In ‘Fireflies,’ the Preacher’s Wife Gets Her Say

NEW YORK — Like Lincoln, and for similar reasons, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. has become more than an actual historical human: He’s a cultural touchstone. We are used to seeing that civil rights leader, or his pseudonymous stand-ins, fictionalized and anatomized in plays like “The Mountaintop” by Katori Hall, “The Good Negro” by Tracey Scott Wilson and “The Man in Room 306” by Craig Alan Edwards.

But we haven’t seen much onstage about Coretta, his wife.

In “Fireflies,” which opened 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, Alabama, church bombing in September 1963.

But in 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.

We meet the two characters at a fraught moment — probably an over-fraught one, dramatically. Olivia (DeWanda Wise) is pregnant with the couple’s first child but is reluctant to become a mother. One reason is that she is subject to dreams and surreal visions that today might be seen as symptoms of post-traumatic stress. Bombs explode around her, and thousands of fireflies swarm the sky, representing murdered black children “flying home” to God. Why add to their number?

Also contributing to the pressurized situation is a package Olivia has just received from the FBI enclosing tape recordings and a machine on which to play them. For Olivia no less than Coretta King, whose real-life FBI encounter was dramatized in the movie “Selma,” the tapes provide evidence of her husband’s infidelity.

Yet all this is still only a small part of Love’s complicated picture of Olivia, whose sublimation of self sometimes reminded me of women in plays by William Inge, but with an even deeper secret inflecting her actions.

Perhaps it will not spoil too much to note that “Fireflies” is the second play in a trilogy that Love describes as an exploration of queer love through black history. The first, “Sugar in Our Wounds,” concerns the romance between two male slaves; the third, “In the Middle,” takes place against the backdrop of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Unearthing the role of gay black people in American history is a crucial proposition. (Among the distressingly few such plays is “Blueprints to Freedom,” about Bayard Rustin.) I was moved by Love’s willingness to imagine, amid the terror of the times and also the shipshape domesticity of the Grace kitchen as rendered in Arnulfo Maldonado’s set design, other kinds of lives than the ones that history books offer.

And as embodied by the fine performers here, under the direction of Saheem Ali, those lives really do seem alive. Wise, best known as Nola Darling in the Netflix reboot of “She’s Gotta Have It,” unifies Olivia’s deeply divided character so that you track your empathy for her even when she slides from apparent giddiness to Medea-like rage. And Davis, exhilarating onstage in “The Royale” and heartbreaking in “Sweat,” is both of those here, layering one beneath the other to deepen our understanding of a fallible man of faith.

But every time the play began to engage me through character it disengaged me through plot contrivance. Secret letters, unscrupulous doctors and kitchen knives come into it. What the actors can overcome, the story often cannot, and the pileup of life-shattering events all in the course of two days begins to seem less like dramatic compression than old-fashioned overkill.

The language, too, can seem awfully rich, perhaps deliberately in a play about oratory and faith. (We hear parts of three sermons.) It is one of the more fascinating aspects of “Fireflies” that Love, who says he became a playwright after realizing that acting wasn’t a part of his “ministry,” makes the rhetoric of the black church into a kind of third character in this two-hander. He — or, more likely, she, the play argues — steals the show.

Production Notes:

‘Fireflies’

Through Nov. 11 at the Linda Gross Theater, Manhattan; 866-811-4111, atlantictheater.org. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.

By Donja R. Love; directed by Saheem Ali; sets by Arnulfo Maldonado; costumes by Dede Ayite; lights by David Weiner; sound and music by Justin Ellington; projections by Alex Basco Koch; choreography by Raja Feather Kelly; production stage manager, Cody Renard Richard; production manager, S.M. Payson; associate artistic director, Annie MacRae; general manager, Pamela Adams. Presented by Atlantic Theater Company, Neil Pepe, artistic director, Jeffory Lawson, managing director.

Cast: Khris Davis (Charles) and DeWanda Wise (Olivia).