Dry Land at Shotgun Players

Martha Brigham (Amy) and Grace Ng (Ester)

Shotgun Players Dry Land

Photography by Ben Krantz Studio

My partner and I have been enthusiastic subscribers to Shotgun Players for the last several years, ever since their remarkable traversal of Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia, a trilogy of plays about mid-19th c. Russian revolutionaries. This week, we saw their current production, Ruby Rae Spiegel's Dry Land. It's a gripping play, featuring two young women swimmers on the verge of adulthood, about to graduate from high school and go on to....what?

Spiegel was just 21 when she wrote Dry Land, and she has a superb ear for dialog; her young women -- and their friends -- are very real, as is the predicament that one of them is in. Martha Brigham, as Amy, and Grace Ng, as Ester, give remarkable performances, as does Don Wood, in a role where he has almost nothing to say.

I highly recommend this play and, really, everything Shotgun is doing (so far, this year has been excellent). You can read about Dry Land and buy tickets here; you can use the code tellafriend to get a two-for-one discount on tickets, too.