What the Tide Remembers

WHAT THE TIDE REMEMBERS is a two-act play set at the fictional Ocean View Amusement Park in Norfolk, Virginia, where a film crew has arrived to shoot the park’s demolition for a documentary. Mary Daly, a production assistant whose grandmother once brought her to this same park as a child, begins seeing Danny Kowalski, a seventeen-year-old ride operator who vanished in 1978 after uncovering falsified financial ledgers exposing the park owner’s embezzlement. As the crew intercuts present-day interviews with flashbacks to that final summer, Ruth Delaney, a former park employee who has spent forty-six years carrying the truth of what happened to Danny, is forced to finally speak. Part ghost story, part unsolved mystery, part elegy for a vanished American boardwalk, the play asks what a place remembers when the people who loved it are gone, and what it costs to finally tell the truth.