Fire in Dreamland (Rinne Groff)
When I graduated college I got a job as a technical director at a local high school. A combination of the school’s too-high expectations for a two-person crew and my own inexperience led to the worst year of my life: 14-hour days, six days a week, constant disappointment, and regular emotional breakdowns.
During this time I was saved by a board game.
No matter how hard my day was, I knew I could wake up early and play a game by myself before going to work, and no matter how late I came home I could play a game before going to bed. And for however long it took me to play I could escape into something else for awhile and put my life to the side. I played that game over one-thousand individual times that year.
Rinne Groff’s Fire in Dreamland follows Kate trying to put her life back together after the devastation of Superstorm Sandy and the nothingness her life has become. She meets a charming expat named Jaap, and she gets drawn into his dream about making a film. This film lets her escape herself for a little while, and though her problems come back she’s able to rebuild.
Over six months Kate gets blinded by his passion, ignores his rougher edges, and trudges forward until reality is undeniable. I don’t want to ruin the subtle action of the play, how it ping pongs between the smallest moments that mean everything to the character, and the quiet it finds onstage, but it is a moving portrayal of lives in ruin and what we do to get ourselves through.
The play has a strange device, one that challenges a traditionalist such as myself, but I could see being used to either great, or alienating, effect: frequently scenes are interrupted by a clapper board, like you see on film sets, and the action resets to another time and place; sometimes we look at a small moment we’ve seen before, sometimes we jump a minute or two to get to the meat of an issue, and occasionally we join Kate eight years ago at her father’s deathbed. It is the sort of thing that I think playwrights configure, but that is hard to pull off in reality.
I think the portrayal of Jaap will make or break this play. He could be reduced to nothing more than a simple conman, someone looking to get his no matter how he needs it. But I’d rather see him as a person afraid of the world, a child of sorts who doesn’t understand what he gets into, follows his whims, and leaves messes behind for others to clean-up.
This month I’ve realized how much comedy means to me: as I read plays devoid of laughs, or consisting of very shallow ones, I’ve discovered that I really do need laughs to connect me to a work. But then this comes along which, although not unfunny is certainly not a comedy at its heart, and challenges my notions of what I’m looking for in a work.
