Dry Land
Opening Night: September 6, 2014
Closing: September 27, 2014
Theater: HERE Arts Center
Ester is a swimmer trying to stay afloat. Amy is curled up on the locker room floor. Victor hates jocks but not girls. Reba just wants to party. A play about girls, abortion, bath salts, bathing suits, rashes, love, and what happens in one high school locker room after everybody’s left.
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September 8, 2014
The turbulent waters of friendship are explored in Ruby Rae Spiegel’s hard-hitting and moving new play Dry Land, now playing at the HERE Arts Center in a Colt Coeur production. The play mostly takes place in the girls’ locker room of a high school in Florida, and centers on two high school swimmers, Amy (Sarah Mezzanotte) and Ester (Tina Ivlev). At the top of the play, Amy asks Ester to “punch me again”. Ester is concerned with the bruises her blows could inflict, but Amy is insistent. During the conversation that follows, which is punctuated by punches to Amy’s stomach, we eventually find out that Amy is pregnant. Desperate to abort the baby as soon as possible, she has enlisted the help of Ester to terminate the unwanted pregnancy.
READ THE REVIEWSeptember 14, 2014
Colt Coeur proclaims that they create “theater that holds you tight and never lets go.” In just the right ways, Ruby Rae Spiegel’s play can’t resist a good deal of seat dancing as you squirm your way through repeated (literal) gut punching action, toxic locker room humor, and some blood effects that will remind you why you shouldn’t eat at least an hour before going into the pool. If that isn’t enough to reel you in, Spiegel offers us a skillfully crafted narrative that covers all the teenage issue biggies that could easily steer their way into Glee territory. I’m happy to report that you won’t find that nonsense here. Lights up. And the first gut punch begins. Soon we discover that Amy (Sarah Mezzanotte) is pregnant, in high school, by a boy she now shudders at the thought of. She has enlisted the help of friend Ester (Tina Ivlev) to abort the baby so that she does not have to tell her mother. She has read about the uncomfortably named “DIY abortion” techniques in a magazine that include detergent drinking, stomach sitting, and good-old-fashioned vodka. (And by the way, is this article an actual thing in this mind-boggling world?) Dry Land doesn’t allow us much time to come up for air as we hurdle our way through a story of friendship, love, and betrayal.
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September 12, 2014
Few things are as bracing as the shock of new talent. In 10 years — or more likely in 10 months, considering our accelerated hatching cycle — you’ll be able to say you were there for Ruby Rae Spiegel’s first full-length play. She’s only 21 — a senior at Yale — but Dry Land feels like the first step in an inevitable rise. Same goes for the equally young and inspired leads, Sarah Mezzanotte and Tina Ivlev, who play Florida high schoolers sharing swim practices, a co-dependent friendship and a painful problem. Dry Land isn’t flawless, but it casts a strange spell and sticks with you. The show’s emo streak captures the ambiguity of the bonds between girls, but there’s also a tremendous amount of guts — and blood, sweat and tears.
READ THE REVIEWSeptember 12, 2014
The downtown comedy-drama Dry Land opens with two high-school swimmers doing an unorthodox drill. “Punch me,” pretty alpha-teen Amy (Sarah Mezzanotte) tells meek Ester (Tina Ivlev), who reluctantly obliges. Then Ester pounds a fist into Amy’s belly again, with gusto. It’s a fitting beginning. Ruby Rae Spiegel’s play packs a wallop of its own, too. Amy is pregnant and doesn’t want to be. In a fast-moving 90 minutes, Spiegel, who’s just 21, offers a funny, unflinching and touching look at friendship — and how much you can give and take to sustain one. Even to the point of helping with a DIY-abortion. It’s not exactly groundbreaking material. Whiffs of Mean Girls and Obvious Child waft around the Colt Coeur production, but the issues are dealt with in an impressive way.
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September 13, 2014
The two girls don’t know the protocol for sitting on someone’s stomach for medical reasons. So they improvise, awkwardly and goofily, with one planting her rump on the midsection of the other, which leads to both of them convulsing into giggles. The girl being sat upon laughs so hard that she wets herself. They’re having a good if uncomfortable time. Most likely, so are you. Until the girls remember that what they’re trying to achieve is a do-it-yourself abortion. Even then, the giggles linger, though with a clammy, premonitory chill. Feelings seldom come singly in Dry Land, the remarkable new play by Ruby Rae Spiegel at Here in Greenwich Village. Set largely in the girls’ locker room of a Florida high school, this portrait of an unlikely friendship under uncommon pressure is tender, caustic, funny and harrowing, often all at the same time. Such emotional multivalence is common among teenagers in hormonal flux. But it’s rare that this muddled state is rendered with the nonjudgmental clarity brought to it by Ms. Spiegel, an undergraduate at Yale who just turned 21.
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