Necessary Wolves

This is not a review of The Wolves, though if I were writing such a review, I’d urge you all to snap up the last few remaining tickets for the production of Sarah DeLappe’s play, directed by Courtney Ch’ng Lancaster, co-produced by the Howland Company and Crow’s, and still on until this Saturday at the Streetcar Crowsnest. I’m friends with too many people associated with the production, and I have too many ties to the Howland Company, to have the distance required for a proper critical assessment. So this is not that. This is a set of reflections triggered by seeing the show two weeks ago, and it’s one of three blog posts I’ll be writing over the next few days, all triggered by things I ‘ve seen and discussions I’ve had in Toronto theatres this month. (It’s also a bit of a relaunch of this blog, where it’s been awfully silent of late, and won’t be for the next little while.)

Oh, there will be spoilers. Because this is not a review, and I don’t know how to write about a thing while ignoring important parts of the thing. Stop reading now if you haven’t seen the show and you think theatre works like a mystery novel or an M. Night Shyamalan film that you can’t enjoy once you know the ending, rather than like a work of art that you can enjoy for many reasons other than SURPRISE! (and where in fact knowing what to expect is helpful precisely because you’ll then understand how those expectations were met or subverted).

(Photo: Dahlia Katz)

I. Form

Almost all the reviews I’ve read (I think I’ve read them all) talk about the play and its rapid-fire dialogue, the author’s evident interest in idiomatic accuracy, and so on. One way of describing the often overlapping, intersecting conversations and ramblings of DeLappe’s text would be hyperrealism; another, hyperstylized representation. There were moments that reminded me of Caryl Churchill. That’s what the text does. But how about its performance? All the reviews mention that the actors go through warm-up routines and pre-game stretches while delivering those lines. But nowhere could I find any reflection on how the physical exercises – and the physical challenge of speaking dialogue like that, not to mention the challenge of listening to dialogue like that – worked as theatre, and as a theatrical experience. There is the play, and then there’s the show: from reading about the latter, I learned a lot about the former, and a little about individual performances, but virtually nothing about this production of The Wolves as an evening at the theatre – as an engagement with theatrical form.

Thinking back to my own experience watching the show two weeks ago, this strikes me as a really odd omission. To me, what was most remarkable about that experience was not that I got to watch a group of female teenagers hanging out for ninety minutes without talking very much about boys. (Yes, I understand the politics of representation. I agree that it’s important and even exciting that the play avoids tired clichés about how girls talk and what they talk about. But I don’t think that’s the most noteworthy thing about The Wolves, let alone this performance of it.) Rather, it was that I got to watch a group of actors – all either female or non-binary – be extraordinarily present physically, irreducibly present, in the moment, as bodies: bodies that spoke and bodies that moved, with total commitment to specific situations, and with almost no apparent attention to “storytelling.” What’s so refreshing about DeLappe’s play is that it’s not about a story: there are plotlines, sure (the team wins and loses, the team might make it to Nationals, two friends have a falling out, someone dies), but those plotlines are not what the play is about — in fact, I suspect it would work just as well without most of them. It’s about moments. Situations. Presents. Or at least that’s how this production of the play worked, for this viewer. (It’s also how Jareth Li’s set works: a rectangle of Astroturf, more a space than a place; between scenes it’s often bisected by sharp lines of light that again create spaces for bodies, alluding to a real place – a soccer field and its lines – but not actually representing it. Actors run in or along those lines, caught in their light, briefly isolated, then released by darkness.)

The moment of greatest reduction to immediate presence, which for me crystalized the theatrical principle of the entire show, was Amaka Umeh’s stunning, increasingly frenetic workout before the final scene – also the last moment of speechlessness for her character (“#00”), who for the first time in the play finds her voice in that last scene. It’s a long bit, this. We sit and watch her exhaust herself. It’s too intense: something seems to have gone wrong, or something’s going wrong, for the character. But there’s not just a character there, on stage, in front of us: there’s also an actor. An actor whose actual, personal presence cannot be ignored. Whose physical exertion is too extreme, too in our faces, too real to read simply as a character’s. It’s a moment in which realism collapses into reality, where suddenly there’s no gap between pretend and do, between actor and character, between story and event: this is just a young person, moving.

The show plays incessantly with growing and shrinking that gap. Many of the reactions I’ve seen, in reviews but even more on Twitter, have been of the “that’s exactly what it’s like” variety – which, again, is great: it’s obviously a good thing if young women see themselves, or their teenage selves, reflected on stage. But I don’t think that response does the show justice. It doesn’t reflect what it does, as theatre. If nothing else, the performers we watch obviously aren’t teenagers: they are adults playing young girls. And the show is almost designed to draw attention to the people doing the playing as much as to the characters they portray. (Kelly Nestruck wondered “what it would be like seeing the show with actual teenage bodies on stage, as in Erin Brubacher and Cara Spooner’s production of Jordan Tannahill’s Concord Floral” – I do too, but I’m not sure I would find such a production as interesting as this one.) DeLappe’s dialogue works like that as well: yes, it’s authentic, painfully so at moment, hilariously so at others, just impressively so most of the time. Or at least it rang authentic to my middle-aged ears, which may or may not be the same. But it’s also extremely stylized – that’s why it reminded me of Caryl Churchill.

