Jordan Boyer plays a high school student and swimmer in the regional premiere of Ruby Rae Spiegel's "Dry Land" at Urbanite Theatre. BRENDAN RAGAN PHOTO/URBANITE THEATRE
Ellie McCaw, Jordan Boyer and Olivia Siegel haven’t been out of high school for long, so they feel almost at home playing students once again in the area premiere of Ruby Rae Spiegel’s comic drama “Dry Land” at Urbanite Theatre.
“It’s easy to play a teenage girl because we are. But it’s hard to endure the hardships that you went through in high school. These things are so real and it’s hard to go back through those emotions and complications,” said Boyer, who graduated just a few weeks ago from Booker High School, where she was a student in the Visual and Performing Arts Program.
McCaw, who starred in Urbanite’s “Freaks” last season, graduated from Booker two years ago, one year ahead of Siegel.
Spiegel’s language speaks to them, and they still speak the language of high school.
“It’s very realistic and it’s completely on point with how everyone talks,” said Siegel, whose character, Reba, provides a comical counterpoint to the play’s more serious elements.
The play explores “the challenges and triumphs that young women go through and face in transitioning from a kid into being a teenager into a budding woman and all that comes with it,” said director and Urbanite co-founder Summer Dawn Wallace, who is both an actress and a teacher. “It deals with women’s bodies, choosing when to have sex, when not to have sex and if they find themselves in situations that they don’t expect, how to have control over their own body.”
The play, set mostly in a girls’ locker room in a Florida high school, gives the year-old theater a a rare “chance to work with young actors and that’s really a challenge, but it’s in language that they get,” Wallace said. The word “like,” for example, is used frequently, but Wallace said “we’ve figured out what that ‘like’ means, versus that one, and how does it help us tell the story.”
Even with characters who sound like they’re walking the halls of their high school, the language should not be “alienating in its vernacular or colloquialism” to the rest of the audience, said Brendan Ragan, a co-founder of the theater. “Some audience members may think, ‘What exactly are they talking about?’ but it’s not in a mysterious or inaccessible language. They’ll understand it.”
Ellie McCaw plays a high school swimmer navigating young womanhood in Ruby Rae Spiegel's play "Dry Land" at Urbanite Theatre. BRENDAN RAGAN PHOTO/URBANITE THEATRE
Wallace said the play “goes to some dark places for these characters, but it’s also extremely funny. It’s going to make audience members who are dealing with younger people think about them in a different way and maybe start conversations between parents and their kids or grandparents and their grandkids.”
The play deals with female sexuality, eating disorders, bullying, suicide and the reality of unexpected and unwanted pregnancy and the possibility of abortion. But it's often handled in offbeat, humorously awkward ways by the young women finding their way through life.
When “Dry Land” opened in New York in 2014, The New York Times praised Spiegel as a new and vibrant voice.
“This portrait of an unlikely friendship under uncommon pressure is tender, caustic, funny and harrowing, often all at the same time,” Ben Brantley wrote. “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.”
McCaw describes her character, Amy, a potential collegiate swimmer, as a leader among her friends, who is not as experienced or worldly as she might suggest.
Playwright Ruby Rae Spiegel in New York, Aug. 19, 2014. (Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times)
“She definitely puts on a show sometimes, wants to impress people and wants to be the most powerful person in the room,” McCaw said. “She has a lot of baggage and has been through a lot of things that have made her more worldly than her peers.”
Boyer’s character, Esther, is the opposite in some ways. “She’s pretty quirky and uncomfortable and not worldly. A lot of girls can relate to her,” Boyer said. “A lot of her struggles in the play are her going back and forth, ‘Am I doing the right thing or not doing the right thing?’ She’s very headstrong about doing the right thing.”
The young women, who share the stage with actors Joshua James and Richard Levene, said the situations the characters go through are more common than some parents may acknowledge or be aware of.
“Everyone is always slightly disconnected from the generation before,” said Wallace, who sees the story as true and accurate based on her own teaching experiences. The play “will help people understand this generation, where technology has taken us and what kids are exposed to at an earlier age. It’s the reality. While it might be surprising to some of our audiences, that’s why this play needs to be done. This is the world that our young men and women are navigating.”
THEATER PREVIEW
"DRY LAND"
Runs June 24-July 24 at Urbanite Theatre, 1487 Second St., Sarasota. More information: 941-321-1397; urbanitetheatre.com
