Dramaturgy
I was the dramaturg for the Kansas City premiere of Ruby Rae Spiegel’s DRY LAND with the Fishtank Theatre. I drew on my background in reproductive health education, policy, and research, to help the creative team understand the physical and legal struggles these characters were experiencing, providing a breakdown of themes, abortion laws and policies, and the mechanics of medical abortion. I helped the production partner with Planned Parenthood and organized a talkback with the Kansas Planned Parenthood Lobbyist, Elise Higgins. In addition I organized a fundraiser where local artisans donated their work to be sold at the performances, with the profits going to Planned Parenthood.
My Dramaturg’s Note
Abortion is necessary healthcare. And yet, for so many, both in the U.S. and around the world, that healthcare is impeded, denied, and near impossible to access safely.
The Guttmacher Institute states “Between 2010 and 2016, states enacted 338 new abortion restrictions, which account for nearly 30% of the 1,142 abortion restrictions enacted by states since the 1973 Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade.” The majority of these were enacted in red states, like Florida, where Dry Land is set. Florida shares an achingly similar political terrain to Kansas and Missouri, red states blood-stained by those who resist. After all, Dr. Tiller, one of the few late term abortion providers in the country before he was shot own by an Anti-Abortion Rights terrorist outside his own clinic, practiced in Wichita, KS, just a few hours drive southwest of where we sit tonight.
We are staging Dry Land in what is currently Trump’s Land. But, the systematic degradation of reproductive rights to make Roe the law of the land in name only has been going on long before 45 decided to move from reality TV to the Whitehouse. That is why the Fishtank is ding this play, in this moment. Our art must speak to these uncomfortable, visceral, and tender truths.
This is not an easy play to watch; then again, misogyny is not an easy thing to survive. So watch, survive, and then—resist.
