Dry Land
Two out of five stars
Urbanite Theatre, 1487 Second St., Sarasota, through July 25. Tues.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m. $28. 941-321-1397. urbanitetheatre.com.
How does this sound to you: Adolescence is a complex and even dangerous time for contemporary American girls. Fraught friendships and sexual opportunities, drugs and alcohol, parents and teachers all contribute to a wild kaleidoscope that can nearly drive a girl mad. This is a life stage for careful reality-testing, and every young woman is bound to make some mistakes. If she’s careful, nothing will get irreparably broken, not even her heart. But still she must beware: There’s a price to pay for coming of age.
Agreed? Well, congratulations, you now know everything that Dry Land, the exasperatingly limited play at Sarasota’s Urbanite Theatre, has to say in its 90 minutes. Actually, you know more: Ruby Rae Spiegel’s drama focuses so much time on the efforts of one adolescent girl to self-abort her pregnancy, it doesn’t have much left for such things as plot or character development. Further, it wants us to be shocked by explicit language about bodies and sex that might have been unusual 40 years ago, but is now so familiar, it begins to feel like a cliché. In fact, what’s most surprising about Dry Land is what an impoverished reality it makes out of its rich possibilities. Certainly the physical/psychological/moral/spiritual/sexual drama of teenhood is more suspenseful/meaningful/tragic/tragicomic than this. Certainly the struggles of adolescent females don’t have to appear so meager.
But on Dry Land, great potential goes nowhere. When the play begins, it shows us a scene so troubling — one girl punching another in the stomach so that the latter will miscarry — that it seems we’re about to enter a jungle of shocking adolescent behaviors. Sorry: That opening scene is the most interesting in the play, and nothing that follows it, with the possible exception of a related segment at play’s end, comes near to equaling its dynamism. What Spiegel offers instead for 80-plus minutes is manipulative dialogue designed to scandalize the grownups in the audience (Do girls really talk like this?! Oh, my!), and some brief scenes with extraneous characters who could be cut from the play entirely without any loss. There’s even a scene where a janitor does nothing but clean up a locker room for a few minutes — apparently, we’re supposed to find a scene without dialogue wonderfully intrepid. Well, I know there’s some controversy about the meaning of “postmodernism” in art, but at the very least it means not being subjected to these modernist platitudes (John Cage’s silent 4’33” premiered in 1952, for heaven’s sake). Which is another way of saying, it wouldn’t be inartistic to see a theater play as a space for real substance, of all things.
At least the acting is likable. Ellie McCaw is excellent as Amy, the pregnant girl trying to induce an abortion any way she can. McCaw does a fine job with the sparse material Spiegel provides her — she is clearly an alpha-type, used to being emulated and adored, reflexively mean to girls who don’t act so sure of themselves and impressively capable of gratitude when someone does her a real favor. As Ester, her sometime friend and chosen pugilist/abortionist, Jordan Boyer is appropriately servile: She clearly wants Amy’s attention, and is willing to do just about anything to win it. Then there are the actors playing the three unnecessary characters. Josh James is arguably the most prismatic actor in the show: In his short scene, he suggests a full and complex personality, overconfident at times, but also ironic, with a tinge of self-deprecation. Olivia Siegal is fine as Amy’s friend Reba, though this character contributes absolutely nothing to the play except for evidence that there are, in fact, girls whom Amy treats as equals. Richard LeVene as the janitor has so little to say or do, I can’t begin to imagine why he’s in the drama at all. The action takes place on Rick Cannon’s convincing locker-room set, and the characters’ costumes — swimsuits for the two main swimming-team characters, mostly — are well-designed by Monica Cross. Summer Dawn Wallace’s staging is top-notch: Even while waiting for something significant to happen (it seldom does), she easily has us believing in the reality of these characters and their difficulties.
Problem is, theater is about storytelling, and in Dry Land, author Spiegel has only a fraction of a story to tell. Instead of going back to the drawing board and inventing more plot (or revealing more character), she pads her drama with irrelevancies, then relies on its most troubling images — the attempts to make Amy miscarry — to make up for what it lacks. The result: 10 minutes of real drama out of 90. What a waste.
This article appears in Jul 7-14, 2016.