All-female play ‘The Wolves’ set for February in east valley

After director Kate St-Pierre read Sarah DeLappe’s play “The Wolves” for the first time, she immediately called her friends to read it aloud.

“I thought, ‘Holy cow.’ I had to wrap my head around it,” St-Pierre said.

The finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for drama is DeLappe’s first work to make it to the professional stage. It follows nine players from an all-girls high school indoor soccer team in an unnamed town as they stretch and train off the pitch, swapping stories and navigating adolescence along the way.

The play runs Feb. 1-18 at Cockroach Theatre at Art Square.

The players, identified only by their jersey numbers, discuss a litany of topics; the Khmer Rouge (and how the name of the genocidal regime is pronounced), periods and their coach’s obvious hangover are among them. Sometimes conversations split off, double and triple and eventually come back together, very much like a real team with real teenage girls.

“It’s very human and it’s very honest,” St-Pierre said. “It’s such a strong ensemble piece. You really get to know who they are as individuals and as people.”

“The Wolves” premiered off Broadway at The Duke on 42nd Street theater in August 2016 to acclaim. In addition to its Pulitzer, the production was a critic’s pick in The New York Times. It also has received a Drama Desk Award, an Obie Ensemble Award and the American Playwriting Foundation’s inaugural Relentless Award, established in honor of late actor Philip Seymour Hoffman and currently the largest cash prize ($45,000) in American theater in recognition of a new play.

The production is playing or is scheduled to play in 23 theaters worldwide this year, according to play publisher Samuel French Inc.

St-Pierre is active in the Las Vegas theater scene. She sang in Cirque Du Soleil’s KÀ as well as Le Rêve and established The LAB, an experimental theater company, in 2016. She also is a teaching artist at The Smith Center for the Performing Arts and an artist in residence at the Nevada Arts Council.

In addition to its all-female cast, director and writer, the play’s entire technical team consists of women.

“We have such a variety of talented women in the technical arts and in the performing arts and designers and technicians and stage management, so we though this would be a wonderful opportunity to pull together an all-women team,” said Cockroach development director Mindy Woodhead.

Now is a particularly important time for productions like this, Woodhead said, with the recent exposure of the corruption of the entertainment industry, theWomen’s March in Las Vegas on Jan. 21 and the #metoo movement.

When dancer and actress Anastasia Weiss (player No. 2) read “The Wolves,” she loved it but was a bit overwhelmed by its complexity, she said, particularly by how there can be several conversations going on at once.

“You have to really be aware of everyone’s conversation,” Weiss said. “Not just the one you’re having with your partner, but you’re also listening to the conversation over here and over there.”

The play is also extremely physical. While the characters are talking, they’re also stretching or performing warmups and drills, such as high knees and butt kicks, and the complicated “spider web” passing drill.

“To me it felt very strong and very feminine,” Weiss said. “Immediately I was like, ‘I want to do this.’”

The play isn’t all about feel-good camaraderie. Sometimes the pettiness of the girls makes the team feel like a wolfpack, director St-Pierre said.

In one scene, a couple of players make fun of No. 46 (Jasmine Kojouri), the new girl who lives in a yurt they refer to as a “yogurt.” Others poke fun at No. 2 ( Weiss), a naïve Christian girl who, to their horror, uses pads instead of tampons.

“We had a discussion the other day to discuss what it’s like to be in in middle school and high school and to be diminished by a peer or what it’s like putting a peer down to be on top,” St-Pierre said, adding, “What these young women are going through is real. And it’s honest. And it’s stuff we’re still trying to figure out.”

Contact Madelyn Reese at mreese@viewnews.com or 702-383-0497. Follow @MadelynGReese on Twitter.