The Wolves is an ensemble play by Sarah DeLappe. I was excited to learn it would premiere at CapStage after it won an Obie and was shortlisted for the 2017 Pulitzer.
It’s the first play in their new season–#SearchingforAmerica.
What director Nancy Carlin gives us is indeed a piece of America.
The Wolves consists of us watching a series of warm-ups that the Wolves, a high school soccer team, do before games. It’s done in a naturalistic style.
Naturalism is related to realism, but is actually more realistic. In extreme naturalism, if people are supposed to be cooking, they would be cooking for real. If something were supposed to smell bad, the audience would smell it too. Naturalism is called “slice of life” theatre.
In this case, it means that sometimes a few characters have their backs to us–and that when these girls talk, we are experiencing what it sounds like to overhear many girls–overlapping conversations, half thoughts, and cuss words.
If this play were done in a realistic style, I probably wouldn’t like it, but the naturalism works.
We see what we see–nothing gets solved. No story gets fully told. There is no happy ending, because there isn’t an ending. The majority of the girls are juniors, so they’re not even reaching the end of senior year at the end of the play–we just get these practices–to see this tiny slice of their lives (and all the hints at more). There are colds and crushes, small deals and big ones.
The slices are familiar–what I heard as I was leaving was people remembering their own clubs in high school, their competitions, having to go to their daughters’ practices.
The play is a tight 90 minutes–and the actors are surely exhausted by the end–they’re basically playing soccer for a standard game time, after all.
This is the kind of play that really works in the intimacy of CapStage’s theatre–you’re always just a few feet away from the actors, so you’re beside them when they accidentally insult each other, when they apologize, when a fight almost breaks out over one girl leaving the other vulnerable to an older boy pressuring her for sex. We are right there with them.
We are the wolves.
