When I heard that a play about a girl's elite highschool soccer team would soon begin a run at McCarter Theater in Princeton, I immediately understood why it was called "The Wolves." Years back, writing an environmentalist's take on the World Cup final in 2014, Cheering for the World, I realized that soccer, perhaps more than any other sport, is like a collective hunt. Unlike baseball, basketball, and football, where coaches constantly interject and manipulate like helicopter parents, a soccer coach is stranded far off on the sidelines with few options, shouting commands into the wind. The team must then largely fend for itself on the field, like a wolfpack, reacting spontaneously to myriad variables as it collectively stalks its prey. As in a hunt, scores are few. There are countless small steps that may or may not lead up to a moment of opportunity, when the killer instinct must kick in and the ball be struck just right.
Soccer in some ways turns the world upside down. In most of life, feet play pedestrian roles, in both meanings of the word, bearing our weight or sitting idle while the hands show off their facility. But in soccer the hands become secondary while the feet dance and manipulate and propel the ball with grace and power. The spectator's dilemma is also counterintuitive. In a game where a full 90 minutes may pass without a single score, you'd think the spectator could be casual about watching. Instead, the paucity of goals means that attention must be maintained throughout, lest one miss the quick series of passes leading to the one moment that changes everything.
Though organizations overseeing soccer can become corrupt, the game itself remains in some ways inviolate. For 45 minutes each half, neither advertisers nor coaches can stop the time to impose their agenda. Nor does time itself wield an iron tyranny. Several minutes of "stoppage time" tend to be added to each half, and the referee customarily allows any last-minute attack to play itself out before blowing the final whistle. There is, then, something about the game that remains untamable, wild, like the "fierce green fire" in a wolf's eyes.
The liner notes and reviews of "The Wolves" make no mention of the wolfpack analogy, but it's both comic and real how the coach in the play remains a figure off in the distance, referred to but never quite making it onto the stage. The all-women cast and dialogue make the play an intense introduction to teenage girlworld, with flurries of overlapping conversations that the playwright conceived as voices in a symphony. The ear cannot possibly capture all the dialogue, much like the eye cannot note the movement of all the players on a soccer field. I found myself imagining what theater might have become if it had developed in a female-dominated world, and this play does break some long-standing rules.
For instance, though the characters have clearly wrought personalities, their identities are known not through their names but by the numbers on their jerseys. This, too, is reality-based for me. As an occasional spectator at Princeton University women's soccer games, I become familiar with the players through their numbers and their personalities on the field, not their names.
Written by Sarah DeLappe, whose passions growing up were soccer and theater, there's the feeling that soccer influenced her view of theater, and vice versa. The theater improv classes I've attended begin much as the play does, with participants in a circle, doing some preliminary stretches. The soccer ball is kicked from one to another, like spontaneously conceived dialogue in theater improv, where you must build on, rather than contradict, what your partner has said. A pass in soccer is like a bit of dialogue which the receiver has no choice but to accept as is, then quickly formulate a new pass to send flying, all working to create forward movement towards a shared goal. In theater improv, this collaborative approach is called the "Yes, and ...", in which you build on your scene partner's ideas rather than contradicting them. When you think of how much of our identity can be wrapped up in finding flaw and expressing a contrary opinion, you begin to see how revolutionary and transformative a simple concept like "Yes, and ..." can be.
And what is the goal of this unconventional play? McCarter Theater's promo describes The Wolves as a "drama about nine young women on a competitive high school soccer team navigating high pressure games and a complicated world." Though there is one scene with only the goalie on stage, and a duet between two players in which one is puzzled by the curiosity the other shows in the identity of a bird that has somehow found its way into the dome where their games are held, most scenes have all or nearly all of the characters together onstage.
For me, The Wolves delves into the tension between the group and the individual. We are all individuals with our own needs and freedoms who are also members of collectives, be they a family, a team, a musical group, a nonprofit, or some other organized enterprise where members all work together towards some shared goal. We are also citizens of a nation, and members even more broadly of the human species, participating in small but measurable ways to determine collective destiny. The characters in The Wolves are bonded by jersey and mission as a team, and yet a mix of personalities and circumstance strain the bonds to the breaking point, threatening the shared goal.
There is one scene that, when I later described it to a friend, surprisingly brought an upwelling of emotion that left me nearly unable to speak. It's towards the end of the play, when all seems to have fallen apart. The future of the team hangs in the balance. Will they play the big game, or will animosities and petty resentments, insecurity and fear send them spinning off into disconnected lives? Not knowing what else to do, the captain invites the players who have straggled in to huddle for the team chant, which begins at first soft and hesitant but grows in power with each repetition. "We are the Wolves. We are the Wolves. We are the Wolves! We are the Wolves!! We are the Wolves!!! WE ARE THE WOLVES!!!!"
That scene is the most dramatic transformation from individual disarray into powerful collective unity that I have ever seen. The run of The Wolves at McCarter ended two months ago, so why has that scene only gained in power within me since first witnessing it on the stage? The play, along with a number of other experiences recently, has led me to more clearly understand that each of us has two identities. These two selves, the individual and collective, can either be allied or in conflict.
Perhaps more than most, I thrive on collective enterprise. It began early in life, playing on sports teams or in the symphony band. On twice-yearly journeys north, my family would join others to set up a girlscout camp each spring and stow it away each fall. Even working with others in the family on some small task, like stacking firewood for the winter, is enormously satisfying.
And yet there is one theater of endeavor, surely the most important of all, where my individual and collective selves are in direct conflict. As an individual, I use fossil fuels for almost everything--cooking, transport, domestic comfort. In so many ways, combustion literally powers my life, and yet I know that by meeting my individual needs, the machines I use are adding carbon to the atmosphere. My contribution to chemically altering the planet is a pittance, and yet the power of collective action, of all those pittances piled one upon the other, is enormous. No matter how intentionally good I am in my life as an individual, I am unintentionally doing harm to nature and to the future of humanity nearly every minute of every day.
In years past, trying to do my part, I responded to that deep division between my individual and collective selves by reducing dependency on fossil fuel-burning machines. I tweaked the thermostat lower in winter, wore warmer clothes to better utilize my own body heat. I rode a bike, limited travel. I used my inner resourcefulness to reduce dependence on resources dug up from underground.
The assumption was that the rest of the world would follow suit. That was the dream I expressed in Cheering for the World, inspired by the World Cup eight years ago. But of course, the world has not followed suit, and so we are largely trapped in a form of collective self-sabotage. We care for our children even as we contribute unintentionally to unraveling the world they will inherit. Our individual selves are empowered while our collective selves feel helplessly chained to a tragic trajectory.
For those of us who acknowledge the collective self and respect its power for good or harm, there forms within a deep pit of grief for what we are collectively doing to our one and only oasis in space, and the implications for human destiny. And embedded in that grief is a longing for a world in which our individual and collective selves could be aligned rather than at war.
For me, in me, The Wolves exposed that deep longing.
