Dry Land

The Yale Dramatic Association’s Spring Ex written by Ruby Spiegel (‘15)Amy has a secret and needs help. Ester deeply idolized Amy and will do anything for her admiration. The two girls are on the swim team together at their high school in Palm Beach County, Florida, and they have arranged to meet in the locker room attached to the pool in their school’s gymnasium. There, we watch them form a complex and intimate relationship, one built on vulnerability and challenged by the fear of being vulnerable. Alone in their two secrets, and both deeply lonely, they struggle with each other, with themselves, and with what it means to be and to become young women.As the play digs slowly deeper, it neither flinches nor judges. Amy and Ester can be cruel and destructive, but they are also sweet and funny, essentially flawed and essentially human. Dry Land is not shy in its presentation of difficult questions, and its ultimate hopefulness contains no easy answers. This is a play about the importance of female friendship and community but it is also, at its core, a play about the fear of love.