By Michael Buzzelli
The only victory that counts is the one over yourself.” — Lionel Messi, Argentine footballer [Soccer Player]
Imagine being invisible or watching the world in a super-secret spy drone that can zero in on a high school girls’ soccer team and listen in on them. In Sarah DeLappe’s “The Wolves” the audience is eavesdropping on these girls, the Wolves.
The girls curse and bully each other. They misunderstand one another. They hate and love each other. Most importantly, they come together when it really counts.
It takes a minute to get into the play, but once you’re in, you’re hooked. The play is thoroughly engaging.
The team captain, Twenty-Five (Reese Fontanesi), tries to rally her teammates together from one match to the next. While the girls come together on the field, they are contentious off the field.
The girls are only known by their jerseys, but their personalities emerge.
Seven (Ayden Fichte) and Fourteen (Vivian McGregor) are besties…until they aren’t. The goalie, Zero Zero (Aftyn Tomaceski) throws up before every game. Eleven (Lily Gough) is obsessed the genocidal Pol Pot. Two (Hazel McGregor) is forced to wear a dorky looking helmet because of her last concussion. Forty-Six (Adrien-Sophia Curry) has a travel writer mom who has taken her all over the world. Eight (Francesca Pietroforte) wants her team to get along. Thirteen (Ella Marks) may or may not be high as a kite.
Secrets are revealed over a rousing game of Spider Web (“Zip, Zap, Zop” with a soccer ball).
DeLappe’s dialogue is naturalistic. Characters talk at the same time. Sentences overlap like an Altman film. Not everyone is telling the truth. Each girl is unique and interesting without being a stereotype. DeLappe made the audience care about characters without revealing their names. All wearing the same vibrant purple uniforms (by Costume Designer Sylvia Sims-Linkish, even if they were a little too clean to be believable).
Side Note: There is a lot of talk about characters we never see, and it can be a bit distracting, but “The Wolves” demands your full attention.
Every single girl in the show is fantastic. The casting is superb.
Fontanesi plays the team captain with such determination and drive. There’s a scene before a championship game where she’s trying so hard to rev her players up that her face goes red.
Marks is hilarious in the final scene where she shows up high (or possibly sleep-deprived if you believe her story).
Meighan Lloyd Harding shows up in the final scene playing a player’s mom. While her time on the field (the stage) is brief, it is a riveting, dynamic performance.
Director Britt Dorazio does a marvelous job unearthing all the rawness of the actors and tees them up for a successful run.
Scenic Designer Nina Stumpf turns the center stage into a soccer pitch, replete with several soccer balls, orange cones and such.
There’s some excellent work by Sound Designer Adam Davy.
My advice to the members of the audience who thought “Dracula: Comedy of Terrors” was too vulgar and too gay: Seek enlightenment. Not every show is for insecure straight white people.
There is a visceral emotional charge to every scene, but it slowly ramps up to a shocking finale. If you are a person who needs “Trigger Warnings,” please note the content advisory in the program before the show. Be a big brave girl, and go out and see it.
“The Wolves” is a tragic, funny, utterly engrossing work. Get some balls and go see it.
-MB
“The Wolves” runs until November 22 at Little Lake Theatre, 500 Lakeside Drive, Canonsburg, PA 15317. For more information and tickets, click here.
