The Wolves
By Sarah DeLappe
MU Theatre, Spring 2023
Amidst pre-game stretching and passing drills, the girls on The Wolves navigate big questions and tests of great endurance. In this coming of age story, nine high school teammates in suburban America learn important lessons in love, loss, and identity, while discovering what it means to be a team on and off the indoor soccer field.
During rehearsals for The Wolves, the cast and production team benefited from a number of immersive and embodied experiences. One exciting partnership we made was with the MU Women's Soccer Team.
Another unique aspect of this rehearsal process was the addition of body mapping methodology to help actors tune in to their own instruments, as well as the inner lives of their characters. This helped with character work, movement choices, vocalizations of access needs, and de-roling activities.
Director's Note
Rifling through the dressers in my childhood bedroom during the winter holidays, I found wrinkled in the back of a dusty drawer, my bright blue indoor soccer t-shirt-uniform. Across the front it reads “Psycho Strikers.” In hindsight a pathologizing name, but I think it was an attempt to capture a little bit of what it felt like to be a teenage girl on the soccer field. For me it felt visceral, chaotic, kinetic, uninhibited, powerful. Now I never played striker, I hung out on defense most of the time, but apparently, I was a bit of a disruptor on the field as evidenced by the back of the shirt which displays the number 19 and the word “Trouble” where my last name should be. I like to imagine I really was trouble on that indoor field (I was a better teammate than a player), but more importantly, I like to think that my participation in the team troubled the notion of what I could do and be as a young woman. I didn’t think about it like that back then, I was just playing the game I loved.
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The characters of The Wolves, and the cast members who embody them, trouble the societal and political expectations that are put on the minds and bodies of teenagers. In the play, this team of women learn together, gossip together, and explore relationships to their bodies together. They stretch, bleed, hunger, ache, and overcome many challenges in these six weeks of their season. The Wolves unapologetically zooms in on the ways these teammates warm up their bodies, move them, experience them, and injure them. Playwright Sarah DeLappe has done something revolutionary here in elevating the stories of ordinary teenage troublemakers, but also in facilitating the real-life opportunity for our cast of women and femme folks to experience their physical and emotional bodies in this way, center stage, on our own little patch of turf.