"Dry Land" at Shotgun Players

Shotgun Players photo by Ben Krantz Studio

My friends at Shotgun Players (obligatory disclaimer: I'm a board member there) never shy away from difficult material. Last year we got the horrors of war onstage in "Blasted," and this year we get the horror of being an American teenager. That's a bit of an exaggeration, but not by a whole lot.

The Play

At the age of twenty-one, playwright Ruby Rae Spiegel set out to write an honest play about teenage girls: their lives and relationships. The result was Dry Land, the story of two Florida high school swim teammates who aren't exactly friends, but maybe they are, eventually. Amy is the brash, cocksure, popular girl who also swims. Esther is a senior transfer to the school, a serious competitive swimmer with a somewhat murky past and dreams of swimming in college. All but one scene takes place in the school locker room.

The play opens with Amy demanding that Esther punch her in the stomach. As things unfurl, we deduce that Amy is pregnant (unintentionally) and is trying to induce a miscarriage without having parents or doctors involved. Esther is trying to ingratiate herself with Amy, so goes along with the punching (and more things later) that she's not really comfortable with. Meanwhile, Amy's theoretical best friend, Reba, is clueless and uninvolved.

The dynamics of the relationships and power hierarchy among the girls is one key aspect of the play. So too is the obvious need to reach out and relate, but tempered by the masks each girl has constructed to protect herself from emotional vulnerability. Amy's bravado, Esther's drive, and Reba's airheadedness all turn out to be constructs built up to keep others at arm's length, despite the fact that all of them desperately need and want close friendships.

I can't spell out too much of what actually transpires without spoiling things, so I won't really. Suffice it to say that the girls alternately pull and push each other, trying to get what they want without sacrificing the emotional safety distance they perceive they need. Introverted college sophomore Victor fills in a few information gaps when Esther goes to try out at college, and the school janitor makes a couple of memorable entrances at inconvenient moments.

The Production

For what is essentially a small, personal play, Dry Land is extraordinarily difficult, particularly for the two lead swimmers. Amy (Martha Brigham) and Esther (Grace Ng) have to express their emotions pretty subtly, while sometime quite literally physically assaulting one another. It's a delicate balancing act, but both are up to the challenge. And each role represents quite a distinct change from the last role I saw each actor play: Brigham as the young Leni Riefenstahl in Aurora's Leni a year ago and Ng as the clownish Wilhelm in last season's The Black Rider at Shotgun. Both exhibit entirely different, but still very strong, aspects of their performing talent in this show, and their chemistry works well.

The other players are also good, albeit in much smaller roles. Amy Nowak as Reba, Adam Magill as Victor, and Don Wood as the janitor all blend in well, and a group of eight mostly anonymous swim-team members mostly appear behind a frosted glass wall, though they come into the locker room toward the end. I should mention that the set, designed by Angrette McCloskey, is a most convincing high school locker room, from the dismal gray-green pain to the drab rows of lockers. All that's missing is the musty disinfectant smell.

And I would be remiss not to mention the great job done by Fight Director Dave Maier, because the punches and other physical tussles are extremely convincingly done. It's a bit hard to watch at times because it's so realistic.

And finally, there is blood. Lots of blood. And other bodily excretions. Amy eventually does miscarry, right there in the locker room. It's super unpleasant to watch, but an important part of the play. This show is about the real lives of teens, and well, things get real. Not for the squeamish.

Bottom Line

The show is extremely well done, and director Ariel Craft keeps a lid on the action: it feels like genuine interactions between teens most of the time, not like acting or stagecraft. That's also credit to the writing, but it would definitely be possible to overdo the action, to the detriment of the overall effect.

It is almost impossible to talk about this show without at least a passing comparison to the recent Marin Theatre Company production of The Wolves. Where that play is about a team of teen soccer players, this show focuses mostly on the two girls. In The Wolves, the girls are distinct but kind of anonymous, calling each other by their uniform numbers rather than names, where Dry Land is very much about how the very personal lives interact with the team activity. Both are very effective, but Dry Land is ultimately more gripping because of the personal depth.

There is great power in watching young people struggling to find themselves and get some degree of control in their difficult, confusing world (or as Craft calls it, "the mess and melancholy of youth"). Like real life, it's not always pleasant, but once you commit to it and follow it through to the end, you find things you never expected, aspects of characters you could not have suspected.

I could nitpick some aspects of the script (and particularly the one scene outside the locker room), but I don't really want to. The play works. The production is super effective. And it's been extended for another week, so it runs through June 23. It's well worth seeing, though I would be careful about bringing actual teens to the show--it's pretty intense.