Running Time: Approximately 90 minutes, no intermission
"Thrilling! THE WOLVES keeps you on the edge of your seat."
— The New York Times, September 12, 2016
Last season a young playwright, Sarah DeLappe, brought her debut play, THE WOLVES, to New York and it became something of a phenomenon. It was a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Drama; the production won an Obie Ensemble Award; it won a special Drama Desk Award for its acting ensemble, and was nominated for Lucille Lortel and Drama League awards for Best Play, as well as for the Outer Critics’ Circle John Gassner Award for Outstanding New American Play.
The critics agreed: “A thrilling debut play. First-rate ensemble acting and theater that keeps you on the edge of your seat,” wrote Ben Brantley in The New York Times. Jesse Green, then writing for New York Magazine, called it “an astonishing new play. Extraordinary.” And Frank Rizzo, Variety, said "the ensemble work is astonishing – acting teamwork of the highest order.”
At its most straightforward, THE WOLVES is a fly-on-the-wall look at a girls’ high school soccer team as they go through their warm-ups. Beyond the surface, though, is the thoughtful and eloquent way Ms. DeLappe delineates each of the young women in the space of 90 minutes and six scenes.
Here’s how the author herself describes it:
“I wanted to see a portrait of teenage girls as human beings -- as complicated, nuanced, very idiosyncratic people who weren’t just girlfriends or sex objects or manic pixie dream girls but who were athletes and daughters and students and scholars and people who were trying actively to figure out who they were in this changing world around them.”
This acclaimed production, originally produced by The Playwrights Realm in association with New York Stage & Film and Vassar’s Powerhouse Theatre season, now comes to the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater to open our fall season. The production will again be led by Lila Neugebauer, with all of the designers and almost the entire original cast returning.
