The Wolves by Sarah DeLappe, directed by Nell Bang-Jensen; streaming through December 20, 2020 at philadelphiatheatercompany.org.
The Philadelphia Theater Company’s production of The Wolves is welcome because it’s by a female playwright, staged by a woman, and its ten-person cast is all-female.
Sarah DeLappe’s story concerns a high school soccer team called the Wolves, revealing the interplay of adolescent girls of the time-span of one season. There’s little plot, yet there’s fascination in relatable conversations.
Originally rehearsed for a normal stage production here in March, the Covid pandemic necessitated radical re-thinking. Director Nell Bang-Jensen sent cameras to shoot each of the cast separately, on their own home turfs. Ticket-buyers see a screen with nine square boxes, like a Zoom meeting. Each square shows a team member doing warm-ups and chatting about a myriad of topics. The Zoom squares remain throughout the play.
The conversation sounds authentic, and is engaging. The visuals, though, are disappointing. Except for one brief interlude of one of the girls exercising, the production remains with those tiny boxes. The girls’ bodies are continually shown inside each box, rather than their faces. We can’t become familiar with their individual personalities and often it’s hard to discern who is speaking.
When dealing with interlapping dialogue, of course it’s hard to pick one face to fill the screen. But check out the telecasts of Verdi or Puccini operas where large casts sing all at once yet the directors select key moments for tight closeups of the soprano, even while all of her co-stars are singing too. And sometimes those opera video directors use a dissolve shot to show one face and the full ensemble simultaneously.
I was intrigued by the focus on a soccer team, and was hoping for a sports drama in the spirit of Maroons: The Anthracite Gridiron by Ray Saraceni which was presented by Iron Age Theatre in Norristown in 2011. Read about it here:. I’m especially a follower of women’s soccer and my son is a play-by-play broadcaster for the National Womens Soccer League. Alas, DeLappe’s script has little about soccer strategy, nor the progress of this team in its league. There isn’t much sports chatter beyond “Who are we playing today?” This is a drama about adolescence, not about athletics.
One delightful moment reveals the girls bitching about what city was picked for the playoff game. It was authentic and funny. Another high spot was the ironic juxtaposition of views about foreign cultures, reaffirming the inconsistency of teenagers. The girls studied, and became familiar with, the political history of Cambodia — yet they were ignorant about the Armenian heritage of one of their teammates.
The players are talented young performers: Michelle Tsai, Hanna Gaffney, Margaret Morgan, Donovan Lockett, Annika Cowles, Iraisa Ann Reilly, Emma Lenderman, Alison Ormsby, Tori Lewis, and veteran Leah Walton is the sole adult.
This version of The Wolves is a valiant low-budget attempt to persevere during the Covid crisis. When it comes to finding a way to bring theater to the public at this time, the current EgoPo production of Underground and the Wilma presentation of Heroes of the Fourth Turning are better examples.