by Linda Chin
THE WOLVES – Written by Sarah DeLappe. Directed by A. Nora Long; Scenic Design by Shelley Barish; Costume Design by Amanda Mujica; Sound Design by Elizabeth Cahill; Lighting Design by Karen Perlow. Cast: Lydia Barnett-Mulligan, Sarah Elizabeth Bedard, Simone Black, Olivia Z. Cote, Chelsea Evered, Grace Experience, Laura Latreille, Julia Lennon, Valerie Terranova, Jarielle Whitney. Presented by Lyric Stage Company ay 40 Clarendon St., Boston through February 3
2017 Pulitzer finalist Sarah DeLappe titled her impressive debut play The Wolves after the story’s subject, a soccer team of sixteen and seventeen-year old young women. Nine actors play the team members, identified to the audience and each other during the five weeks the action takes place by their jersey numbers. Not until the last scene do we hear a series of girls’ names, and connect that player #7 is Alex and #14 is Megan. Out of earshot of adults, the Wolves freely discuss a range of mature topics – abortion, pads vs. tampons, eating disorders, Mexican children locked in cages, and various adult figures – parents, coaches, and Cambodian genocide leader Pol Pot with a familiar vernacular (#11: “but it’s like he’s old”; #25: “he murdered thousands of people”). Not until close to the end of the play does the tenth and only adult cast member (Soccer mom) appear, and not surprisingly the group dynamic and flow of the conversation changes with her presence.
The young athletes vary in personality, but gratefully DeLappe does not lapse into stereotypes typical of stories about high schoolers. One way they can be distinguished is where they are on their coming-of-age trajectory. For several of the girls, we witness their moral and psychological growth over the course of the play, accelerated by a tragic event. We are also been touched by some of the characters’ backstories, their experiences with homelessness and emotional deprivation, making them teenagers who seem more adult than child-like. As spectators, audience members (predominantly adults during the performance I attended) get to be flies on the wall, privy to the frank and animated conversations and story-swapping adolescents engage in when have their guards down, reminiscent of the many I overheard when driving carpools.
The Wolves is written and performed as a true ensemble piece and is a tribute to the power of participating in women’s sports. No single team member, including the team captain, takes a dominant or lead role. Even when delivering a short monologue, no single actor monopolizes the conversation or grabs the spotlight; the others are listening. Often the dialogue involves overlapping threads, and combinations form, shift, and reform. No mean girls or FOMO in this group. As teammates they also communicate non-verbally. When they are stretching or doing their jumping jacks, they are a synchronized pack, when they are moving across the field and passing the ball they are interdependent parts of a single living, breathing organism. As individuals and as a team, The Wolves are fierce.
As a play and as a production, The Wolves is fierce. The Lyric’s U-shaped “stadium” seating offered great sight lines, a soccer net surrounding the artificial grass-covered stage kept errant passes from going into the audience and kept the young women on their own turf separate from intervening adults. In a post-performance talkback, Associate Artistic Director Courtney O’Connor, director A. Nora Long and several of the actors shared tidbits about the casting and rehearsal process. Young women represent a large proportion of the talent pool of actors, and this play was selected in part because it affords rich performance opportunities for this demographic. The casting call was held at an indoor soccer field, and attracted over 200 actors. Kudos to the team for casting a wide net and spot-on casting, and to the actors for managing the challenging staging/choreography and being so believable in their diction and characterizations.
A show of this nature requires a lot of discipline, stamina and focus, and some of the well-trained actors mentioned that had played in competitive sports. When Title IX became Federal law in 1972, schools and universities were required to give men and women equal opportunities to participate in sports. Theater companies are not required to produce plays written by men and women in equal number in a given season, nor are they required to hire female directors. Kudos to Lyric Stage for supporting the representation of women in theater, for producing a play by a female playwright, with a female director and an all-female cast. It’s not just women athletes, actors, arts makers or the women who make up the majority of theater audiences who benefit. We all do. For tickets and information, go to: https://www.lyricstage.com/
