Soccer takes center stage in ‘The Wolves’

Photo Credit: Julieta Cervantes

You don’t have to have grown up sucking on orange wedges during halftime of your youth soccer games to appreciate “The Wolves,” Sarah DeLappe’s riveting debut play, which opens this week at Lincoln Center Theater in New York. But it helps.

DeLappe, 27, played a lot of ball as a kid in Reno, Nev., at a time when soccer in America, at least the women’s game, was just hitting its stride; a seminal moment, DeLappe told The New York Times, was watching Brandi Chastain tear off her jersey after scoring the winning goal in penalty kicks against China in the 1999 World Cup. 

“The Wolves” is not a play about soccer, per se, but DeLappe’s fluency with the game comes through in wonderfully subtle ways as she sets her characters in motion, a high school girls soccer team going through warm-ups (and much, much more) over a series of Saturday matches.

Beyond the oranges, there are the stretching routines, hyper-focused on the ACL, every baller’s bugaboo. There’s the politics of starting lineups and what it means to be striker one match and on the bench the next. And there’s the unique rhythm and movement of the game’s training drills, deftly choreographed by director Lila Neugebauer, another avid player growing up. As I sat watching, I recalled my own high school playing days, and how the flow of practice allowed just enough banter and camaraderie between teammates, without the worry of real conversation. 

We were teenage boys, so anything to avoid intimacy. The Wolves are girls, and the play’s only other character is called Soccer Mom. Men exist solely as off-stage caricatures—the drunkard coach, the horn-dog boyfriend, the overbearing father. They’re narrowly drawn, but that’s the point, since this is the world according to adolescent girls struggling to find their place.

In one of the play’s most powerful scenes, the team’s goalkeeper, literally silent through the first hour or so of drama, finally gives voice to her emotions. “Wait a minute, are you speaking?” one of her teammates asks. The keeper explains that she doesn’t feel the same anxiety any longer. “I’m not afraid of the ball slipping through my fingers,” she says.  

The event that leads to this moment of self-reckoning is the narrative pivot point in “The Wolves,” and its unfolding is as suspenseful as stoppage time in a scoreless tie (it’s no accident that the play runs 90 minutes, same as a regulation soccer match). In both cases, viewers know that some resolution awaits, but any attempt at prediction is futile.  

That’s what I love about soccer. The action might meander along, tortuous for viewers unattuned to its subtleties and subtexts. Then, in an instant, something happens—a brilliant run, an unexpected pass, a lucky bounce of the ball—and the outcome changes, possibly forever. 

DeLappe understands this, and the fact that her debut work is showing to sellout crowds on a major New York stage is proof of soccer's larger cultural relevance—even if not everyone in the theater was raised on orange wedges.               

Could “The Wolves” just as easily be set around a high school basketball or lacrosse team? Sure, why not. But the portrait of adolescent angst, trauma, and, in the end, deliverance, would not be so beautifully complicated or complete.