Soccer drama ''The Wolves' is a winner
By Patrick Z. McGavin
Just about everything in Sarah DeLappe’s remarkable play The Wolves is jolting and startling, pulsing with energy, verve and style. It’s not just the stylized language and shrewd interplay of imagery and sound that that is so hypnotic but the multiplicity of voices, of manner and being, that achieve a peculiar and entrancing rhythm.
The play, directed with imaginative fury and striking authority by Vanessa Stalling, is playing through March 18th at the Goodman Theatre. The play, broken up into a series of quick vignettes, is performed without intermission and runs 90 minutes. In other words, the structure rhymes with that of a typical high school soccer game.
DeLappe, a Brooklyn native, was just 26 when she wrote the play that was a finalist for the Pulitzer for drama last year. The title refers to the team name of a suburban under-17 women’s team. The action is set during the January indoor season of a club program.
The play’s alternate title could be Female Trouble. Like the John Waters’ film masterpiece, the work is alternately cool, transgressive and very smart. “The play is autobiographical though it doesn’t map out my actual experiences -- I never played high school soccer -- but the characters are an amalgamation of all the teenage girls I’ve known, loved, hated and admired,” DeLappe said in an interview published in the Goodman program.
The play is staged in the auxiliary Owen Theatre, a tighter and more intimate space. Collette Pollard’s evocative set design is a small wonder -- a rectangular turf practice layout. Protective netting yields a near authentic soccer experience. During the training and warm-up drills, the players hammer away at shots that ricochet off the nets, just inches away from the audience or front row of where fans would sit. Keith Parham’s blackout and strobe lighting effects also set the mood, the striated light suggesting a moment of pure sensation, or even ecstasy, crucial to the themes of build-up and anticipation.
Soccer is the dramatic entry point, but the play probes something harder and more difficult to articulate. DeLappe’s significant talent is the study of the interior of young female consciousness. Various men are talked about, a player’s boyfriend or the not terribly well-admired coach, but they exist in the margins and never materialize physically. What makes this work is a very bracing sensibility and point of view. This is the rare sports production that is not about damaged masculinity or failure. It’s about a kind of grace, achieved through physical abandon and technical perfection.
The Wolves is about process, showing the chasm between what these young women aspire toward and what is actually realistically available to them. At this time in their lives, they are smart, self-aware and hyper articulate, even on subjects that flummox them. These are children of the digital age, of porous emotional boundaries. Everything is open and nothing is denied. As the players are introduced before a game, with their symmetrical lines and shape, The Wolves begins like a musical. Slowly, distinctly, the individual personalities of the women emerge.
Their names are never revealed. They are identified by their jersey numbers, or their positions. The team captain, played by Isa Arciniegas, looks to establish order and rule of authority. The keeper (Angela Alise), competitive and tightly wound, must overcome her own anxiousness and sense of dread. The striker (Natalie Joyce) suffers no fools and is convinced of her superior abilities. The firecracker of the group is an Armenian émigré, beautifully played by Aurora Real De Asua. She combines a wonderful skill set with a deeper sense of wonder and possibility.
The most difficult for the rest to get a feel for is the exotic though contradictory Erin O’Shea. Willowy and skilled, she is a mass of contradictions, preternaturally talented, a kind of world traveler who is also a somewhat blank innocent, a reverse Daisy Miller from the novella by Henry James. The question the rest are trying to figure out is whether her naïveté is a calculated act or just an emotional buffer. (“She calls soccer football and positions spots,” one player complains.)
From the opening exchange, the camaraderie in the group dynamic is clear, but so is the need for one-upping and getting in the last, best word. DeLappe’s intuitive and naturalistic feel for dialogue is tremendous and deftly shows in the flow of bickering and asides. The overlapping dialogue is rich and sustained, and everything hangs in the air. The exchanges are bruising, observational and often hilarious. “My brother is the reason shrinks were invented.” “You do that,” another player says in response to her teammate admitting she watches documentaries. Still, the back and forth is never snide or off-putting. It’s also never personal.
Being girls on the cusp of adulthood, their mellifluous voices have a range, euphoric and tender and operate within a large range of influences and references, the words snapping quickly and ferociously from one end to the other. DeLappe casts her own wide net and the conversation shifts from the genocidal murderous campaign of the Khmer Rouge to the fancier and exotic realms of Harry Potter and J.R.R. Tolkien. The speech is heightened naturalism, though rendered in a spontaneous style so that everything feels captured, or overheard. It makes the material all the more involving.
