Pack Mentality, Precisely Executed: The Wolves at Players Club of Swarthmore

by Ash Kotter

Reading plays was my tether to the stage during the 12 years I wasn’t doing theatre. In 2018, during a 3 AM nursing session with my second child, I was scrolling through a New York Times listicle about the best American plays since Angels in America. Angels had been my favorite play since I was 16, and as an arguably important piece of American theatre, I figured I'd probably want to read any play on a list invoking it. Now and again, I’d order a play from that listicle to read during the sleepless, messy, milk-stained hours of motherhood. I finally got around to The Wolves during the Pandemic Era, roughly five years after its 2016 Off-Broadway debut. Here’s the briefest summary I can offer that still only sort of resists simplification: the play follows a girls’ high school indoor soccer team across six weeks of pre-game warmups. The Wolves isn’t about soccer (“the world’s sport”), but playwright Sarah DeLappe uses it as a backdrop to examine unapologetic teenage girlhood through the lens of American exceptionalism within a literal Air-Dome bubble in the middle of generic suburbia.

Angels in America premiered in 1991, when DeLappe and I were toddlers. Meeting The Wolves in my thirties felt like meeting a modern classic as it was still becoming one. By 2021, when I read the play, DeLappe had already scored a more than a hat trick: winning the American Playwriting Foundation's inaugural Relentless Award in 2015; a 2016 finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize; a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2017 (losing to Lynn Nottage’s Sweat); and a 2017 Obie winner. Now, at nearly a decade old, this play is the kind of critical darling climbing college syllabi and production rosters.

The team at Players Club of Swarthmore earned The Wolves another win. Please. Go. See. It. This kind of provocative community theatre is rare around here.  

Most scripts invite you as a reader to digest one character at a time. You follow the shape of a scene, the logic of dialogue, the arc of intention. The Wolves simply does not work like that. It’s less like reading a play and more like reading sheet music without a staff, with words instead of notes. Players identified only by their jersey numbers volley overlapping, often simultaneous, dialogue about weekend plans, gossip, abortion rumors, war crimes, genocide, period blood and blow jobs and pimples, racial identity, bikini waxes. The text is mostly lowercase, often not written in complete thoughts or sentences, with punctuation and typeface only when it counts. This script is hard to read and even harder to execute in performance. Layered atop the perfectly disjointed and syncopated cacophony is physical athletic action dictated by the text. It demands breath, sweat, tension, and a shared physical intelligence. It’s a controlled collision. There can be no weak links on the team, and the Coach absolutely must understand the playing strategy.

This is an ensemble-driven piece, through and through. I’d love to know what director Kayla Bowe did with this cast to unify this group and satisfy the text’s demands. #25 (Ali Walker) sometimes throws out some sportsy motivational lines like “Teamwork makes the dream work,” but with this show, that’s not just locker room fluff. There is no “i” in TEAM here. Look, actors know they have to listen. Good ones listen well. In this show, an actor has to listen, or else. There are so many unspoken cues and the pace must never falter or the beats will faceplant. You can’t coast. You can’t disengage. Truthfulness and commitment are the only ways through, or the entire show fails. 

I didn’t grow up playing sports, but my daughter plays competitive travel soccer year-round. She’s only in 4th grade but heading to a player's development academy next year, and she plays indoor in the winter. The world of this play isn’t just familiar, it’s probably my near future. I’ve noticed a perception specifically in girls’ youth soccer that’s worth mentioning when discussing this ensemble's strength within the context of the show as a whole. In girls’ youth soccer, the offensive players seem to get all the recognition from the coaches and parents. Striker is God. Midfielders center the action. The goalie gets heroic credit. But defense? Defense gets overlooked and undervalued, which is friggin’ absurd. But here in the world of The Wolves, while each character has a defined position within the game, it’s not about who scores. #00 (Autumn Scouten) is in every scene but barely speaks until the end, and delivers one of the most impactful moments in the show. Soccer Mom (Kathy Gilbert) appears for less than five minutes, but those less than five minutes completely leveled me. I call out those specific roles and moments only to demonstrate how the parts that may seem structurally minor are not minor whatsoever. The pecking order of the cast list and who is billed in what order is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter how many lines you have. There are no leads. No one stands out, because they all do. The Wolves only works when the pack moves as one. Autumn Scouten (#00), Ali Walker (#25), Ivy Meyer (#13), Janea Hundley (#46), Anna Fiscarelli-Mintz (#2), Jessie Denmert (#7), Salma Elwy (#14), Angelina Canavan (#8), Hope Smalley (#11), and Kathy Gilbert (Soccer Mom) are a hell of a tight formation. Cheers to alternates Courtney Bundens and Gab Fischetti for rounding out the team's integrity by being ready to sub in.

DeLappe calls for a simple set. Directly from the script, “An indoor soccer field somewhere in suburban America. The field is AstroTurf. We only see the field: no goals, no bleachers. [ceiling] Fans, fluorescents. There should be the sense that the field goes on forever.” PCS’s Second Stage is a pliable black box, and Scenic Designer/Master Carpenter Dan Jakauskas followed DeLappe’s orders: green turf stretched across the alley-style playing space and ran up one wall, flanked by seating that mimicked the feel of watching a game. Props by Hannah Jackson (Assistant Stage Manager and Photographer) and Denise Klodziej dressed the sidelines like a real girls’ soccer practice: ball carrier bags, marker cones, backpacks (the tie-dye Wawa drawstring one was perfect). Director and Costume/Sound Designer Kayla Bowe dressed the team in brandless game-day kits simply logoed with “The Wolves” and jersey numbers. Little touches like tied-back sleeves and headbands fashioned with athletic pre-wrap (a trend I’ve seen plenty in my six years as a soccer mom) enhanced the authenticity. Lighting Designer Geena Shaw kept the environment fluorescent and consistent, shifting only when it needed to (and in this show, the lights don’t need to change unless they need to, those design moments hitting you like a ball to the face). Wig design by Graycen Paulicelli and fight choreography by Andrew Staub effectively added to the necessary elements of the story. Light Board Op Sean McDermott and Stage Manager Kat Coogan kept the cues crisp. Assistant Director Natalie Payán, Producer Abriham Bogale, and Producing Director George Mulford rounded out a team that knew when to hold back and when to make a breakaway.

The Wolves is a bold, physical, and deeply, disarmingly human piece of theatre. It’s the kind of production that reminds you what community theatre can be when it doesn’t play it safe. The content is mature and the show is risky, but so is theatre at its core. These girls aren’t distilled for your comfort; they’re written and performed like raw, multicolored bruises. This ensemble should be proud of delivering such a precise, defiant celebration of femme-centered storytelling — inclusive of all who’ve been shaped by and defy the world’s expectations of how teenage girls should behave. As Sarah DeLappe writes in the play’s preface, “We do not meet them as the property or accessory of a man… we meet them with each other. We're on their turf. They're not on ours.”  

Make the trip to PCS, and see The Wolves before its season ends on May 17th. Tickets here: https://pcstheater.org/