Now receiving its World Premiere at Luna Stage in West Orange, Amy Hartman's Mercy and the Firefly feels more like a work in progress than a finished, polished play. Described in press materials as being about the pervasiveness of emotional and physical violence in our society, the play’s meandering plot, unsympathetic characters and unconvincing performances make it disappointing when it should be riveting and cathartic.
After a five-year absence, Lucy returns to her childhood home in a slum neighborhood located in Homestead, Pennsylvania. There, at 3 AM, she encounters her former beau Oliver, a recovering addict who is readying his late mother's home for future sale. Now a nun—albeit one suspended from her convent for inappropriately touching a handicapped student—Lucy has brought with her a teenager named Mercy, witness to the murder of that student and thus in danger from the gang members who perpetrated it. Her precipitous appearance wreaks havoc in Oliver's and her mother Vivian's lives, especially when she insists that the teenager live under Oliver's roof instead of with her and Vivian, for a reason that is never spelled out. At the end, a terrible secret is revealed, leading to a denouement of forgiveness and, one hopes, redemption.
It's these last two themes that are the most elusive in Mercy and the Firefly, coming as they do in the last of ten scenes. The first act is very long and overwritten, with lots of extraneous events and revelations (like Lucy and Oliver's recitation of the scientific process that makes fireflies light up). Vivian tends to go off on tangents when conducting a conversation, recounting her impregnation by Lucy's father as though it occurred in a dream. And Mercy starts off the play with a rap performance that describes her life in East Los Angeles; the meaning of the words gets lost in our anticipation of the rhymes. As for the actual location of Homestead, well that’s a mystery, for the actors sometimes speak with what sounds like Boston or New York accents. Is it eastern, western or central Pennsylvania? Who knows?
Director Cheryl Katz tries her best with this diffuse and rambling material. Unfortunately, she neither makes the characters sympathetic nor does their delivery of Hartman's dialogue sound convincing and natural. As Lucy, Marcie Henderson fails to convey the mindset of a woman who has decided to become a nun. One supposes that she joined an order and entered a convent in Los Angeles as a refuge from her appalling life in Homestead. She displays terrible judgment in literally kidnapping Mercy, taking her across country without telling the girl's mother. And one wonders just what kind of a Biology/Earth Science teacher Lucy was when Mercy says the kids all called her “Godzilla”!
Alicia Rivas plays Mercy (right) with a permanent scowl and hostile body language. She delivers the profane dialogue with gusto but without much fluid naturalness, and her inexperience on the stage (she's a theater student in college) shows.
The two most sympathetic characters in the play are Oliver and Vivian, the collateral damage of Lucy's actions. Christopher Daftsios's Oliver (center) is earnestly trying to stay clean and sober, so when Mercy tempts him with drugs and he succumbs, we feel that he's been blindsided. As Vivian (left), Andrea Gallo has to speak some of the most outlandish dialogue ever written; she truly sounds as crazy as others assume her to be. However, in her final speech of the play, when she tells her daughter the truth about her birth and parentage, we see a woman who has too long held a secret to protect her child—to her own detriment.
Robert Monaco's set and Jill Nagle's lighting provide a serviceable canvas upon which these play out. Christopher Metzger's costumes, while nothing special, are entirely appropriate to location and character.
Mercy and the Firefly was developed by Luna in their New Moon Series; it could have used further work to tighten it up and give it a sharper focus. I still can't figure out why the firefly is mentioned in the title, other than the recitation by Lucy and Oliver in the opening scene of the play. And by the penultimate scene, I was crying for mercy—and not in the way the playwright intended!
Mercy and the Firefly will be performed Friday and Saturday evenings at 8 PM and Sunday afternoons at 2 PM through March 13 at 555 Valley Road, West Orange. For information and tickets call 973.395.5551 or visit online at www.lunastage.org .
Photos by Steven Lawler.