The Wolves meditates on the specter of young female vulnerability or fear. One of the players suffers from an eating disorder, and the questions of sexual expression, objectification and body image permeate everything. It accounts for the defensiveness of several of the young women. Sometimes the wisecracks also hit a little too close, like the aggrieved reaction of one of the players to a thread about breast cancer. These young women have lived largely protected lives, like the privileged, geeky daughter of two therapists vividly played by Sarah Price. As they are exposed to harder adult truths and tragedy, the sense of pain and hurt is all the more shattering.
DeLappe never shirks from the innate competitiveness and social ambition of the players. In one of the best scenes, a coach from Texas A&M turns up at one of their games to get a look at the top prospects and the moment illustrates the tenseness and the rivalries and the internal machinations that shape the group. “It never gets easier,” one player says to a teammate suffering from a lack of confidence. “You just get better.”
In the play’s emotionally devastating final movement, the wit, style and natural buoyancy give way to darker intimations. The void the players experience brings home a deeper and elemental need to be part of something greater. The Wolves has a striking cumulative power, of feeling and emotion, tenderness and regret. By the time of its moving act of solidarity, it transcends the familiar toward the ineffable. The result is unforgettable.
This review is based on the evening performance March 3. The day before, I had a chance to talk with two of the actors. The Wolves is an interesting example of verisimilitude. What makes the work particularly convincing is that the actors looked and played the part. Almost all of the professional performers had a background playing soccer.
The original auditions were held at the Chicago Futsal Academy on Clark Street in the Andersonville neighborhood. Director Stalling, who is from Peoria, even had Goodman install strips of turf at the rehearsal space. Loyola University coach Katie Berkopec designed a rigorous training for preparation.
Angela Alise, who plays the keeper, grew up in Kansas City and played at the famed St. Teresa’s Academy, the national powerhouse program. She was part of a state championship team there in her senior year. Alise, interestingly, is a graduate of Loyola University.
“Katie came full circle, and she talked about how a team is very similar as far as building an ensemble,” Alise says. “The rhythm is built into that communication and how it is passed down the field. My work as an athlete helped me as an actor, especially the endurance. In the play, we are moving constantly.
“Vanessa’s staging feels like you are watching a soccer game in a stadium.”
On their own, the actors got serious about getting into soccer shape, playing together in Wicker Park and devising a set of drills and workouts to perfect their games. The production crew and actors also held a couple of sessions at the CIBC Fire Pitch in Lincoln Square.
“All the roles are really meaty,” Alise says. “It’s about a group of people working toward the one goal, and that is very exciting.”
Natalie Joyce grew up in Philadelphia, dividing her time between soccer and her love of theater and performance. Her character is the most flamboyant, proud, defiant and exceptionally self-confident. Her character also experiences a heartbreaking personal setback, a harbinger for the play’s last action.
Her work is exceptional, tremulous, exciting and marked by a fearlessness. “The play is this blend of authentic soccer and authentic theater,” Joyce said, “a perfect marriage that makes it understandable. We have this really cool introduction, these vignettes, where we don’t get to play games. The audience is right there, sitting and getting balls kicked in their faces.”
The Goodman is one of the most celebrated theater companies in the country. Only actor Sarah Price of the nine-player ensemble had previously appeared in a Goodman production. Even the fact that the actors are adults, at least a decade removed from high school, is never a distraction.
“It’s beyond a dream, the fact I am even working at the Goodman” Joyce said. “The script is so beautiful, and it really speaks to young women. And it is something you don’t get to see. I walked into the first audition, casting directors, all women coming in for these parts, and that is something that never happens.”
Ultimately what makes The Wolves work so well is the deeply personal connection between the material and the performers.
“When I found out it was produced, I knew this was something special that I wanted to be a part of,” Alise says. “This is my life.”
Author's note: This play contains harsh language, profanity and sexually explicit conversations that may not be suitable for some viewers.
The Goodman Theatre presents
The Wolves
By Sarah DeLappe
Directed by Vanessa Stalling
Set design by Collette Pollard
Costume design by Noël Huntzinger
Lighting design by Keith Parham
Original music and Sound design by Mikhail Fiksel
Casting by Erica Sartini-Combs, Adam Belcuore, CSA
Dramaturgy by Kristin Idaszak
Production stage manager/Nikki Blue
With: Angela Alise, Isa Arciniegas, Taylor Blim, Aurora Real De Asua, Meighan Gerachis, Natalie Joyce, Cydney Moody, Erin O’Shea, Sarah Price, Mary Tilden
For ticket information, call 312-443-3800 or go to https://www.goodmantheatre.org/thewolves
By Patrick Z. McGavin
Just about everything in Sarah DeLappe’s remarkable play The Wolves is jolting and startling, pulsing with energy, verve and style. It’s not just the stylized language and shrewd interplay of imagery and sound that that is so hypnotic but the multiplicity of voices, of manner and being, that achieve a peculiar and entrancing rhythm.
