Rebecca Naomi Jones owns Fire in Dreamland at the Public Theater. She plays Kate, and in the way of well-trained actors, she makes you believe she is Kate, arrived tonight, just to tell you a story. Rinne Groff writes her like she’s peeling off pages backstage; they seem that spontaneous. Groff, true to form, is telling a complicated tale, spinning out competing narratives, occasionally... Read more


The Public Theater continues its 2017-2018 Off-Broadway season with the New York premiere of Rinne Groff's Fire in Dreamland.
(Photos by Joan Marcus)
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Fire in Dreamland Image and Video Gallery

On Coney Island, in the aftermath of 2013's Superstorm Sandy, a disillusioned do-gooder named Kate meets Jaap Hooft, a charismatic European film-maker who sees in the devastation wrought by the storm an opportunity to make a work of art about another disaster that struck Coney Island some hundred years before: the 1911 fire that started in the amusement park known as Dreamland, burning it to ashes from which it never arose. As Kate throws herself into the vortex of Jaap's visionary schemes, she finds beauty, pain and betrayal, and eventually herself. 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.