Vegas Theatre Company Opens 2022/2023 Season

Dry Land by Ruby Rae Spiegel explores controversial issues

Vegas Theatre Company (VTC) presents the Las Vegas premiere of Dry Land by Ruby Rae Spiegel, a play as gut-wrenching as it is funny and paints a truthful portrait of the fears, hopes, and bonds of teenage girls. The play will run at Vegas Theatre Company at Art Square from Sept. 14 to Oct. 2.

Ester is a swimmer trying to stay afloat. Amy is curled up on the locker room floor. Dry Land is a play about abortion, female friendship, resiliency, and what happens in one high school locker room after everybody’s left.

“I’m so passionate about this play”, says VTC’s Artistic Director Daz Weller, “it leaped off the page with a voice so ferociously youthful and honest that it demanded to be produced. Ruby Rae Spiegel fearlessly addresses the realities young women in the US face when dealing with unwanted pregnancies and has created a play that, at its heart, is about connection, loyalty, and love.”

Spiegel wrote the play when she was 21 after reading an article about the rise of DIY abortions in the US. She was also influenced by her own personal experience with a pregnancy scare that led to the more emotional core of the play.

“That feeling of intense aloneness in your own body,” says Spiegel, “that you are the only one that can do anything about this, and it is just in you. That stuck with me.” In an interview with Whatsonstage.com, Spiegel says, “I think the play is as much about abortion as it is about female friendship and loneliness. But it's not a solemn play, it has humor and darkness, the way life does. The title of the play is about safety, trying to find that safe place to swim ashore. My philosophy is that I'm trying to show the experience of abortion without shame.”

“Presenting a play like Dry Land is the core work of VTC,” says Weller, “To tell stories which lift up the voices of the marginalized. Stories that illuminate our world and encourage empathy. Stories that bring us together.”