Conquering loneliness is at the heart of an intimate, well-done show from Evergreen Players

In Fireflies, Matthew Barber’s 2017 play about a lonely, retired schoolteacher and a mysterious drifter come to fix her roof, the playwright touches on just about all the hot-button human emotions. And while everything from passion, jealousy and suspicion to anger, fear and hope bubbles up throughout, it all happens in a tiny space in such a subdued way that it feels like we’re inside a diorama.

Now showing in the Evergreen Players Black Box Theatre, Fireflies is one of those beautiful, tight plays that’s laser-focused on just a few characters. With only 35 seats in the house, the audience is never more than a few feet from the action on stage. This gives the actors the chance to do quite a bit with their facial expressions and subtle gestures that’d be lost in a bigger house.

It also means the cast had better be damned good with that kind of close scrutiny, and the four-person cast excels on every level under the capable direction of Kathleen Davis.

An intimate space

One interesting element of this production is where it’s being produced — and not just the stage itself. Tucked into a small nook of shops in Evergreen, EP’s Black Box Theatre is a little haven unto itself. The outer lobby has a faux fireplace, a few tables and chairs and friendly staff/volunteers who serve up cookies, coffee, beer and wine on the pay-what-you-want tip-jar model.

From the lobby, you enter the performance space through a screen door to find yourself in the kitchen of retired schoolteacher Eleanor Bannister. Deliberate or not, it’s a neat transition from the theatre itself to the world of the play. And what looks like a perfectly ordinary, no-frills Texas home is, we soon learn, a type of prison Eleanor has built over many decades.

The first act opens with Eleanor (Marilyn Herrs) enduring the ramblings of her busybody neighbor, widow and bestie Grace Bodell (Julie Williamson). In between talk of figs, relatives, recently deceased townies and other mundane topics, we learn from Grace that there’s a “drifter” in town named Abel Brown. As busybodies will do, she’s taken everything she’s learned about him and constructed a profile of an itinerant conman who’s coming for people like her and Eleanor — single women living alone, the perfect marks for his scams.

“Nosy neighbor” is a caricature we’re all familiar with, but Williamson portrays Grace so perfectly that it feels fresh — and very funny. She may be as lonely as Eleanor due to her husband’s passing, but she’s at least found an outlet in making everyone else’s business her own. And even if she’s annoying most of the time, Williamson keeps the character loveable. Given that Eleanor is usually in the depths of despair or wringing her hands about unsettling developments in her snowglobe world, Grace’s appearances are a relief.

‘Eleanor & Abel’

That’s the name of the novel by Annette Sanford that Barber based this play on, and it is their story at the heart of the action. Even as Gracie is going on about the drifter, we soon learn Eleanor has already been in contact with him, hired Abel to fix a hole in the room of her guest house and may already have fallen for him.

The notion that this prickly woman — who’s resigned herself to living the rest of her life alone — could have a late-life romance is the central question. What kind of man would it take to compel her to shake off the cobwebs around her heart and go in for something as simple as a kiss? How could she, who’s denied herself so much, ever open up for a stranger?

Herrs is tremendous in this role, drawing not only from plenty of experience on stage but also, I would guess, from her work with seniors in the Evergreen area. What’s fascinating about Barber’s script and Herrs’ portrayal of Eleanor is how much we learn about the character that’s unspoken. The hard-hearted schoolmarm is yet another trope, but watching the walls come down around that person is the charm of Fireflies.

But it doesn’t happen overnight. Abel may have been taken with her when he first saw her sans drawers in her nightgown, but he’s got his work cut out for him with this sad, tough cookie. As the misunderstood drifter, Sean Maslow does an outstanding job as the persistent and understated suitor. We learn he hasn’t ever settled down, but while he may have some baggage, his heart is in the right place.

This, it turns out, is what makes Gracie and Eleanor so suspicious of him. So when he convinces Eleanor to let him hang around and tackle a renovation of the guest house, he lands in the doghouse almost immediately when he has to rush off to tend to some family business.

Pupils vs. students

Eleanor doesn’t wait very long to hit the panic button, thinking Abel has run off with her money — just as Gracie warned her he’d do. The cop who comes to hear her tale is none other than a former student, Eugene Claymire. She’d recently told Abel the difference between “pupils” and “students,” in her view, had to do with intent. Pupils are there because they have to be; students are there to learn because they want to.

David Speechley as Eugene Claymire in ‘Fireflies’ | Photo: Kellie Fox

Eugene is definitely in the former camp, a “fathead” in high school who turns out to be a decent guy in a police uniform. Only appearing in the second act, David Speechley nonetheless does a bangup job with the character, providing much-needed levity for Eleanor when she’s at her lowest. And along with a spirited bit of Coleridge he belts out to show Eleanor he remembers something at least, he gives her some food for thought about that whole pupil-vs.-student thing.

Indeed, has she been the pupil all these years? Has she been living this staid life because she thought it was what she was supposed to do it and not because it’s what she really wanted?

As unlikely as their pairing may seem, watching these two work past their unstated issues is the stuff of many older stories. Social norms and “what’s expected” get in the way of what the characters may want, and it’s typically only when something unexpected or meaningful happens that the barriers come down.

In Fireflies, it’s the age of the characters that comes into play. Both perhaps in their early 60s, we get the sense that the two of them are done with games and artifice. It takes Eleanor longer to get there, but we can imagine what happens after a tremendous fight between Abel and Eleanor lands them in an entirely different state of being.

As a study of vulnerability and connection, Fireflies is an affecting story that resonates with truth. This production does the script proud, with a solid cast and expert direction that makes for a truly enjoyable night at the theatre.