The stylization has a point, I assume. It should stand in the way of us kicking back and pretending that we’re watching a girls’ soccer team’s locker room talk. At the very least, it should alert us that this isn’t just authentically transcribed speech, that this speech that is “exactly” like real life is at the same time deliberately literary, or dramatic, or theatrical – in any case, nothing like real life. Structured. Patterned. Layered. Artfully arranged. And to the extent that it is all of those things, the actors speaking those lines also remain visible as themselves: as performers tasked with the challenge of delivering parallel conversations, hanging on to their own syntactic through-lines against all odds; as highly trained, educated people in their twenties, reproducing an idiom well removed from their own; as artists making art about real teenage girls. And what makes this compelling theatre (rather than an exercise more easily accomplished on screen, with actual teenagers) is that it isn’t self-representation, at least not straightforwardly: it’s not teenagers being themselves. The gap between performer and performed is always there, and powerfully there – in the bodies, in the voices, in the text.

Here’s the thing, though, about that gap. It’s a space that allows for reflection, and perhaps even for argument. It’s where, for me, the politics of representation have a place. It’s where thoughts like these had time and space to form, for me: that in our theatre, teenagers are usually played by actors years out of school, while young people, especially young women, are often played by actors with a decade or more of professional experience; that plays written by young people, if they are ever seen at all on professional stages, are rarely produced, directed, performed by young people; that actors in their twenties performing these roles also, necessarily, perhaps without meaning to, draw attention to the fact that these parts they play are the kinds of parts they likely wouldn’t have been cast in ten years before – there’s a strange kind of nostalgia, or even melancholy to that; and finally, that in allowing us to see the young performers playing these girls, in making them so physically present, in relying so much on their actorly virtuosity in their treatment of the text, the show also makes a point not about teenagers, but about actors – young, female, non-binary, diverse actors, their visibility, their skill, and their all-too-frequent absence. As I was watching Amaka Umeh work out, but at moments throughout the evening, what I saw, more than anything, was actors we don’t see enough on our main stages (it really matters that this show is not being presented in the studio theatre at the Crowsnest!): and I saw them precisely because they didn’t, they couldn’t, fully disappear into their characters. (I literally mean “couldn’t”: you can’t kick a ball around on stage as a character. You can say that’s what you’re doing, you may even think it, but if that ball goes into the audience, it’s the actor who mistimed the kick, not the character. The physical base condition of this show pretty much ensures that the actors never vanish from sight.)

That’s a political point, but it’s one made through formal choices. It’s a point that could not have been made, in this way, anywhere but in a theatre. And it turned the show into something more than a play about young girls and their voices: it became a show about adults, most of them women, their voices and bodies, on stage.

II. Age

I don’t really know what DeLappe’s play is about, exactly. I don’t mean on the level of “story” (or whatever term one might want to use) – that’s obvious enough. It’s about a girls’ soccer team. Which isn’t saying much, is it? At that level, Hamlet is a play about a Danish prince. Big whoop. Like other critics, I don’t quite buy DeLappe’s own idea, that it’s somehow about America (or something). But authors are, of course, routinely wrong about what makes their work interesting. So: I don’t know, but I have a sense of one thing it’s kind of about – and unlike many critics, that sense is why I found the turn the play takes towards the end both crucial and revelatory. Here’s your spoiler: one of the team members dies. (In a neat dramaturgical trick, we don’t find out who it is until all the other players have slowly, one by one, trickled in: it’s pretty much a process of elimination. In both senses of the word. We get to experience relief every time another player shows up, and then perhaps guilt at feeling relief that it’s not that one. And then a moment of hope that it isn’t someone we’ve met. And then a kind of resigned sadness when we’re sure that it is. “We” in this case being me.) And for the first time in the show, we hear an adult voice – and see an actor playing someone her own age.

Some reviewers, in Toronto and in New York, found this twist unnecessarily plotty, or dramatic, or tragic, or whatever. A play that didn’t really have a story suddenly seemed to want one. But that’s not how it read to me. What I saw was one more situation, a more extreme one than previous setups, but not categorically different in structure: an event has taken place, and we watch young people respond to it. The turn is not from non-plot to plot, but from one mode of representation to another. For much of the play, we see a diverse but also coherent group of characters responding to life from more or less the same level of life experience. Most of us in the audience are older than those characters, and can observe them in their difference from us (and perhaps remember being like that, once). In that final scene, the dramaturgical logic shifts: we now are given two different kinds of responses by two different kinds of people, teenagers on the one hand, an adult on the other – the new angle seems to invite a comparative perspective and one, given the makeup of most theatre audiences, in which “we” suddenly have something like an onstage representative. We’re suddenly implicated in our very difference from those kids – and, uncomfortably, in our own difference from our teenage selves.

