Teen team’s chat mesmerizes
Let’s say your mental image of high school girls already goes beyond the upward-inflecting, “like”-spouting, phone-dependent stuff of pernicious and tired stereotype. Maybe you already know that, among intimates, young women can be ribald, aggressive (that’s emphatically not passive-aggressive), tell-it-like-it-is — qualities we typically allow only their male counterparts.
Even if you’re so enlightened, Marin Theatre Company’s “The Wolves” paints young womanhood with the sort of breathtaking verisimilitude that can’t but humble you. Set exclusively during the warm-ups of an elite girls’ suburban soccer team, Sarah DeLappe’s play, whose West Coast premiere opened Tuesday, March 20, offers a forbidden window into an insular world.
Conversation is so unfiltered, so private, that you want to hold your breath for fear of disrupting it. Even the banal chitchat that opens the show mesmerizes. Subject matter bounces from menstruation to China’s censorship of the Internet to the Khmer Rouge, delivered in a flurry that’s as athletic and as dizzying as the girls’ myriad stretches and drills, which they execute as if they were synchronized swimmers.
The program refers to the nine players not by their names but by their jersey numbers, and one of the show’s foremost delights is to see those numbers emerge into fully fleshed-out individuals, and then re-emerge into still more complicated, more multifaceted beings. There’s awkward new girl #46 (Neiry Rojo), who has a way of creepily sidling up behind someone that Peter Lorre would envy but whose background turns out to be far more cosmopolitan than her more provincial teammates can fathom. There’s #25 (Sango Tajima), the team captain forced to be more of an adult than the rest as she takes on coaching duties their actual coach, hungover or asleep, at best phones in. There’s #2 (Isabel Langen), who, though more sheltered than her peers — “We don’t have a TV” — also evinces uncommon maturity. She can issue a genuine apology when she goofs up out of naivete, and she has the empathy to envision and lament someone else’s hardships.
The actors, directed by Morgan Green, own their characters with marrow-deep certainty. Langen gives #2 a tremulousness that’s equally capable of bursting into tears or cheering with a stentorian peal. Rarely has someone reveled in stoner argot as joyfully as Nicole Apostol Bruno’s #13, all “rad,” “dude” and “righteous.” As #8, Carolyn Faye Kramer walks through the world with such all-consuming shock and dismay that you pine for a spinoff “#8 Show” that’s just her saying “eww” and “you guys” all the time.
Wins and losses ostensibly move “The Wolves” forward — not just in the games but in injuries, in college scouts being interested in some players but not in others, no matter how hardworking or deserving they might be. But what strikes most about these plot points is how randomly doled out they seem — how any player, truly, could have been the one catapulted to further success or infelicitously benched. To see the play is to step back into high school and appreciate how much luck played a part in the teenage miracles or calamities we credited or blamed ourselves for.
But “The Wolves” also paints all of youth as a miracle. To see it is to remember a time when you could make mortifying mistakes and then immediately rebound, when you were open enough to blunder your way into ceaseless learning. It conjures a time when the ball’s rustle on the Astroturf, the thrill of speed and skill, the appreciation of your teammates’ athletic prowess could be enough, as it never quite is again later in life, to unite a group of disparate creed and class in common purpose: to shoot and score.