“smart passing smart listening smart eyes”

Near the end of The Wolves, the character Soccer Mom instructs the players to win their upcoming game with “smart passing smart listening smart eyes,” a line indicative of Sarah DeLappe’s brilliant and gutting use of language. Her use of punctuation (or lack thereof), word choice, verbal ticks, interrupted thoughts, and aborted sentences shape the poetry of this play, a piece at once conversational and transcendent. The characters populating this world wrestle with expression–cutting each other inadvertently, never quite saying what they mean. DeLappe’s linguistic restraint reflects theatrical naturalism and also the challenges of people trying relating to one another. Can we ever actually say what we mean? Should we? What do we miss when we withhold our truths from one another, or ask too much of someone else? The music of DeLappe’s language, grounded by the bass drum of the piece’s physicality, highlights the way individuals become ensembles. 

In the same way that musicals are total works of art, activating emotions through a sensorial experience in which the body becomes instrument, movement, character, and expression, this high-concept play layers realism-style acting with athleticism and attention to the body’s capacity for exertion, pain, and the sublime. This piece fashions the basic, everyday life challenges of adolescence into music, the pulse of muscles stretching, the rhythm of soccer balls moving through space, the harmony and discord of teammates striving toward something bigger than themselves. 

I came to this piece through music and language, but it should also be noted that we spent a ton of time playing soccer. Before we even cast the show, I met with the coach of the Linfield Women’s Soccer Team, who told me that practices typically begin with players casually kicking around the ball, decompressing from their day, sharing whatever’s on their mind at the moment. This informal start to training sometimes feels like the most important part of their time together, and this is the moment of The Wolves. In this play, we are on the cusp–the breath before the game, before the goal, before becoming what we’re going to become. 

Whatever our age, we’re all still becoming. Whatever our age, we all need each other, need to learn how to care for and about each other, need to confront our shortcomings and push ourselves to places that are uncomfortable in order to understand who we are and want to be. The music of our lives, the poetry of our connections, enables us to view our stumbles as syncopations in a symphony we create together.  

And, whatever our age, we all need support–we all need someone to bring us orange slices when we’re getting ready for something important. 

-Lindsey Mantoan, Director