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11/02/2017 12:01 AMFireflies, premiering at Long Wharf, is a graceful and gentle production, a sweet twilight-years romance, directed with understated precision by the theater’s artistic director Gordon Edelstein and skillfully performed by a seasoned ensemble of distinguished actors.
The play was written by Matthew Barber, who won a Tony Award for his adaptation of the novel Enchanted April, which debuted on Broadway in 2003—one of the most produced plays of the decade. Fireflies is also an adaptation of a novel, Eleanor & Abel by Annette Sanford. But Barber chose to focus the stage production on a single week in July 1995, in the life of the novel’s protagonist, Eleanor Bannister, a retired high school English teacher who is increasingly reclusive, and who has lived her whole life in the tiny town of Groverdell, South Texas.
Jane Alexander heads the bill as Eleanor, and three other characters make up the cast: Judith Ivey as Grace Bodell, Eleanor’s busybody neighbor and protective friend; Denis Arndt as Abel Brown, a drifter with a troubled past who appears on Eleanor’s property while she’s wandering alone in her nightgown; and in a smaller role, Christopher Michael McFarland plays local police officer Eugene Claymire, who was one of Eleanor’s students many years earlier.
The entire two-act play takes place in Eleanor’s homey, well-worn kitchen, designed by Alexander Dodge, that doesn’t appear to have been updated since the 1960s, except perhaps for the refrigerator.
Alexander is both genteel and imposing as the stubborn yet ever-hopeful Eleanor, whose life as an aging never-married woman takes on new meaning and possibility when Abel enters her life. Arndt is smooth and likable as the stranger trying to convince Eleanor to let him repair her dilapidated outbuilding that she refers to as “the honeymoon cottage,” in exchange for letting him live there rent-free. Despite mounting evidence that Abel may have ulterior motives, we want to believe he’s a good guy as much as Eleanor does and Arndt walks that line convincingly.
Ivey is splendid as Grace, who represents all that is good in a little town, including humor, compassion, and fierce loyalty to the people in your small circle, who are more like family than neighbors.
As Eleanor lets her defenses down and a flirtation begins to turn romantic between the unlikely couple, Eleanor lends Abel $2,000 to purchase materials to make repairs to the cottage. And to everyone’s dismay, but not surprise, he disappears with the money.
In Act Two, Abel returns and we learn the truth about his character, which I will refrain from revealing, as the entire resolution of the plot revolves around the story Abel shares with the heartbroken Eleanor and how she reacts.
And, therein lies the weakness in an otherwise fine production. Because Barber condensed a novel into a one-week time-frame for his stage adaptation, a lot of the background of the characters and build up of dramatic tension over why Abel abandons Eleanor is too quickly resolved in the very short (35-minute) second act.
So, although Fireflies is a sweet little slice of Americana, a glimpse into the lives of ordinary citizens with authentic and lively dialogue, and characters who elicit our compassion, we are not all together riveted by their story, we are not on the edges of our seats or made too uncomfortable. We aren’t even sure what makes the characters tick because it took a whole novel to flesh that all out.
On the other hand, maybe it’s a good thing nothing earth-shattering happens on stage and audiences leave the theater feeling all is okay with the world. Living in a time when everything is urgent, breaking-story news, a well-tuned and finely acted drama without a lot of drama isn’t such a bad thing.
Amy J. Barry has been writing about Connecticut professional theater for more than 25 years. She is a member of the Connecticut Critics Circle (ctcritics.org).
Performances of Fireflies continue through Nov. 5 at Long Wharf Theatre, 222 Sargent Drive, New Haven. Tickets are available by calling the box office at 203-787-4282 or visiting www.longwharf.org