Whenever there’s a group of six or more female characters onstage, they’re either making Guido Contini’s life impossible, or trying to be good wives for their barn-raising, lumberjack husbands, which is why Sarah DeLappe’s The Wolves, with its all-female soccer team, and nary a sight of a man trying to control them, passes the Bechdel test with flying colors. But the play is too smart to satisfy itself with just this achievement, rather it paints an honest look at the painful adolescent years where people have to figure out the people they want to become, while learning how to share the world with others going through the same process.
This is why through most of the play, the young women remain nameless, we can only identify them by the numbers on their t-shirt, or by their surface traits (the one who curses a lot, the one from out of town etc.) it’s as if DeLappe is showing us the process by which we come to earn our place in the world, the process where we stop being numbers and become people. And boy how they try! In the opening scene we see the young women discussing the Khmer Rouge while they stretch, we can see the self congratulatory manner in which some of them talk about how they care about “human interest” stories, the fear in others who don’t want to sound stupid, and the careless attitude of others who wonder why should they care about genocide that happened so long ago and so far away.
As directed by Lila Neugebauer, The Wolves becomes almost tribal in its structure, we see the girls get together match after match, and rarely pick up where they left off before, each of them completely aware that in their time outside of team duty, they have obligations to fulfill with their other tribes. This makes the play compelling from an anthropological level, as it also becomes a study on how we bond with outsiders to create our own communities. Since we see the girls warming up before the game, there is also an element akin to watching a ballet, Neugebauer perfectly discovering a balance between the cleverness of DeLappe’s words, and the overpowering beauty of the human body in motion.
The play discovers a perfect rhythm that is suddenly thrown off course by an unexpected twist, through which DeLappe thrusts adulthood onto them without a warning. It can feel like a cheat in a play that’s been so truthful, but in the discord it provokes it also invites us to become self aware while developing empathy. The Wolves is the rare kind of play that works on a purely emotional level, and will still haunt your thoughts days after you’ve seen it. What DeLappe and Neugebauer achieve is a work that makes one recall precious memories of their youth, without recurring to over-sentimentalization. To say the world is hungry for more plays like this, which tackle the pretty with the ugly in such a refreshing way, would be a true understatement.
