Team Travails
Photo by Eryn Powell ’20
From Kenyon News - October 17, 2018
Kenyon College students will bring to life Sarah DeLappe’s coming-of-age play “The Wolves” on Thursday, Oct. 18, at 8 p.m.; Friday, Oct. 19, at 8:30 p.m.; and Saturday, Oct. 20, at 2 p.m. and 8:30 p.m. The play, a 2017 Pulitzer Prize finalist, will be presented in the Bolton Theater.
Set in an indoor soccer arena, nine teenage girls on the Wolves soccer team talk about their personal problems and politics of the world at large while warming up before their game each week. The play follows the story of these adolescent soccer players and how they prepare to face small and big problems.
“The play spans over six weeks of them practicing and warming up for games. You never actually see the games, but you see them interacting and warming up together. Each week something else new has happened in their outside lives,” said the play’s assistant director Natalie Zimmerman ’19, a drama major from New York City.
“I am excited to have the audience follow the stories of these teenage girls and laugh, but also to take them seriously,” Zimmerman added. “It’s very much a female-centric play, and that is something we don’t really see very often.”
Associate Professor of Drama and Film Benjamin Viccellio ’98, who directs the play, noted that DeLappe subtly discusses and explores important themes within her work.
“Roiling underneath the surface is the ever-present contest between pack dynamics and self-definition. When choosing a play to direct, I always try to pick something that scares me a bit, something that presents an unusual staging challenge or something that I can’t quite get my mind around on a first or second or thirteenth read. This play is both,” Viccellio said. “It’s a pretty special piece. It’s wonderfully funny and wonderfully sad and anything but obvious.”
Stage manager Arianna Marino ’19, a drama and philosophy major from Willoughby Hills, Ohio, looks forward to seeing the audience’s reactions. “It’s a cast of 10 amazing women, and the ensemble has gotten really strong over the last six weeks,” she said. “I will be interested to see what the audience takes away from this show. It’s not a show with one protagonist or a clear moral takeaway, but it’s certainly powerful.”
Tickets are $7.50 for general admission, and for groups of 10 or more, $5. Tickets are $4 for senior citizens, non-Kenyon students and children under 12, and $2 for Kenyon students. To reserve tickets, contact the box office at 740-427-5546.
— Betül Aydin ’21