Solid Acting Buoys Underwhelming Coming-of-Age Story in “Dry Land”

By her own account, high-school senior Amy’s been a bad girl. Her unwanted pregnancy — which she’s willing to go to extremes to terminate — is only the latest of her self-sabotaging behaviors. But Ester, a recent transfer and swim-team standout with her own painful neuroses, thinks Amy’s remarkable.

Will Amy get through this episode intact? Can the girls help each other grow? That’s really all there is to Dry Land — and barely that, what with the play covering maybe a month in their lives and about 10% of the stage time being literally nothing but a janitor mopping the floor. Aside from the play’s one big scene, we never feel much is at stake, as playwright Ruby Rae Spiegel has done little more than generate a pedestrian scenes-from-a-high-school-friendship. 

The saving grace of this show is the casting. As Amy, Arlene Duran seems to grasp the difference between acting scenes and living scenes. Sarcastic, irritated, changeable, cruel, terrified, lost — we believe almost every moment. What’s more, most of her dialog sounds genuinely conversational — a far rarer feat than you’d think.

Meanwhile, despite Spiegel’s not putting much meat on Ester’s bones, Victoria Martins manages to find a character arc, becoming notably less twitchy by play’s end. And although the other speaking role exists only as one-note comic relief, Kalani Smith pretty much steals every scene she’s in. 

On the whole the mise en scène is solid, but music between scenes is so loud that it diminishes the ensuing action. Otherwise, while director Alana Dietze has done fine work with the actors, she’s made a couple of boners, including having Amy’s torso completely covered when Ester expressed concerns about bruises on Amy’s stomach, and allowing a VCR to turn itself on without anyone’s pushing POWER or PLAY. Also, in a play that is generally well-blocked, the final scene features a notable move that in context makes no sense.

Watching Dry Land gives you the nagging feeling that it’s really going to kick in any second now, but it never quite does. A climax comes, but still you’re wondering: is that it? And although the denouement finally gets us where we were going the whole time, it’s too little too late.

Because of the acting, though, we get to spend some quality time with the characters. And that’s something.

Dry Land at California Repertory — Cal State Long Beach
Times: Thur-Sat 7:30 p.m., plus Sat 2 p.m.
The show runs through May 6
Cost: $23-$25
Details: (562) 985-5526, csulb.edu/theatre-arts
Venue: CSULB Studio Theater, Theatre Arts Building (South Campus), Long Beach