PLAY LIKE A GIRL
Productions such as The Wolves provide a new platform for teenage girls’ stories,
Late last month, over 20 million Americans binged nine hours of television called “dramatic, disturbing TV” by New York Magazine, and “wrenching” and “riveting” by the New York Times.
It won’t win any Emmys, but the hearings featuring Dr. Christine Blasey Ford and Judge Brett Kavanaugh were widely compared to the best prestige drama miniseries; this one revolved around highstakes politics, words like “boof,” “ralph” and “Squi,” and a woman’s story about a traumatic event that happened when she was a teenager in high school.
It may not have changed circumstances for Kavanaugh, but the way Blasey Ford’s story enraptured audiences is another circumstance that suggests the United States (and Canada) are ready to tell, and hear, stories of teenage girldom that reveal the light and dark realities they live with.
Howland and Crow’s Theatre’s production of The Wolves, which focuses on nine players of an elite girls’ soccer team over several weekly pre-game warm-ups, opened shortly after the Kavanaugh hearings. Director Courtney Ch’ng Lancaster remembers speaking at a donor event, with Christine Blasey Ford reverberating through her mind.
“I told them, in a slightly verklempt voice, that this is your opportunity to retrain your ears to hear voices that we are all collectively, myself included, trained to miss,” she said.
The Wolves, a Pulitzer Prize finalist by Sarah DeLappe, closes this weekend after rave reviews. It has a cast of young women and non-binary actors who discuss international politics, periods, boyfriends and girlfriends, childhoods, families, death — some of which may have major repercussions on their future — all while completing taxing physical warm-ups.
“At first I thought the audience would be teenagers. But on the second read and third read I realized, oh no, the audience is everybody else. The teenagers are fine,” said Lancaster.
So was her cast, who channelled world events into the process of rehearsing the play.
“What are we going to do? We have to work and we’ll work through it as we work through our own drama,” said actor Amaka Umeh, who plays the goalie.
The Wolves was one of the most talked about plays in New York City in recent years and that buzz followed it into its Toronto debut.
Another critically acclaimed play that recently debuted south of the border, Clare Barron’s Dance Nation, looks at a dance class of 13-year-olds. Two more American plays about the female high school experience have or are coming to Toronto. Ruby Rae Spiegel’s Dry Land was produced last month by Cue6 Theatre, about two swim teammates navigating sports pressures, body image and an unwanted pregnancy.
Jocelyn Bioh’s School Girls; Or, the African Mean Girls Play, a riff on the Tina Fey movie comedy set at a high school beauty pageant in Ghana, opens next March with Obsidian Theatre and Night- wood Theatre.
This refocusing on teen girls’ stories onstage doesn’t mean that theatre has been barren of these issues, only that there’s a vastly different tone in breaking them down. The characters in The Wolves, Dry Land and School Girls, written by women, are not defined by predicaments in their current or past lives, and they don’t feel the need to bare them in detail to educate an audience.
“Despite the fact that there is a major issue in the play, part of what I love about it is it’s not necessarily an ‘issue play.’ It’s not the after-school special. They talk about it the way that we talk about it and that makes it more heartbreaking,” said Jill Harper, director of Cue6’s production of Dry Land, which among other things includes a graphic depiction of an abortion in a high school locker room.
Though audiences had strong reactions to the play’s depiction of abortion, Harper said that Spiegel cleverly sandwiches it between two more easygoing scenes. “We get so many opportunities to see them as regular teen girls and then you’re shown this thing. And they’re still regular teenage girls.”
That took on special significance during Premier Doug Ford’s campaign for leadership of the Conservative party, when he suggested mandating parental permission for abortions for minors — the same type of regulation that drives Amy in Dry Land to find a brutal alternative. “This is what that looks like everyone, please look at it,” Harper said.
Coming in 2019, Bioh’s School Girls looks at another teen girl experience in Ghana, one that includes the same insecurities and social stresses with the added complication of colonialism and American cultural influence. Director Nina Lee Aquino grew up in a similar environment in the Philippines, which shares a strong beauty pageant culture that the play explores, and understands firsthand how that warps one’s self image in adolescence.
“North America means the world, it means the universe,” said Aquino, who herself has a daughter nearing teenagehood. “Especially BIPOC teens (an acronym that means Black, Indigenous and people of colour), they’re the most vulnerable right now. In terms of representations in the media, there aren’t a lot of role models out there. There aren’t enough of us. Am I glad that this play is coming out at such a crucial time? Absolutely.” Not every woman I know had the time or energy to watch all or any of the Kavanaugh hearings, especially with the looming inevitability of his acceptance into the Supreme Court. But plays like The Wolves, Dry Land, School Girls and more to come may provide a safer platform to hear these stories and feel heard.
“There’s that sense of potential in a teenage girl where they haven’t quite figured themselves out yet. There’s the potential for them and there’s the potential for us to shift our knee jerk reactions and assumptions about what strong is,” Lancaster said. “Wouldn’t it be cool if our automatic assumptions of strength were the Wolves?”
Carly Maga is a Toronto-based theatre critic and a freelance contributor for the Star. She alternates the Wednesday Matinée column with Karen Fricker. Follow her on Twitter: @RadioMaga