They meet sorta cute in Rinne Groff’s Fire in Dreamland, now at the Public Theater. Kate (Rebecca Naomi Jones) is crying by a column somewhere on the Coney Island boardwalk near where in 1911 the amusement park Dreamland burned to the ground. Dutch-born Jaap Hooft (Enver Gjokaj), a self-proclaimed filmmaker, approaches Kate and, first by wiping her streaking mascara, ingratiates himself.
Before you can say “Nathan’s Famous Hot Dogs,” Kate and Jaap are an item, she being devoted to him because he declares he’s going to make a movie about the Dreamland tragedy. She wants to be part of it, considering it the project she has promised her just-deceased father she would commit to as something substantial in her life.
Indeed, the audience knows just how important the memory of Dreamland is to her because just after Kate is caught sobbing, a movie-set clapperboard sounds and she snaps out of her sad mood and starts cheerfully describing to the audience a movie she once saw about the Dreamland conflagration.
N.B.: That clapperboard is crucial to Groff’s tale. It’s clapped in lighting designer Amith Chandrashaker’s shadows for nearly two-thirds of the play’s 90 minutes. The shadowed figure clapping is eventually introduced to the action. He’s Jaap associate and new Kate friend Lance (Kyle Beltran). His clapping is meant to indicate jumps in time.
I had no idea that time leaps are what the clapper’s cracks signify until I read Groff’s script. While watching Fire in Dreamland, I leaned more towards regarding those claps—whenever Lance clapped them and Chandrashaker’s lights shifted darker and harsher—as signaling something being filmed. Not a foolishly illogical thought, is it? Oh, well.
Anyway, when the lights are bright, Kate and Jaap are either filming snippets of his project or he’s preoccupied with raising money for the flick. Yet, as the two encounter relationship ups and downs—and a pregnancy—his intentions become increasingly suspect.
While Jaap claims he’s attempting to raise capital and while he actually films only a few minutes of a script he’s noticeably slow to write, Kate begins to suspect he is severely conflicted. She’s even more uncertain of him when film school collaborator Lance finally leaves that obscured upstage chair and starts talking. Compounding Kate’s concerns is his response when she tells him that she and Jaap are to marry. Lance says he’s always thought Jaap is gay—and he appears to be talking from first-hand experience.
(Speaking of Jaap’s fundraising endeavors: Fire in Dreamland may have the distinction of being the first play in which bitcoins are mentioned. Certainly, I’ve never heard today’s headline-grabbing currency discussed so animatedly on stage before.)
Eventually in Fire in Dreamland, the inflexibly self-involved Jaap’s motivations—which are admittedly foreshadowed from that first mascara swipe of his—undo Kate’s devotion to him. What they don’t undo is her need to have a goal she sees as satisfying the pledge she made to her dying dad.
This repeated goal—which has her twice showing up in glittering mermaid-inspired gowns (Susan Hilferty designed the costumes and the effectively stream-lined set)—is important to Kate but may not be sufficiently weighty for an audience asked to sit through her entanglements with the trying Jaap. Yes, playwright Groff, whose previous Public Theater work was The Ruby Sunrise, intends Fire in Dreamland to present a woman’s determination to find herself, but that Kate triumphs or not by way of completing a Dreamland film just doesn’t sustain interest.
Towards the end of the drama a neon sign advertising “Dreamland” lights up, reminding the audience, with the urgency of a 100-pound symbol, that Groff is writing about dreams and our ability or disability to make them come true. It would be nice to believe right along with her, but that just doesn’t, uh, pan out.
Marissa Wolf directs Groff’s opus creditably, and Jones, Gjokaj and Beltran perform it well. Though perhaps ultimately unable to make Kate completely sympathetic, Jones does her attractive utmost. Gjokaj, who has a Barrymore-like profile and heaps of grit in his performing, is convincing as the childishly devious Jaap, and the pencil-thin Beltran is regularly amusing as he assumes any number of totally puzzled expressions.
Throughout Fire in Dreamland, Jaap says to Kate in regard to his faulty command of English, “I don’t know what those words mean.” If he says it once, he says it at least 10 times. As Groff spun her unsatisfying tale, I knew what every word meant, but more and more I stopped caring.
Fire In Dreamland opened on July 16, 2018, at the Public Theater and runs to August 5. Tickets and information: publictheater.org
