Dry Land. HERE (see Off-Off Broadway). By Ruby Rae Spiegel. Directed by Adrienne Campbell-Holt. With ensemble cast. Running time: 1hr 30mins. No intermission.
Dry Land: In brief
Teenage girls wrestle with abortion in a new play by Ruby Rae Spiegel, directed by Adrienne Campbell-Colt for her rapidly rising Colt Coeur troupe.
Dry Land: Theater review by Helen Shaw
Watching Ruby Rae Spiegel’s ruthlessly honest Dry Land, you wonder: Girls, how did theater miss you?!? Everything else belongs to them: film, television, fiction. Yet it takes Spiegel’s simple, fierce play to put a young woman’s capacity for pain center stage—and the choice feels thrilling, even political.
Dry Land drops us into a Florida high-school locker room, where two teens are changing after swim practice. Amy (Sarah Mezzanotte), one of the “remarkable” people, is subtly torturing Ester (Tina Ivlev), demanding her friendship by sharing unshareable confidences. “Don’t tell anyone I told you,” the kids say, but we soon know why Amy, a self-professed “slut,” needs Ester to punch her in the stomach. It’s more mysterious why Ester, the helplessly uncool superathlete, will do it for her.
By the show’s bloody, matter-of-fact climax, writing phenom Spiegel (currently a senior in college) has indicted an America that allows its girls such awful risks. Ester and Amy, as well as bumptious friend Reba (Alice Kremelberg), assume coaches seduce you and parents won’t help, eating disorders and pregnancies just happen, and there is no safety net. Thank God they can at least make terrible jokes about it all.
Director Adrienne Campbell-Holt of the reliable company Colt Coeur enables startling performances, aided by Ivlev’s transfixing gravity and Mezzanotte’s film-ready ease. There’s a glitter to the young: The company, the director, the writer and the actors all shimmer with it. It feels almost vampiric how energizing it is to watch them, but it won’t make you miss high school at all.—Theater review by Helen Shaw
THE BOTTOM LINE This wrenching, darkly funny teen drama burns like a blast of chlorine.