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by Ruby Rae Spiegel, directed by Jill Harper

Cue6 Theatre, Assembly Theatre, 1479 Queen Street West, Toronto

September 7-22, 2018

Amy: “Sometimes I get so drunk I think I’m someone else”

“Punch me”, Amy says to Ester and Ester does it but not hard enough to Amy’s liking.  At first we think Amy, a swimmer, is trying to prove to Ester, another swimmer, how hard her abs are.  Gradually, by the end of this, the first of the nine scenes of Dry Land (2014), we realize that Amy is hoping Ester’s punches will induce an abortion.  American Ruby Rae Spiegel wrote this play about girls in their later teens when she was only 21.  This gives Dry Land a blazing authenticity of language and insight into teen behaviour and concerns.  Yet, Dry Land is more than a closely observed portrait of how young women relate to each other today.  It is also an inquiry into how young people can develop a sense of morality in a society that has become unmoored from traditional standards.

The play is set entirely in the girls locker room of a Florida high school convincing created on stage by Elahe Marjove.  Outwardly tough, self-assured seventeen-year-old Amy (Veronica Hortiguela), a member of the school swim team who has been very sexually active, has become pregnant and can’t possibly let her mother know.  She doesn’t have a credit card to buy an abortion pill, which in the US costs up to $1000.00, and even if she did because she lives in Florida one of her parents would have to be told about her plans 48 hours before she used it.

Amy, therefore, has been looking around the internet for ways to induce an abortion.  She feels she can’t ask her best friend on the team, Reba (Reanna Spitzer), because she can’t trust Reba not to tell one of her parents who is a dentist.  Thus, she has chosen an eighteen-year-old girl from the swim team, the awkward, deferential Ester (Mattie Driscoll), who is not a member of the in-crowd at high school and feels it an honour that Amy has selected her for such an important job.  Although Ester is painfully shy, it turns out that of all the girls on the team, she is the one who is being scouted for an athletic scholarship to university. 

Over the six-and-a-half weeks of the action as Amy becomes ever more desperate about aborting the fetus, we learn how differently Amy and Ester have responded to having become sexually mature.  From Reba we learn that becoming sexually active is expected and that the “in” teens purposely organize sex parties.  At the same time, we see that teens don’t consider oral sex as “real” sex and is no big deal.  Yet, there are unspoken rules about when and where to boast about sex and getting pregnant is enough of a mistake to cause ostracism.  Though Reba gossips about sex in a studied blasé tone, Spiegel’s is that teens like Amy and Ester are having difficulty because teens reach sexual maturity so much earlier than they do emotional maturity.  

Amy wants people to think she has partaken completely of the high school sex scene though she secretly worries that the students consider her a “slut”.  Ester, in contrast, is sexually inexperienced.  Sexual maturity has caused her to withdrawn from social situations and to focus almost obsessively on her swimming.  Even when she meets a nice, geeky guy like Victor (Jonas Trottier), who really likes her, she is tense and standoffish.  Neither Amy nor Ester has any sexual guidance from their parents whose marriages have broken up and are now in complicated relationships with other people.

Spiegel shows that millennial teens are pushed into a highly sexualized world before they have really ceased being children.  With the older generation abdicating its responsibility, the teens have to discover their own moral compass themselves.  In the relationship between Amy and Ester, the two begin with basics of establishing helpfulness and trust, though Amy, in a sudden petulant mood, even breaks that bond with Ester.  Spiegel’s use of a swim team and her title Dry Land suggest that the girls on the swim team are happiest in the water where they are coached and given guidelines as to how to do the best they can.  On dry land, however, without help and guidelines, they flounder. 

Director Jill Harper has assembled a dedicated cast of young actors mostly fresh from theatre school.  As Amy, Veronica Hortiguela is excellent at projecting an outward forcefulness that masks her inward insecurity.  Hortiguela makes clear at the start that Amy is merely using Ester and has no intention of becoming friends with her.  Yet, Hortiguela shows how Amy’s cold exploitation of Ester gradually turns into a need and secretly into admiration.

The Ester of Mattie Driscoll takes just the opposite path.  Driscoll, expert at bringing out Ester’s social awkwardness, shows that Ester so desperate to be liked she lets Amy order her about and mock her.  Eventually Amy goes too far and accuses Ester in front of her best friend Reba of being gay.  Yet, Driscoll also shows us that Ester’s interactions with Amy cause her not to lose but to build up her self-respect.  By the end the two teens have completely changed positions in how we and they evaluate their strengths and weaknesses.

Unlike Amy and Ester, the Reba of Reanna Spitzer is completely at home in the gossip-ridden world of high school society.  Spitzer makes Reba funny and cutting while revealing Reba to be so “in” because she is so superficial.  Quite unlike Reba is the intense Victor of Jonas Trottier, who is vainly looking for someone serious among all the superficial people around him.  Trottier appears in only scene in the play, but it provides a key insight into Ester and her fear of losing her concentration ahead of her test for the swimming scout.  Trottier makes Victor a delightfully bumbling would-be “woke” young man, concerned about asking consent at every stage of his desired intimacy with Ester even to the point of ridiculousness. 

Spiegel’s play is already insightful concerning the need of teens to discover, if they can, their own code of morality, but it still shows the signs of a work by young playwright.  One scene in which Ester practices a school report about colonists, the native Seminole Indians and the Florida Everglades is a too-obvious attempt to expand the meaning of the play to a wider realm.  The fact that the Seminoles had learned to live with the marshy environment of Everglades whereas the colonists’ only approach was to fill them in and make them “dry land”, resonates only hollowly within the very narrow confines of Spiegel’s otherwise minutely observed study of young people’s external and internal strength.

Still, Dry Land is an exciting play, equally funny and disturbing, incisively directed and ideally performed.  Its realistic style is completely different from Cue6’s previous hit pool (no water) but Harper and her cast give Dry Land a similarly strong emotional impact.  In terms of local relevance, the play makes abundantly clear why sex education needs to be a vital component of a school curriculum.  Cue6 is gaining a reputation as a young company that fully meets the demands of the daring subject matter it chooses.                 

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive. 

Photos: (from top) poster for Dry Land, ©2018 Cue6; Veronica Hortiguela as Amy and Mattie Driscoll as Ester; Mattie Driscoll as Ester. ©2018 Samantha Hurley.

For tickets, visit https://dryland.brownpapertickets.com