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Theatre in Review: The Wolves (The Playwrights Realm/The Duke on 42nd Street)

Photo: Daniel J. Vasquez

The Wolves is the name of a girls' high school soccer team, and Sarah DeLappe has assigned herself quite a test in portraying its members: The action of the play unfolds entirely during a series of warmup sessions on an indoor field. At first, it seems that The Wolves will consist of nothing but amusing crosstalk and chatter; gradually, over the course of 90 minutes, we learn a great deal about each player, the sport that binds them, and, most of all, the complicated and altogether uneasy place occupied by adolescent females in contemporary society.

The play kicks off on a lively, funny note with several simultaneous conversations that juxtapose comments like "I'm pretty sure they have Twitter in China" and "We definitely should not take our liberties for granted" with "Suck my tampon, bitches!" In just a few highly economical pages of dialogue, DeLappe establishes her subjects as smart, sassy, and wised-up, yet also more than a little naïve about the wider world. The dialogue is funny and lively, with a delightful screwball spin. One of the girls, #8 (they are only identified by their team numbers), mistakes her teammate, #14, for a Mexican immigrant. "Yeah. I'm, uh, I'm Armenian," #14 says by way of correcting her. "Then why are you always going to Mexico with your family?" asks #8. "Um, for vacation?" #14 replies.

DeLappe is one of a new wave of playwrights -- among them Annie Baker and Anne Washburn -- who arrive at drama through the side door, avoiding conventional plotlines and flat-out confrontations, preferring to let key information slip out during the course of seemingly trivial conversations. As The Wolves unfolds, we see the characters deal with performance anxiety, concussions, broken limbs, absent parents, hookups, and the emergency contraceptive Plan B. Soccer is more than a pastime to most of them -- several of them see it as a way into a top college, not to mention the Olympic Development Program -- and it also provides their lives with a stabilizing force. And when catastrophe strikes, touching each of their lives, we see how it offers them a form of comfort and way of mourning.

The director, Lila Neugebauer, has a way with large casts -- her 2014 staging of The Wayside Motor Inn, at Signature Theatre, won a Drama Desk Award for outstanding ensemble -- and The Wolves can easily be enjoyed for the seamless interaction of nine actresses, most of them convincingly playing characters several years younger than their true ages. Particularly notable are Brenna Coates as #7, arguably the group's toughest cookie, with a fondness for bad decisions when boys are involved; Samia Finnerty as #14, who serves as #7's wingwoman and lives to regret it; Tedra Millan as #46, who lives in a yurt and is home-schooled by her mother, a travel writer -- experiences that give her a perspective that often confounds the others; Midori Francis as #8, who memorably announces, "I don't get what the big deal is about self-knowledge;" Lizzy Jutila as #00, the goalie, who almost never speaks and suffers from debilitating anxiety; and Lauren Patten as #25, the team's rather steely captain. But there are also solid contributions from Jenna Dioguardi, Sarah Mezzanotte, and Susannah Perkins. The cast's most familiar face, Mia Barron, as the mother of one of the girls, makes a devastating eleventh-hour appearance that leaves the room in stunned silence.

The production benefits from a simple, yet evocative, design; the set designer, Laura Jellinek, places the audiences on two sides of an Astroturf deck, and the lighting designer, Lap Chi Chu, supplies rows of PAR 38 units that simulate the look of stadium lighting. Ásta Bennie Hotsetter's uniforms look authentic, and the sound design, by Beth Lake and Stowe Nelson, blends pop tunes like Miley Cyrus' "Do My Thang" and Sia's "Cheap Thrills" with the sounds of soccer games in progress.

In a funny way -- I'm showing my age here -- The Wolves reminded me a bit of Vanities, the Off Broadway blockbuster of the 1970s about a trio of Texas cheerleaders down through the years. Like The Wolves, it spins a story out of a series of seemingly trivial remarks. But the playwright, Jack Heifner, mostly satirizes his characters' blinkered upbringings, engineering a melodramatic third-act confrontation that contradicts the style of the first two acts. DeLappe renders the team members perceptively and with sympathy; years from now, if someone wants to know what it was like to be a middle-class teenage girl in the second decade of the 21st century, The Wolves will serve as a reliable guide. -- David Barbour


(12 September 2016)

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