Rinne Groff (The Ruby Sunrise, Saved) returns to The Public with a dynamic and poignantly funny new play directed by Marissa Wolf, Associate Artistic Director/New Works Director at Kansas City Repertory.

In the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy, a disillusioned do-gooder named Kate meets Jaap, a charismatic European making a film about the 1911 fire that burned Coney Island’s Dreamland amusement park to ashes. Desperate for something to live for, Kate buys a ticket on the thrill ride of Jaap’s passion. The only trick is to keep the roller coaster from running off the rails before it destroys them all.

Breaking the boundaries of time and narrative, FIRE IN DREAMLAND is a vibrant new play that explores the astonishing things we create in the face of devastation.

Originally commissioned by Berkeley Repertory Theatre & The Public Theater

Fire in Dreamland begins with Kate (Rebecca Naomi Jones), a frustrated bureaucrat working to restore Coney Island after the devastation of Hurricane Sandy, telling her story of meeting a passionate filmmaker, Jaap Hooft (Enver Gjokaj), near the beach. A clapperboard is utilized to cut between the scene she begins to describe and herself in the ‘action’ of that scene. In this play about filmmaking and vision, the clapperboard is a clever way to establish cinematic sensibility on stage. It suggests in the theatrical space something so easily accomplished in cinematic editing—think of that famous cut in Lawrence of Arabia, where T.E. Lawrence blows out a burning match and we cut to a brilliant red sky as the sun slowly rises: instant transformation. Cinema allows us to jump effortlessly between time and space, and the clapperboard, operated by Lance (Kyle Beltran), acts as an aural cue for visual and narrative jumps in Fire in Dreamland. Unfortunately, some of the “cutting” between scenes confuses the flow of conversations and diminishes tension between and amongst the characters, becoming more of a hindrance than an enhancement of drama. Past, present, and forward get somewhat muddle …Read more