As soon as that new setup is in place, a couple of remarkable things happen. For one, the soccer mom that enters knows nothing about how teenagers speak: she has an opinion, but it doesn’t match what we’ve been watching for almost 90 minutes (her family has a “like jar” at home for fines due whenever her children say “like,” but these kids, for all their verbal tics and idiosyncrasies, aren’t heavy likers). For another, the adult – the mother of a dead child – turns out to be far less emotionally resilient than the kids around her. Life experience seems to be less a protective shield than a burden. The monologue Robyn Stevan gets to deliver as this newly bereft mother comes down with crushing weight, but its impact is doubled by the context, and altered in its import too. Because this is not actually a moment about parenthood and loss. It is that, of course, but that’s not its function in the show, or, I imagine, in the play. Because Stevan is not alone on stage. Her character’s grief sits next to, is couched in, the other girls’ responses to their friend’s death. And it’s the comparison that matters. It’s a brutal comparison. There’s something almost callous about it: a mother, struggling with her words, stumbling into cliché, right after (habitually, almost compulsively) lecturing the survivors about proper diction – and with her on stage eight friends of her daughter’s, not unaffected by the death, not left wholly untouched, but yet unbroken. Intact somehow. And perfectly articulate, aloof even, repeatedly debating whether their friend was partly responsible for the accident that killed her: she shouldn’t have been wearing headphones, they keep pointing out.

There’s something entirely unbearable about this moment. It echoes earlier moments of similar detachment from human suffering: the juxtaposition of a discussion of the Khmer Rouge (is that rou-sh or rou-gy?) with a conversation about the relative merits of tampons and maxi pads, for instance; or the casual gossip about the abortion one of them may or may not have had (which turns out, perhaps, not to have been a big deal, but could have been). And in that final scene: one of the girls, #13, suddenly wailing – not because her friend has died, but because Nationals will be not in Florida, not near Disneyworld, but in Tulsa. Or the fact that #00, silent and compulsive throughout the play, is, in the aftermath of her teammate’s death, suddenly relaxed, cheerful almost – and speaks. It’s all unbearable. In a way. #25 has found love. It all should feel unspeakably cruel. Careless. Indifferent to the world and others. How they go on living, like that, the young.

And then there’s the final moment of the show, a breathtakingly intense tableau: the entire remaining team in a huddle, heads bowed in together, chanting their pre-game mantra: “We are the Wolves” (you can hear them here, in the trailer). In part they’re finding strength as a team to deal with the trauma of death: just before this, there were tears. But none of them seem shattered, as individuals, by that trauma. The chant is also, mostly perhaps, their wonted pre-game ritual: it’s what they do to psych themselves up for the match ahead. If it weren’t that, if it were be just a group response to grief, it would still be a powerful moment, I’m sure – but a predictable, perhaps even sentimental one. This, though, is a more complicated play, a more complicated show, and its final coup de théâtre is more complicated too: as I was sitting there, what awed me was not the strength these girls found through their group ritual, but the strength they already had, the power they simply expressed in that moment – and the genuinely shocking contrast between that power and the utter devastation of the adult just before it. What left me breathless as their chant grew louder was the sheer indomitability, the – yes – brutal, callous, indifferent, but also totally and utterly necessary life force of youth. They actually are the wolves. But they have to be.

This is not a show that idealizes young women: there’s plenty of vacuous chatter during those warm ups. Most of these kids are pretty ignorant. (Some of them also aren’t.) They care about stupid stuff. (Some of them don’t.) They fight about silly things. (Some don’t.) They’re also not blind to the crap that surrounds them: they know they got the incompetent coach because they’re not boys. But this is a play written in 2016. It is a play written before the Parkdale teens took the political world by storm, responding to the horror of their friends’ murder with stunning articulateness. It’s not a play full of preternaturally intelligent teens with unbelievable rhetorical gifts and an astonishing sense of the world around them. It’s a pre-Emma-González play. In that sense, the girls in The Wolves have very little to do with those Florida teens. But that’s a superficial comparison. Because at a fundamental level, running beneath the apparent differences between the fictional characters and the real teenagers, their power is similarly awe-inspiring and similarly inexplicable.

That was the thought I was left with as the lights came up and I couldn’t get out of my seat for a minute: that youth is incomprehensible resilient. Frighteningly resilient. It’s a necessity of survival, this resilience. It may look, from an adult perspective, by comparison to adult responses to life, like indifference, or callousness, or even cruelty. It may look wolfish. And it is, in its way. But it’s also a precondition for kindness, for engagement, for empathy. They’re kids, these soccer kids, and the play doesn’t need them, doesn’t want them, to be more than that. Of course they’re ignorant: they haven’t had time to learn things yet. Of course they have weird priorities: they haven’t figured shit out yet. And of course they’re detached: they haven’t grown the callouses yet that would make contact possible. That will make contact possible. They are wolves, these Wolves, because they have to be, for now.