Believe me, I will try to restrain myself, but I write this review in a state of utter disgust. I have had series tickets to Seattle Public Theater for many years, and have attended several individual plays at this theater for years before that, going back to the days when it was called "The Bathhouse Theater". There have been many good plays, and a few excellent plays, even within the last couple of years. But this 2018-2019 season has been uniformly awful, and the current production of "Dry Land" is probably the worst play I have seen in my 46 years of Seattle theater-going, which has included at least a dozen different theaters around the city. I have noticed that attendance at SPT has been dropping as the season progresses, so perhaps someone will take note and stop trying to pick "socially relevant" plays that are not entertaining, not enriching, not deep -- just PC and preachy, and often self-consciously avant-garde. But it will be too late for me. I have one more ticket left in this series and I doubt I will even bother to attend. Sooooo many better ways to spend an evening.
"Dry Land" starts right off with the gratuitous full nudity of several young women (supposed to be 17 & 18 year olds) as they change into their swimsuits and horse around. At other points in the show we are also treated to this nudity. (I hope my review does not inspire an increase in pedophile attendance.) The language of these young women is explicit and vulgar. It has been a long time since my high school days, true, but I find it hard to believe this level of profanity and crudeness occurs among female high school athletes. In case someone reading this still wants to see the play, I won't reveal the one plot "development" of the story, despite it being pretty obvious from scene one. However, I will say that the play tries to prove its modernity and social relevancy by a series of single sentence, throw-away lines throughout, covering such issues as racism, anorexia, child molestation, lesbianism, teen suicide, teen drinking and drugs, teen promiscuity, kinky sex, S & M, oral sex, abortion pills ... and more. Again, these issues are not explored, just thrown in randomly. Really, nothing is explored. Some stuff just happens to unlikeable characters. The playwright was wise not to include an intermission or no one would see the last half.
So "Dry Land" is just the worst play in a series of bad plays. Let me move on to the theater itself. Since the last play, SPT has changed both the women's bathroom on one side of the lobby, and the men's bathroom on the other side of the lobby, to "gender neutral", although the formerly-men's restroom says, helpfully, "This one has urinals." Neither of these bathrooms are single occupant. Don't know about the other, but the formerly-women's has 4 or 5 stalls and a door to the outside. The door is locked, but still ... as one of the women I go with pointed out, women need to judge the safety of a restroom upon entering. Finding a man in the restroom does not signal "safe". One of the attendants said "Oh, we expect that our long-time customers will go to the restroom they have always used." Oh, really? And don't you expect any new customers? I suspect the long-time customers will do their best to avoid the bathrooms, or just decide SPT is no longer worth attending, as the other people in my group and I have. read more