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At the center of the performance of Ruby Rae Spiegel's high-school drama presented at the Kirk Douglas Theatre was an image of blood streaming from between the legs of a groaning teenager as her friend quietly disposed of a newspaper-wrapped fetus. Beyond its initially familiar portrait of the challenges of teenage friendship, Dry Land staged what most performances tend to hide offstage by bringing abortion and the visceral reality of female embodiment into the realm of visual representation.
Centering themes of girlhood, burgeoning sexuality, and teenage friendship, Dry Land's plot unfolds within a high school girls' locker room, where the girls on the swim team swap gossip and probe their own identities in the blithe and superficial jargon of adolescence. The production opened in medias res, with Amy (Teagan Rose) standing in her bathing suit commanding a punch to the stomach from a reluctant Ester (Connor Kelly-Eiding), indicating from the outset a clear power differential between the two girls. Throughout the play, Ester obeys Amy's dictates, punching her, sitting on her stomach, and buying her laundry detergent to ingest, all in an effort to induce an abortion. Amy, physically mature and sexually experienced, occupies a coveted position within the high school social hierarchy; Ester, on the other hand, is an under-confident, socially isolated newcomer whose focus is on winning a swimming scholarship. In sharing the secret of her pregnancy with Ester, Amy enlists her as both witness and accomplice to her attempts at abortion, relying upon Ester's social isolation to make her complicit. The characters' distinct personalities and roles within the...