Actor, Audience in Trial by ‘Fire’ : Stage: The director fears his work at the Tribune Theatre might be too challenging to be understood.

Michael Mollo knows that “Fire Under Water (Prometheus Drowned)” is sure to be difficult for anyone who sees it. It’s difficult for him; it’s difficult for his actors, and it’s difficult for those who have watched the play take shape in rehearsals.

“This is a very demanding piece because it’s stylistic, and it inverts reality . . . it just might be too challenging for Orange County or elsewhere,” Mollo said resignedly of his new drama, which premieres at the Tribune Theatre on Friday.

But Mollo, a co-founder of the struggling Revolving Door Productions drama troupe in Fullerton, hopes the audience will stick with his tale of Joe Noone, a messianic skin-diver working through his memories of child abuse and a plan to save the world that starts with his own suicide.

Real life mingles with dream sequences, and contemporary dialogue is ladled with biblical and literary references in a plot that Mollo said incorporates notions of sanity and insanity, New-Age trendiness, the men’s movement, the myths of Joseph Campbell, a quest for personal and universal spiritualism and a down-home love story between Joe and his wife, Sara.

A farrago of ideas and events, uneasily mixed?

The 26-year-old writer and director, who recently returned to his longtime home of Fullerton after a year in San Francisco, worries the same thing. Still, he’s confident that the play has worth, especially to anybody who’s attracted by the experimental.

“I think what’s going to save it is that there are a lot of good one-liners and bits that are tied to the language, which I think is very poetic,” Mollo said. “Some of it is even done in iambic pentameter, so if people don’t like Shakespeare, they’ll like this even less.

“But if they (use ‘Fire Under Water’) to question their own lives and aren’t (angered) by the play, I think they may come back again. I’m hoping people who are intrigued will see it more than once.”

The drama’s basic idea came to Mollo while he and his girlfriend were living in a poor section of Daly City on the outskirts of San Francisco. Mollo moved to the Bay Area shortly after his play “Visions: Portrait of a Beat Generation” was staged by Revolving Door.

The piece chronicled the life and friends of Jack Kerouac, and Mollo wanted to immerse himself in that history, starting with San Francisco’s North Shore. The experience was gratifying, but Mollo was plagued by thoughts of his own childhood, during which he said he was physically abused.

“I wanted to experience the city, and I did, but I also got in touch with some personal issues,” he said. “I got into my soul and was able to elucidate some sensitive issues. This is the result of 13 rewrites.”

Mollo said Joe is an ambiguous, even enigmatic figure. One of the questions an audience will have to answer for itself is whether Joe is crazy, especially when it comes to his wish to die and be reborn as a modern-day savior.

The playwright stressed that Joe may seem mentally unstable, but there’s a method to his madness. “Sometimes he’s crazy; sometimes he’s lucid, but crazy people often have the most profound thoughts. Anyway, Shakespeare used (mad characters such as) Ophelia in ‘Hamlet’ to show truth.”

The drama’s avant-garde sway is right for Revolving Door, which Mollo said has been committed to staging new, risk-taking plays since opening in 1992.

The group, consisting mostly of Fullerton College graduates like Mollo, became the main tenant of the Tribune Theatre earlier this year. The playhouse had been the home for the Fullerton-based Teatro Cometa, a Latino company, until Revolving Door took over the lease.

As for Revolving Door’s future, Mollo, who remains a member of the troupe’s board of directors, said it’s shaky, mainly because of financial worries. Board members have used their own money to pay most of the theater’s $650 monthly rent because ticket sales have rarely met expectations.

“We still don’t have a budget; this is all being done with two boards and a passion,” he said. “We get frenetic just getting the rent money, (but) we’ve always had a desperate approach, even when we were staging plays in cafes.”

And if the company doesn’t survive? Mollo said it probably will resurface in another form.

“There is definitely a commitment to the art renaissance that is taking place in Fullerton,” he said. “We are very serious about keeping our craft, of getting our expression out there.”

* Michael Mollo’s “Fire Under Water (Prometheus Drowned)” opens Friday at 8:30 p.m. at the Tribune Theatre, 116 1/2 W. Wilshire Ave., Fullerton. It continues Fridays and Saturdays at 8:30 p.m. and Sundays at 7 p.m. through July 31. $5. (714) 525-3403.