dramaturgy
THE WOLVES
About The Playwright
Sarah DeLappe
Something She Said
"I wanted to see a portrait of teenage girls as human beings.
As complicated, nuanced, very idiosyncratic people who weren’t just girlfriends or sex objects or manic pixie dream girls but who were athletes and daughters and students and scholars and people who were trying actively to figure out who they were in this changing world around them."
At 23, Sarah DeLappe holed up in her apartment in Brooklyn and wrote The Wolves in only three weeks. Her inspiration came from an art installation entitled 'Here and Elsewhere' which depicted the political and personal struggles of artists living in the Middle East. The emotional and physical disconnect was obvious to DeLappe who found herself among a crowd on their iPhones sipping cold brews while discussing drone bombings. “I felt so far away from it all. America felt so far away from it all. Even a collection of fine art combed from a swath of different cultures, countries, conflicts, decades, installed on the Bowery, felt so far away.”
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On they way back home, The Wolves became a first draft in a note on DeLappe's phone. Drawing from her childhood background as a soccer player, it was decided that she wanted to tell the story and address issues using a girl's indoor soccer team as the template; because “What could be farther away than a bunch of sixteen-year-old girls warming up for an elite soccer game in a temperature-controlled air dome?” From school projects and the impending pressure of college to vacations and gossip, the team engages in conversation in a manner that resembles an orchestra. DeLappe's experience as a 'mediocre musician' can be seen in the way her dialogue resembles a musical score, with the nine voices of the girls coming through as if they were all individual instruments meant to be heard as one.
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The Wolves was first hit the field in New York City at The Duke on 42nd Street Theatre by The Playwright's Realm, under the direction of Lila Neugebauer.
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As the team navigates the nuances of life as teenage girls, they are preparing for a soccer match by doing agility, stretching, and passing the ball. Moving in unison with military precision, DeLappe reinforces the notion of unity through the movement the characters flow through as they converse. Thinking of war movies, DeLappe wanted to create a version of that male-driven trope that would be accessible to young girls, and saw soccer as the perfect translation. "Instead of this being about a troop of 19-year-old men who are in the trenches, it’s about a team of 17-year- old women who are on the field. So a lot of the fun of the play at least while I was writing it wasabout the archetypes of the “captain” and the “rebel” and the “innocent one” and the “new person” and seeing how they function as a unit but each have a specific role inside of that unit.”
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Conversations about genocides and tampons, feats of athleticism, and a sense of candidness that only a warm-up circle could achieve give DeLappe's The Wolves its unique edge and making it an engaging, compelling work of literature.
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