Robert Tanitch Reviews Dry Land at Jermyn Street Theatre, London SW1.
Ruby Rae Spiegel wrote Dry Land when she was 21 and an undergraduate at Yale University. Hannah Hauer-King’s production is its UK premiere.
The setting is the girls’ locker room of a High School in Florida. A singularly unpleasant student (Milly Thomas) is pregnant and she wants to get rid of the baby. She orders a fellow student (a much nicer character played by Aisha Fabienne Ross) to punch her in the stomach.
Spiegel says the play (over-praised in New York) is not just about abortion but about adolescent friendship and loneliness. It’s the sort of play you might expect to find on a university campus acted by students to an audience of students. It’s not the sort of play you would expect to find in Jermyn Street.
I am trying to think who would want to see the play. The abortion takes place centre stage. A janitor takes a whole scene to clean up the mess.
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