The play, directed with imaginative fury and striking authority by Vanessa Stalling, is playing through March 18th at the Goodman Theatre. The play, broken up into a series of quick vignettes, is performed without intermission and runs 90 minutes. In other words, the structure rhymes with that of a typical high school soccer game.
DeLappe, a Brooklyn native, was just 26 when she wrote the play that was a finalist for the Pulitzer for drama last year. The title refers to the team name of a suburban under-17 women’s team. The action is set during the January indoor season of a club program.
The play’s alternate title could be Female Trouble. Like the John Waters’ film masterpiece, the work is alternately cool, transgressive and very smart. “The play is autobiographical though it doesn’t map out my actual experiences -- I never played high school soccer -- but the characters are an amalgamation of all the teenage girls I’ve known, loved, hated and admired,” DeLappe said in an interview published in the Goodman program.
The play is staged in the auxiliary Owen Theatre, a tighter and more intimate space. Collette Pollard’s evocative set design is a small wonder -- a rectangular turf practice layout. Protective netting yields a near authentic soccer experience. During the training and warm-up drills, the players hammer away at shots that ricochet off the nets, just inches away from the audience or front row of where fans would sit. Keith Parham’s blackout and strobe lighting effects also set the mood, the striated light suggesting a moment of pure sensation, or even ecstasy, crucial to the themes of build-up and anticipation.
Soccer is the dramatic entry point, but the play probes something harder and more difficult to articulate. DeLappe’s significant talent is the study of the interior of young female consciousness. Various men are talked about, a player’s boyfriend or the not terribly well-admired coach, but they exist in the margins and never materialize physically. What makes this work is a very bracing sensibility and point of view. This is the rare sports production that is not about damaged masculinity or failure. It’s about a kind of grace, achieved through physical abandon and technical perfection.
The Wolves is about process, showing the chasm between what these young women aspire toward and what is actually realistically available to them. At this time in their lives, they are smart, self-aware and hyper articulate, even on subjects that flummox them. These are children of the digital age, of porous emotional boundaries. Everything is open and nothing is denied. As the players are introduced before a game, with their symmetrical lines and shape, The Wolves begins like a musical. Slowly, distinctly, the individual personalities of the women emerge.
Their names are never revealed. They are identified by their jersey numbers, or their positions. The team captain, played by Isa Arciniegas, looks to establish order and rule of authority. The keeper (Angela Alise), competitive and tightly wound, must overcome her own anxiousness and sense of dread. The striker (Natalie Joyce) suffers no fools and is convinced of her superior abilities. The firecracker of the group is an Armenian émigré, beautifully played by Aurora Real De Asua. She combines a wonderful skill set with a deeper sense of wonder and possibility.
The most difficult for the rest to get a feel for is the exotic though contradictory Erin O’Shea. Willowy and skilled, she is a mass of contradictions, preternaturally talented, a kind of world traveler who is also a somewhat blank innocent, a reverse Daisy Miller from the novella by Henry James. The question the rest are trying to figure out is whether her naïveté is a calculated act or just an emotional buffer. (“She calls soccer football and positions spots,” one player complains.)
From the opening exchange, the camaraderie in the group dynamic is clear, but so is the need for one-upping and getting in the last, best word. DeLappe’s intuitive and naturalistic feel for dialogue is tremendous and deftly shows in the flow of bickering and asides. The overlapping dialogue is rich and sustained, and everything hangs in the air. The exchanges are bruising, observational and often hilarious. “My brother is the reason shrinks were invented.” “You do that,” another player says in response to her teammate admitting she watches documentaries. Still, the back and forth is never snide or off-putting. It’s also never personal.
Being girls on the cusp of adulthood, their mellifluous voices have a range, euphoric and tender and operate within a large range of influences and references, the words snapping quickly and ferociously from one end to the other. DeLappe casts her own wide net and the conversation shifts from the genocidal murderous campaign of the Khmer Rouge to the fancier and exotic realms of Harry Potter and J.R.R. Tolkien. The speech is heightened naturalism, though rendered in a spontaneous style so that everything feels captured, or overheard. It makes the material all the more involving.
