coast Repertory