Olivia dreams the sky is full of fireflies, and hears god telling her 'Each firefly is one of my colored kids flying home.'"

New York Theatre

Somewhere in the Jim Crow South, the sky glows a deep crimson. A church bombing has shaken the Civil Rights Movement to its core and the Reverend Charles Grace now must galvanize his followers to continue their journey onward. However, it is his wife Olivia who authors his fiery speeches while playing the role of the supportive partner at home. But her ability to do both of these things is starting to buckle under the weight of entirely too many secrets, regrets and uncertainty about the future of Black Americans.

 

Notice: Please be aware that there is simulated smoking of
cigarettes in this production of FIREFLIES. Please be
assured that no cigarettes are actually smoked in the
production, and no tobacco or any other packaged
products are used in the performance. We support and
are in compliance with the Colorado Clean Indoor Air Act.

 

Fireflies will be performed WITHOUT an intermission.

Dates & Times

DateTimeAdditional Information

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More about Donja R. Love

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Curious Theatre Company and The Denver Public Library recommends these library resources to enhance your theatre experience of FIREFLIES!

READ

What the Fireflies Knew by Kai Harris

In the vein of Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones and Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees, a coming-of-age novel told by almost-eleven-year-old Kenyatta Bernice (KB), as she and her sister try to make sense of their new life with their estranged grandfather in the wake of their father’s death and their mother’s disappearance.

 

WATCH 

4 Little Girls, dir. Spike Lee (2000)

On Sunday, September 15, 1963, the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, was bombed by four members of a Ku Klux Klan-affiliated racist group. Four African-American girls who had been attending the church’s Sunday school were killed in the blast. Director Spike Lee’s somber 1997 documentary tells the story through new interviews and archival footage.

 

LISTEN 

Voices of the Civil Rights Movement: Black American Freedom Songs, 1960-1966, Various artists (1997)

Originally issued on 12-inch vinyl discs by Smithsonian Institution Press, this collection features performers such as the SNCC Freedom Singers, Alabama Christian Movement Choir, Fannie Lou Hamer, Bertha Gober, and Willie Peacock. The music was recorded at public meetings at various locations and times between 1960 and 1966.

DOWNLOAD

For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Politics by Donna Brazile, Yolanda Caraway, Leah Daughtry, and Minyon Moore

This ebook provides a rarely seen look at the trailblazing Black women involved in politics dating back to the Civil Rights Movement. The group of four women provide a behind-the-scenes peek, which includes Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign up to Hillary Clinton’s run for president. Widows like Coretta Scott King shaped their path and they share personal stories of the historical figure that flew high to make the world a brighter place.

In Media

  • NYT Review of Original FIREFLIES Premiere

    by Jesse Green at The New York Times

    In “Fireflies,” which opened on Monday at the Atlantic Theater Company, the playwright Donja R. Love daringly sets out to correct that, subverting the standard portrait of a great-man marriage by making the wife infinitely more interesting than the husband. Though the Martin figure is called the Rev. Charles Emmanuel Grace, there is no mistaking his “face of the movement” stature for anyone else’s. As the play begins, Charles (Khris Davis) has been called upon, just as King was, to speak at the funeral of the black girls killed in the Birmingham, Ala., church bombing in September 1963. But in Mr. Love’s fantasia, it is the reverend’s wife, Olivia, a pencil always handy in her hairdo, who writes the words that soar and console...