The Wolves meditates on the specter of young female vulnerability or fear. One of the players suffers from an eating disorder, and the questions of sexual expression, objectification and body image permeate everything. It accounts for the defensiveness of several of the young women. Sometimes the wisecracks also hit a little too close, like the aggrieved reaction of one of the players to a thread about breast cancer. These young women have lived largely protected lives, like the privileged, geeky daughter of two therapists vividly played by Sarah Price. As they are exposed to harder adult truths and tragedy, the sense of pain and hurt is all the more shattering.
DeLappe never shirks from the innate competitiveness and social ambition of the players. In one of the best scenes, a coach from Texas A&M turns up at one of their games to get a look at the top prospects and the moment illustrates the tenseness and the rivalries and the internal machinations that shape the group. “It never gets easier,” one player says to a teammate suffering from a lack of confidence. “You just get better.”
In the play’s emotionally devastating final movement, the wit, style and natural buoyancy give way to darker intimations. The void the players experience brings home a deeper and elemental need to be part of something greater. The Wolves has a striking cumulative power, of feeling and emotion, tenderness and regret. By the time of its moving act of solidarity, it transcends the familiar toward the ineffable. The result is unforgettable.
This review is based on the evening performance March 3. The day before, I had a chance to talk with two of the actors. The Wolves is an interesting example of verisimilitude. What makes the work particularly convincing is that the actors looked and played the part. Almost all of the professional performers had a background playing soccer.
The original auditions were held at the Chicago Futsal Academy on Clark Street in the Andersonville neighborhood. Director Stalling, who is from Peoria, even had Goodman install strips of turf at the rehearsal space. Loyola University coach Katie Berkopec designed a rigorous training for preparation.
Angela Alise, who plays the keeper, grew up in Kansas City and played at the famed St. Teresa’s Academy, the national powerhouse program. She was part of a state championship team there in her senior year. Alise, interestingly, is a graduate of Loyola University.
“Katie came full circle, and she talked about how a team is very similar as far as building an ensemble,” Alise says. “The rhythm is built into that communication and how it is passed down the field. My work as an athlete helped me as an actor, especially the endurance. In the play, we are moving constantly.
“Vanessa’s staging feels like you are watching a soccer game in a stadium.”
On their own, the actors got serious about getting into soccer shape, playing together in Wicker Park and devising a set of drills and workouts to perfect their games. The production crew and actors also held a couple of sessions at the CIBC Fire Pitch in Lincoln Square.
“All the roles are really meaty,” Alise says. “It’s about a group of people working toward the one goal, and that is very exciting.”
Natalie Joyce grew up in Philadelphia, dividing her time between soccer and her love of theater and performance. Her character is the most flamboyant, proud, defiant and exceptionally self-confident. Her character also experiences a heartbreaking personal setback, a harbinger for the play’s last action.
Her work is exceptional, tremulous, exciting and marked by a fearlessness. “The play is this blend of authentic soccer and authentic theater,” Joyce said, “a perfect marriage that makes it understandable. We have this really cool introduction, these vignettes, where we don’t get to play games. The audience is right there, sitting and getting balls kicked in their faces.”
The Goodman is one of the most celebrated theater companies in the country. Only actor Sarah Price of the nine-player ensemble had previously appeared in a Goodman production. Even the fact that the actors are adults, at least a decade removed from high school, is never a distraction.
“It’s beyond a dream, the fact I am even working at the Goodman” Joyce said. “The script is so beautiful, and it really speaks to young women. And it is something you don’t get to see. I walked into the first audition, casting directors, all women coming in for these parts, and that is something that never happens.”
Ultimately what makes The Wolves work so well is the deeply personal connection between the material and the performers.
“When I found out it was produced, I knew this was something special that I wanted to be a part of,” Alise says. “This is my life.”
Author's note: This play contains harsh language, profanity and sexually explicit conversations that may not be suitable for some viewers.
The Goodman Theatre presents
The Wolves
By Sarah DeLappe
Directed by Vanessa Stalling
Set design by Collette Pollard
Costume design by Noël Huntzinger
Lighting design by Keith Parham
Original music and Sound design by Mikhail Fiksel
Casting by Erica Sartini-Combs, Adam Belcuore, CSA
Dramaturgy by Kristin Idaszak
Production stage manager/Nikki Blue
With: Angela Alise, Isa Arciniegas, Taylor Blim, Aurora Real De Asua, Meighan Gerachis, Natalie Joyce, Cydney Moody, Erin O’Shea, Sarah Price, Mary Tilden
For ticket information, call 312-443-3800 or go to https://www.goodmantheatre.org/thewolves