The play opens with ocean noises; a striking young African-American woman in a trench coat is weeping. She turns to the audience and implores us to listen to the story of a movie she reveres. The film focuses on a terrible fire in 1911 that struck an amusement park on Coney Island called “Dreamland.” No humans, but several animals died. A handsome stranger approaches the woman, and his less-than-charming opening line is to tell her, “You have shit on your face.” He wipes away the runny mascara, and his touch seems to electrify her. Within a short amount of time, they have retired to her mattress on the floor, and in the words of Mamma Mia!, dot, dot, dot. This turns out not to be merely a one-night stand, but the beginning of a relationship which takes the seemingly intelligent woman, Kate (Rebecca Naomi Jones), who has “two masters degrees and a teaching certificate,” down the rabbit hole with Jaap (Enver Gjokaj), who is good looking, but not-exactly-delightful mixture of self-involvement, delusion, and amorality. Why? Is it because Kate has lost her father, a lifelong worker at a Methadone clinic, or because she feels she’s dead ending her life as a civil servant? She clearly needs for her world to be shaken up and to feel the passion she has bottled up inside. But oh baby, this guy is just so clearly bad news. Throughout the action, we hear a clapboard sounding to change the scene. We later find out that the character way upstage doing this is Lance (Kyle Beltran), who has also fallen into Jaap’s sphere by lending him expensive equipment from his film school. Jaap is also momentarily a student there but only applied so he could get his visa; he has no real interest in learning because he knows it all. Kate is captivated by Jaap’s intention to present his Dreamland film from the viewpoint of the animals, notably “the Nubian Prince,” a large black lion who was shot and killed. Kate imagines the noble creature, and declares how much she, herself, wants to roar. When Jaap feels criticized by Kate’s suggestion on how to make the film better, he tells her he’s leaving to get licorice, and just takes off. She’s angry but lets him back in her life when he returns days later. When Jaap shows her a very short sequence he’s shot at the zoo, she’s enthralled. Since we don’t get to see it, we have no reason why. They also take pills together, and again, we don’t know what they are or why they’re being taken. He very conveniently professes, “I don’t know what these words mean” at various intervals. Amusingly, he asks if “playing hooky” means masturbating, but he’s not at all amused when Kate quits her job to help him full time with his filmmaking. She is clearly under his spell, to the point of lending him her credit card and smashing a hole in the wall of her bathroom. The best scene in Rinne Groff's Fire in Dreamland occurs when Kate, dressed in a shiny blue-green mermaid dress, delivers a long monologue about the doomed lion, “the black prince.” Jones captivates the audience, and lets us see Kate’s heart, which yearns for something real, something brave, something passionate. It becomes more and more clear that she’s wasting herself and her time with Jaap, who belittles her by calling her “a petty bureaucrat,” a quitter, and someone so mundane that she just doesn’t get his brilliant vision. He totally rejects her idea for creating a script, a practical plan for getting the money for the movie, and any other improvements which might actually get the job done. Kate tells him she loves him; she’s obviously been hypnotized by the idea of Jaap as a creative artist. He proposes marriage but later retracts his offer because he finds out it would involve “too much red tape.” Hard luck, since Kate finds out she’s pregnant. Jaap reminds her they both said they hate kids. Of course, he takes no responsibility, offers no support, and walks out again. Lance comes into the mix when he shows up needing to retrieve the camera from the film school. When he tells her he assumed that Jaap was gay, a lightbulb goes on for Kate. Does she finally understand that the tantrum-throwing user who calls her names and walks out when things get sticky is not her knight in shining armor? Could it be that her own vision is actually better than his pipedreams? Good writing, good directing, and most of all, good acting make it possible for us to keep caring about Kate and hope she has a bright future ahead with plenty of roaring.
